Remembering Serech by Himring

Remembering Serech

I.

Serech was a fen: earth and water. There is nothing wrong with that, by whatever name you call it: fen or marshes or slightly more uncomplimentary words like swamp or bog.

There were Sindar that loved their muddy hunting grounds around the river Rivil as much as the hunters of Nevrast loved the shores of Lake Linaewen: swaying reeds, ducks and geese and other water birds, an abundance of plants, animals, and fungi. There were dangers there, of course, and some of them might not be obvious to those who did not know their way about the place: quagmires of unsuspected depth, tussocks giving way underfoot. Serech was not always safe. To call the fen treacherous, however, would impute a malice to the land that was not there.

The trouble with Serech was this: there came to be too many bones. It was not just the occasional victims claimed by accidents or even a minor skirmish. The Rivil flowed into Sirion close to the northern end of the great river valley and therefore the location of the fen meant that armies clashed there again and again.

II.

Celegorm, Fëanor's son, having news of them, waylaid the orcs with a part of the Elven-host, and coming down upon them out of the hills near Eithel Sirion drove them into the Fen of Serech.

These were the same orcs who had recently slaughtered many of Cirdan's people without remorse and who would have gone on to drive the survivors into the sea to seek what safety they could find on their ships, if those orcs had not been summoned north to attack Feanor and his sons instead. Waylaid they might be, but hardly innocent victims of ambush—and yet that does not lessen the terror and pain of their end, the anguish of their final struggle caught between certain death on either hand, the violence of the elven attack and drowning in the mire.

And so Serech was littered with the corpses of a fallen army for the first time. But after that, for centuries, the Elven leaguer surrounding Angband held. Slowly earth and water, animals and plants reclaimed Serech until, like a wound scabbing over, the land healed itself, although the battle was not entirely forgotten.

III.

King Finrod Felagund, hastening from the south, was cut off from his people and surrounded with small company in the Fen of Serech; and he would have been slain or taken, but Barahir came up with the bravest of his men and rescued him, and made a wall of spears about him; and they cut their way out of the battle with great loss.

In the first onslaught of the War of Sudden Flame so many of the House of Finarfin and the House of Beor fell that it was a crippling blow to either House, and there were not a few of these who fell in the Fen of Serech, either desperately struggling to defend Finrod or cut off from him and attempting to rejoin him. In the end, Finrod and Barahir barely escaped. Fallen comrades marked the path of their retreat. Bodies of Elves, Men and orcs bled out, piled this way and that among reeds and pools. Even after that first onslaught lessened, there was hardly an opportunity for retrieval or burial.

This time, no long peace followed that would have allowed the land to heal. Worse than that, soon after Sauron gained control of the land around Rivil’s well and began corrupting it. Poison began to bleed slowly into Serech from the slopes of Dorthonion above, leeching life force from all it touched, although downstream Ulmo’s power in Sirion still held strong against all such influences.

IV.

Húrin and Huor drew the remnant of the Men of the house of Hador about them, and foot by foot they withdrew, until they came behind the Fen of Serech, and had the stream of Rivil before them.

When the brothers made their retreat and last stand in Serech, the fateful battle had already raged back and forth over the ground for days. High hopes lost, their grim resolve strengthened and they kept their faith. The enemy had to bridge the river with their dead. Trolls fell under the strokes of Hurin’s axe. But by the end of that day, all the Men of Hador lay slain except for Hurin, their cut-off heads in a heap on the bank of the Rivil. Two decades later, Hurin would remember bitterly how the wind had hissed in reed and grass in Serech that sunset.

And although many fallen Elves and Men were carried away to the big mound on the plain to the north, on Morgoth’s orders, others remained where they fell,  crushed and torn and trodden in the mud, and no few of the enemy with them. There was no healing for that hurt. Soon Ulmo’s power began to withdraw down the valley of Sirion southwards, towards the Sea.

V

But now, for two Ages, all those lands have lain under the wave. Still, we have not forgotten Serech.

Chapter End Notes

The italicized passages introducing numbered sections II to IV are quotations from the published text of The Silmarillion, lightly edited for coherence.