Ice Glossary by sallysavestheday

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Ice Glossary

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Anchor ice: Submerged, stabilizing ice attached or anchored to the bottom, irrespective of the nature of its formation.

He was never supposed to be King. Younger son of a lord who would never die, Fingolfin wielded shadow power: understood but not endorsed. His practical management of the day-to-day affairs of Tirion was a relief but not a rule. He relished the role – both for its challenges and to spite his elder brother – but it was always a game, a dance, an entanglement that meant nothing at all and everything at once. The flames across the narrow neck of the sea put an end to that charade. Now he walks in the center of the host: the anchor point, the solid core around which their fragile hopes are built. Problem-solver, rule-maker, loss-consoler, vision-keeper; he holds the hearts of the remains of the Noldor in his raw, numb, ruefully capable hands.

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Brash ice: Accumulation of floating ice fragments; the wreckage of other forms of ice.

It is years before Fingon can breathe through the memory: the flames licking at the night, scorching his heart along with their hopes, transmuting the paper flowers of his love to ash. His mind dances away from it whenever the torches are lit, when a campsite is solid enough to risk a fire. All the small shards of himself that he has so painfully collected fly apart again with each crackle and spark. He drifts to the leading edge of the host, where it is coldest and darkest, takes on the task of testing the route, risking himself over and over again as the floes shift and the crevasses gape. Valiant, they call him. But it is only by hurling the pieces of himself into the freezing night that he can ever hope to be reformed, reshaped, reborn.

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Calving: The breaking away of a mass of ice from an ice wall, ice front or iceberg.

The Ice is not Tirion. Her father and brothers, once so indulgent of her independence, now treat her like glass, corralling her at the center of the host, keeping her busy with the children and the weary and the ill. It is a restriction born of fear and love, but it galls. Again and again she slips away to test the edges of the dark, tasting freedom in that liminal bitterness, that fine, sharp bite where the light ends and the air seethes with the promise of something monstrous. When the great bear rears up, Aredhel greets it with laughter, all her singing fury coalescing into joy. She wears its teeth as a necklace, its skin as a cape. Her knife hand burns and hungers for more. It will take impossible effort to confine her now.

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Concentration boundary: A line approximating the transition between two areas of floating ice with different concentrations.

The line is invisible, but very real. The emotional space between Fingolfin’s host and his nephew’s is wide and chilled and slippery. Finrod’s people keep their own council; they manage their own affairs. As Finarfin patiently suffered Fingolfin’s leadership, so does Finrod, but the two groups still hold themselves apart. It was not only Fëanor who stirred the frustration of Tirion: Fingolfin’s proud partisans have made trouble of their own. Finarfin’s children mourn their grandfather; they plot revenge; but most of all they seek to disentangle themselves from the poisonous vines of family politics. A realm for each, they murmur and whisper in the dimness of their separate tents. To each his own.

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Flaw lead: A narrow separation zone between floating ice and fast ice, where the pieces of ice are in a chaotic state. Flaws form when ice shears under the effect of a strong wind or current along the fast ice boundary.

They are hungry. They are hungry, and the weather is too rough for hunting. The wild winds sweep across the floes and toss the gritty snow in their teeth; their torches will not catch to light their way. The ice edge cannot be seen or felt without danger, and Fingolfin will not risk more losses. The last of the horses were butchered long ago. They have been stretching the frozen meat in boiled water, smearing the stripped fat of Aredhel’s great bear on the lembas, sucking their fingers for the sweet, rich drops. Fingolfin reads the tension among the host. He sees the eyes on his own tent and orders the flaps kept open, that all may see he eats no more than the least of them, that his own children drink water melted from the ice so that the soup can be spread further, feed more. He walks the camp, seasoning the pale broth with his solemn attention, his open regard, his gratitude for their patience, their fortitude. His deft touch seals the seams of the greater company; bridges their churning gaps.

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Fracturing: Pressure process whereby ice is permanently deformed and rupture occurs. This term is most commonly used to describe breaking across very close ice.

Turgon had never approved. He had avoided comment, swallowed complaint, distanced himself from the possibility of argument. But there was no question that he was solidly opposed. Cool when they met in any shared space, he boiled in private at the thought of Maedhros’ power over Fingon, the rights their secret binding ceded to his uncle’s House. Now he cannot abide his brother’s mourning, his persistence in his abandoned devotion across the ever less merciful Ice. The crack between them grows, filled with their differing memories of their faithless cousin. Its edges only grow sharper as they stumble farther through the dark. Elenwë’s fall brings them to breaking. The words Turgon hurls at Fingon in his grief and rage can never be unsaid, nor unheard.

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Growler: Piece of ice smaller than a berg and floating less than 1 m above the sea surface. Growlers are difficult to distinguish when surrounded by sea ice or in high sea state.

Galadriel’s pale eyes keep her thoughts well-hidden as the host drifts through the sea mists and stumbles through the dark. She Sings the surface to stability under her breath, focusing three steps ahead to secure her path. Her mind is bent like a jeweler’s lens on the realm she imagines for herself: the freedom she will find there, the power she will call her own. Smooth-faced and limber on the tilting floes, she casts off the guilt of Alqualondë as unnecessary baggage, scorns Mandos and the Valar and their Doom. Let them seal the walls of Valinor against her. What’s done is done. At the other end of this cold road is home.

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Ice Blink: A whitish glare on low clouds above an accumulation of distant ice.

A pale fire, perhaps, or a flash of mirrored light. Something unnatural, at any rate, made by hands, not wind or foam. Argon sees the flare in the corner of his eye again and again: the white light in the clouds, the burst of brightness against the night. Surely that light is made on land. He is weary of the endless walking, eager to be once more on solid ground. His cousins have filled his head with it: how their ancient clans were sundered, how joyful those left behind will be at their return. He hurries, thrumming with the imagined reunion, with the welcome that awaits him. What a surprise their host will be; how their armor will catch that shimmering light!

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Nip: Ice is said to nip when it forcibly presses against a ship. A vessel so caught, though undamaged, is said to have been nipped.

Finrod’s sledge is heavy, weighted as it is with his store of things both precious and refined, then carpeted and cushioned as a throne for the smallest among them: the four remaining children riding like queens above the throng. Wound in furs and blinking as the wind pinks their cheeks, they might be any little ones on a winter ride in Valinor, were it not for their slow weeping, their soft, uncertain cries. None of them has a parent left to answer those calls. They are the babies of the camp, now, spoiled with fish fat and bear grease and the crumbs of the lembas, passed from heart to heart to heart to keep them alive. He has Seen them, grown, in a puddle under the torchlight, so feels no real fear for their survival, but he wonders what meaning the world will shape for them, after passing through these straits of loss and longing, with the ice scraping so close against their sides.

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Polynya: Any non-linear shaped opening enclosed by ice.

When the wind stills, it is almost comfortable inside the tent. Turgon unties his hood and Idril’s, then slides his chilly hands under Elenwë’s wrapper as she shrieks and laughs. Her belly is hot and soft under his fingers; she tips her head back to catch his mouth, then smiles. Warm; they are warm in each other’s company, the small dome of their togetherness soft and sweet and joyful in the starry darkness. The cold, the night, the Ice are banished – held at bay by the tenderness within. Idril clambers between them, drapes across their laps in the deep relaxation of happiness, her bright hair spilling like Laurelin's lost light across the floor.

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Thaw Holes: Vertical holes in ice formed when surface puddles melt through to the underlying water.

Warmth is their undoing: the softening steals the surface; thins the ice. They have camped in the lee of a great ice wall for days, resting, grateful for the absence of wind and the chance to hunt and heal and hope. But their own heat works in the stillness to melt what was solid beneath them, and they have hardly begun to move again when the first one falls. Elenwë drops straight down into the sea; the skim ice forming over her head so fast that they would not even know she had been lost if Idril had not screamed. Fingolfin hauls Turgon from the water when he turns blue and cannot find the surface with his slowing hands. They rub and rub him until his skin flushes and he howls in agony, but he will never be truly warm again.

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Weathering: Processes of ablation and accumulation which gradually eliminate irregularities in an ice surface.

They lost track of time not long after stepping onto the Ice. The wind whirls at all hours; the stars peep through the encircling darkness when and where they will. The sky is unfamiliar, even for those who hold Varda’s lights so dear: this far north, nothing in the sky speaks of home. The walk wears them down; it smooths away their differences until they are all small variations on the same ragged creature, lurching across the heaving floes. One still wears gold in his braids, glimmering faintly with longing against his furs. One binds blue ribbons around his wrist in memory and clutches his child so close her feet never touch the ground. One marks the dead with gems meant for trade or ornament, left one by one to shine where a loved one fell. Fingolfin gathers the host, all worn and faded and abraded away, as the strange new light grows. One last push, he commands, gently. See? In the east, the mountains stand solid against the brightening sky.