"An Elopement With Life": The Spectacular Fading of Celebrían by Zara BalrogBalls

In some way I cannot place, the changes of the season this year have turned my stories inside out — though I am not yet certain if they conspire against or collude with me. It has been so since the Redhorn Pass.

One thing I am certain of: I cannot carry on as I have before.

The world has not ended, says Nerdanel, whom I have only ever encountered in lament and ballad. Imposed conditions are only that. Conditions. What if the world does not end with the taking of Elrond's wife?

I am not only Elrond's wife, I tell her. And I am not only the taking.

Then what are you? she asks. The mother of the sons of Elrond? The lost daughter of Galadriel? The dullness in Celeborn's left eye? The fourteenth crack in Elrond's heart?

Leave me, I snarl at her. I remember I am in the garden. In plain sight, madwomanesque, quite literally on all fours though not for the reason you may think. Leave me, lost wife of Fëanor. Mother of kinslayers.

And the mother of a poet. And in a way, still, your mother-in-law, she says, shrugs. She has very broad shoulders. At least, one of your many mothers in law. Perhaps technically a grandmother in law, but I am not about to take such an infirm sounding title. Though I do not fear age, at least not in the way you fear the dark.

I do not fear the dark, I tell her. If I had been afraid, woman, I would have perished upon entrance to the cave.

And yet here you are. Destined for brighter shores. She makes it sound like an insult.

I think it is uncharitable of her to say such things, even if only in my head. Stay, she says, like it is so easy. Elrond once told me that Nerdanel was a sculptor of stone, that the jewels cut by her beloved were only ever eyes in the body of her work.

Perhaps this is why she is the first, and the most insistent, to appear in my head. Sculptors, after all, are tricksters. They draw upon shape-shifters and shamans to draw stories from stone. I, however, am different. I tell myself this. I have lost too much of myself, and there is not enough shape to shift. I suppose Nerdanel is trying to tell me that once the things I have always considered mine, mine alone, can be stolen in an instant. That upon the Pass I was no longer Celebrían, but Elrond's wife, ripe for the taking. I suppose she is telling me to not lean into such a descriptor.

My relationship with the gardens of Imladris is, I suppose, akin to my relationship with my own dreams. Here, I can sit on a bench and watch my terrible twins run around chasing each other, Elladan a dog, Elrohir his tail. Baby Arwen paints my toenails in six different colours. Here, amidst old trees and new bushes, memory is so vivid I can catch every snag in her curly hair. It doesn’t matter if it happened two thousand years ago: when I enter the garden it is as though the memory is painted upon the grass, the landscape fluid and pliant enough to absorb the memory in whole. It changes little things, here and there, my garden — a few extra tangles in Arwen’s hair, the wrong knee skinned on Elrohir. Nerdanel, existing. Still, it is the unreality of it that I love most, that enhances the memory to such bright shades it feels almost like a dazzling hallucination.

Here, I see through reality. Here, I look Arda in the eye.

Adar once showed me a calcified chrysalis, how whatever caterpillar that once slept in it, in it sleeps no longer. These little structures crumble and dissolve at the slightest touch, unable to tell wondrously winged stories for there is no longer any tale left to tell. The chrysalis, the second skin, shatters under a sigh. Nerdanel disappears and I return to my usual task, groping in the grass of our garden on my hands and knees, hunting in vain for the Elessar. I dropped it in the Pass, and look for it at home, because after all that has happened, I should be allowed a crumb of madness.  

The tawaif, a courtesan skilled in both creative and pleasurable pursuits, had been a predominant presence in Mughal court in the South Asian subcontinent, spanning an area that encompasses present day India and Pakistan. They were skilled in Indian classical dance and music, trained in poetry, ghazals, and literature, serving the rich and royal. With the colonial and subsequent postcolonial labelling of the courtesan as 'immoral', and the slow decline of courtesan culture, these days the tawaif at her prime is only embalmed in a cinematic space – the courtesan genre of Bollywood.

Disruptive both cinematically and politically, the uniqueness of the Bollywood courtesan is in her beautification of negative affect: the courtesan presents death, failure and loss as accepted, desired, and lived alongside. Note that the ‘courtesan’ is distinct from a ‘dancer’, in that whilst both archetypes practice the same art form, classical kathak, the courtesan disrupts said medium in order to express despair and abjection, interrupting the narrative to centre herself as the active participant in the performance.

View: Maar Dala, Devdas, 2002. 

Maar Dala, as linked above, is a mujra (dance performance) specific to the courtesan genre: a lamentation featuring the courtesan, Chandramukhi, and her paramour in white, Devdas. As seen in Maar Dala, a notable aspect of the courtesan genre is the usage of abhinaya (facial expressions as a curated part of the dance form) to depict her happiness within the state of unhappiness. Madhuri Dixit, who plays the courtesan Chandhramukhi in Maar Dala, sets up a deliberate juxtaposition: a continuous, genial smile in contrast with the lyrics of the song itself —

“Who has thrown across me, this dazzling green colour? My happiness is killing me, my happiness has killed me, it has killed me".¹

A dance number such as Maar Dala showcases a world in which performance subverts the real. Utopia is under the control of the abject figure, the traumatised woman, and so the dance numbers — with their timeless fantasy and pre-colonial nostagia — becomes an idealised future. The courtesan song’s acknowledgement of having no destiny in combination with her assertion of ownership over her own desires and longings, forces away the voyeuristic gaze. The courtesan turns abjection and shame on its head — when Chandhramukhi dances in the brothel, it is Devdas, her paramour, who looks away in embarrassment.

I read the Bollywood dance sequence as a choreographed interruption of the film, an attempt at freeze-framing and showcasing a possible utopian future. The performance of a courtesan lament is theatrically (if in no other way) in the control of the courtesan herself, where the gazers — including the “pure” male paramour, are relegated to the literal outskirts of the camera. If we are to take queerness and disruption as a “thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that it indeed something is missing”, then the courtesan lament becomes a space in which fantasy disrupts fantasy in order to showcase a utopian, queer future. In these timeless interruptions, despair is not dark and silent but “dazzling green”, dancing across the screen.

In the courtesan genre, the kotha, or the dance-space within the brothel, is similarly depicted as a place of stasis and decay, positively so — the space is decadent, lavish, lush with jewelry and brocade, as dazzling as the courtesan herself. Perhaps the kotha is easiest described through a section of dialogue from Pakeezah, a blueprint for the courtesan genre, and a foundational film in the depiction of courtesan-as-disruptor:

“Our bazaar is a cemetery of women with soulless bodies. Our kotha is our mausoleum festooned with the living corpses of dead women. Our burials are left open. I am one such restless corpse  of an unburied grave, who is deceived time and again into an elopement with life". ²

To use Lauren Berlant’s term, the women in the kotha are all in a state of “slow death”. Slow death refers to the “physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence”.³ It identifies death and dying as a constant process for certain populations, where crisis is not a singular event but rather a fact of life. The queerness of this particular type of slow death is in its ability to depict the instabilities of sexual and gendered norms. The courtesan is not the subject in this view, rather it is the fact that if she is a “living corpse” in a “mausoleum” - someone must have placed her there: corpses do not exactly walk into their own graves.

Put simply, the cinematic courtesan frames death, failure and grief as an aesthetic performance, one full of joy and decadence. Her dances and laments, aesthetically pleasing events within a self-professed arena of death, performed by dying women, are a re-capacitation of destroyed bodies: sexually and societally persecuted, yet capable of creating beauty.  A society that allows a group of people to live in a state of perpetual dying is a failed society; hence the courtesan’s embrace of death and embodying of corpses evidences the difficulty of queer survival in a heteronormative world. In this domain, immortality is nothing but a death scene drawn out for eternity.

In Western literary histories, the allusion towards death is easiest described as memento mori — a reckoning with inevitable decay and destruction. In the courtesan, it is taken forwards, for she makes dying a communal activity. In doing so, she constructs a dialogue between the living body of the audience and her own dying body, forcing a queering self-reflection in the able-bodied. Not a reminder of death or warning of its inevitability, but an interruption showcasing what queer theorist Jack Halberstam refers to as the "potential of the moment" — the performance of death in order to showcase the value of the life lost.⁴

To perform one’s own death knell is not merely an act of defiance but a declaration of presence. It is the paradox at the heart of theatrical death — the final dance, the swan song, the last ascent. To stage one’s own vanishing is to grasp at this threshold, to make death — a silent and unilateral event — something deliberate, aesthetic, spectacular. Re-enactment offers a kind of narrative authorship: the chance to turn loss into an event, to reclaim disappearance as an act of volition rather than inevitability. This is why cultures across time have ritualised it, why the theatre of death persists in everything from Greek tragedy to the mujra of the Bollywood courtesan film. The act of choreographing one's own dissolution does not prevent fate, but momentarily transforms its meaning. It makes visible what would otherwise be unseen. In the context of the Eldar, it renders legible the process of fading.

But there is something deeper at work in the ritual of re-enactment: not only the staging of disappearance, but the careful reassertion of self in its aftermath. D.W. Winnicott, writing on trauma and play, suggests that "it is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found".⁵ 

Queerness is not only an opposition to the norm, but rather a “mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present”.⁶ And so a queer reading of Celebrían's 'final year' on Middle Earth through the framework the cinematic courtesan offers us, introduces the possibility of a mode of joyous existence within the horrors of the present. Not a Celebrían frozen in a cave, not a Celebrían who never traversed the pass, not the unseen, supremely grievable cautionary tale, but a Celebrían who dazzles the narrative with her despair. 

Through the long, lingering weeks of recovery, Elrond relieves me of the constraints of time, lets me live through seasonal rhythms, circadian cycles. Cut adrift from commitment, I walk in the garden and watch things and hunt for the Elessar. It is late summer, as the green of grass turns into a fallow deer’s coat, I feel myself begin to wither. I turn fallow in turn, acres and lifetimes stretching ahead of me with no incentive to really do anything about it. What is the point in me?

The second lost lady to land in my head is Elwing, who alights on my shoulder as a pigeon and says:

Oh, I don’t know. What is the point in you?

Elwing, of course, knows about pointy things. Being a bird. I remember sometimes that she was only thirty, when she leapt to what should have been a final fall.

Forget my flights, she tells me. What about yours? Will you jump?

I cannot understand why all these stories rise and bubble within me only when I am in the garden. It is as if every little twig in Elrond’s disaster of a family tree, both adopted and biological, is determined that I never find the Elessar. Elwing’s is an old story, from very far away, yet resonates across the now of my garden, multifaceted like the damned stone I cannot find.

What will you choose? asks Elwing again.

Insistent, stubborn. I think of Arwen. Is there truly a choice? The transformation of an ending, or the initiation of a new beginning. Both involve, for all intents and purposes, leaving — does it not? I wonder why I am expected to make such decisions at such times in my life, when all I am and have been and will be is whirling around with these other women, these Elwings and Nerdanels.

What if it doesn’t? she positions. What if you don’t go?

What if you go away now? I ask her, but don't really mean it.

I've always wanted to have a mother in law. Elrond's kinslayer fathers are nice to be around on their good days, yes, but neither of them are the type to enjoy bickering with anyone besides the other. The both of them have lost too much and have taken too much to ever find an argument exciting: their stakes have always been too high. Elwing asks me why I'm taking this long to find the Elessar, considering our gardens are – whilst large and somewhat ostentatious – not exactly a cross-continental plain.

Probably because I don't have eagle-eyes, I shrug. You might, though, on your not-pigeon days. Well. I am not certain of the ocular talents of the average albatross, maybe you might be blind as a bat and equally useless.

Or perhaps, Elwing rolls her eyes, you haven't lost it at all.

Little does she know.

I wonder if letting go of and losing a thing are counterparts. I wonder how it is for Elwing in her tower — are you helplessly still and calm without the wind beneath your wings? Five thousand years. Have you stopped thinking like a mother? Is it possible to do such a thing? Have you lost your voice like the birds do in summer, or is it the world around you that has changed its tune? I think about storytellers. Lindir, Maglor, Rúmil. Even Elrond on his least dreary of days. What would it be like, for them, had all their stories coalesced into one, and then dried up into nothing?

You are here, Elwing says. You, whom I know more intimately now, than I will ever know my son.

And then she disappears into birdsong. The robin sings, the blackbird tries, and chiffchaffs hold the tempo. Oh, sometimes it feels like I am already gone.

Elrond comes to help me search for the stone, though he knows far better than I where I dropped it and how impossible the finding of it truly is. When Elladan and Elrohir rode in and cut everything around me down, the Elessar had not necessarily been very high up in their priorities.

And then my husband inadvertently made certain that I would never find it again. A month or so after my return, or my saving (whichever way you wish to look at such a thing), I heard Glorfindel report to him that the cave system had been collapsed with a series of well aimed trebuchets. Elrond's orders. His little retributory violences, small and self-contained, like a toddler's fist, or knucklebones in a jar. The Elessar will never be found now, and he knows it as well as I.

He scuttles around the grass beside me, hunting for the stone, like it is the only way he can think of to be close to me. A small, obedient spider, until even this gets too much and I sit under the large teak tree and close myself off from him, because every day is already so monotonous that I cannot listen to Elrond's mind and its constant refrain of she is hers. She is not mine for you to take. She is not mine for you to claim. You will not take her, Mandos, you thief. She belongs to Celebrían. She belongs to her. You thief. You cannot take her. Morning, noon and night, without pause.

“Cel,” he says, and points. “Look, a mole.”

Elrond is the type of comfortingly eccentric person to get disproportionately excited at the sight of a mole. I raise my eyebrows slightly, lower my lids. “Elrond, that’s not a mole. It is a ferret.”

“There are no ferrets in Imladris,” he looks actually offended at the idea. “That’s… ah, no, see, a hedgehog. That’s what it is.”

He grins at me, eyes twinkling, and our minds touch. You cannot take her. You thief. Thief, Mandos, you thief.

I shut him out, wincing, and look again, and what do you know, he’s right. The hedgehog rolls about by our feet, either brave or blind, trying to curl snout-first into itself. His body follows the snout, focuses on a single point, as though with each dive he’s threading his life through the eye of a needle. He’s a small, self-contained magic trick, I realise, looking at the sunlight on Elrond’s canine as he smiles. A little shape-shifter, reappearing and disappearing in a different place every time you blink. We watch and wait.

Elrond sits by me in silence for a little while longer, looking warily at the bees nest above us. My legs are held close to my body, a prawn-under-pressure, curled so tightly that they take up no space and nobody can tell what shape I make, or at least the shape I make will matter no longer, like I am a body in a tomb.

Thief, I hear him think tiredly, as he leaves. Despairing and desperate and drained and dangerous, all at once. You thief, like a starving dog leashed to a tree, watching a child cast bruised apples into the river. 

Across the legendarium, Celebrían does not haunt the narrative herself inasmuch as her absence is utilised to explain the comings and goings of those who loved her. Most explicitly, the transient lives of Elladan and Elrohir, born as princes to a relatively utopian enclave who — when introduced to the story — spend their lives as Rangers in the wild. The two are narratively aligned with the dispossessed Men of the North, even as Elrond continues to maintain a position more akin to his noble heritage and is conscious enough of said lineage to remark upon it to Aragorn regarding Arwen in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen. It goes some way to explaining the choice of Elrond in leaving immediately for the West at the close of Return of the King, and steepens the emotional impact of Arwen’s choice to stay in Middle-Earth.  

Reading the state of losing all joy as a manifestation of Complex PTSD dislodges Celebrían from serving as a melodramatic emblem of violence, and instead relativises her subjectivity by providing it a ‘real world’ interpretation. The disabled character is made-abject then excluded from the narrative, made-absent. In the case of c-PTSD in Middle Earth, made into empty husks or objects of mourning to be grieved in the cultural imaginary, or relegated to a detached, if utopian, space of exclusion: Valinor.

Celebrían undergoes torment, loses all joy, and consequently leaves Middle-Earth to become a hole in the narrative. This cessation of function then, ironically, is what pushes the narrative forward for the non-disabled characters. The grief directed at the vacant spaces by others, such as the vengeance-seeking behaviours of the Sons of Elrond, recalibrates the value of a person, in this case the palatably grieveable Celebrían, to the value of an absence, though the disabled character ostensibly remains alive.

With reference to Celebrían’s final year in Middle-Earth, TA 2509 — 2510, the natural assumption would be that it was spent in a state of abject suffering. After all, a Celebrían separated from the period of torment would be a noblewoman living in a sanctuary city, wife to a regional lord bearing Vilya, and due to her lineage and marriage would be in a position of immense political power. Celebrían has three children, and is ostensibly immortal: there would have been neither fading nor sailing had the torment in the Redhorn Pass not occurred. In an immortal race, the condition of dying and, as such, fading, promises neither curative nor cessation through death, the term trapped in the gerund alongside the sufferer. As such, post-torment Celebrían does not become a hole in the story so much as becoming — like Finduilas — pinned to a moment of violence within it, unable to move across the narrative.

The cultural fantasy of the female victim of violence often traps women in an unyielding present tense, positioning them as symbols of sentimentality. These women are objectified and become sites of social intervention, their suffering the focal point of external pity and mourning. The narrative demands their pain be witnessed, but rarely offers a way forward, reducing them to objects for emotional consumption rather than subjects of their own story. In this framework, they are suspended in time, never allowed the complexity of recovery or transformation, perpetually existing as symbols of loss without the possibility of reclaiming their agency. Their lives are defined by their victimhood, and their trauma, while undeniably real, becomes a static identity that resists movement or resolution.

This collection seeks to intervene in that by complicating the narrative of female victimhood, especially as it pertains to Celebrían. While her trauma and suffering are central to her character, they do not define her as a static figure. The collection explores how her pain—her history with an act of violence—becomes an entry point to a broader dialogue about survival, agency, and the refusal to be reduced to victimhood. Rather than presenting her as a figure to be pitied or mourned, it allows her to challenge the very framework that limits women to fixed narratives of suffering. Through her interactions with other 'lost women' of Middle Earth, the work insists on the ongoing process of becoming, a journey that refuses to let her, or any woman, remain confined to the moment of violence that marks their lives.

The excavation of 'lost women', those exiled from history or buried in footnotes, has long been an act of necessity. But to merely retrieve them is not always enough. As Saidiya Hartman argues in Venus in Two Acts, the archive often offers nothing but "the violence of abstraction," reducing marginal lives to brief mentions in documents, records, or genealogies.⁷ Faced with these silences, there are two choices: one can either mourn the absence or reimagine it. This is where spectacle intervenes — not as distortion, but as a counterweight. To make Celebrían larger than life is not to falsify her, but to insist on her significance, grant her the textual theatricality denied to her.

This is why many lost women, when resurrected, arrive not in scholarship but in opulence: swathed in gold, speaking in poetic monologues, standing at the centre of their own tragedies with the full weight of an orchestra and backing dancers behind them. The mujra in Bollywood cinema, for instance, takes the courtesan and turns her final moments into a grand, shimmering spectacle.

The more magnificent the lament, the more undeniable her presence. This same impulse underpins the feminist reclamation of figures like Medusa, whose transformation from victim to icon is less about accuracy than about restitution. In "The Laugh of the Medusa", Hélène Cixous calls for women to “write themselves in excess,” to take up space, to make language an "immoderate" force that undoes the structures that once silenced them.⁸ Excess, in this sense, is not indulgence but defiance: a deliberate exaggeration to compensate for centuries of minimisation.

But there is also something deeply strategic in the act of spectacle. To make a lost woman like Celebrían into a vast, operatic, hyper-visible character is to place her where she cannot be ignored. The historian Carolyn Dinshaw, writing on medieval mystics, notes that the only women who survived the historical record were those who either made themselves indispensable or made themselves too large to erase.⁹

This is the gamble of turning absence into presence: by rendering lost women theatrical and staging their stories at the scale of legend, one ensures they are no longer dependent on memory. They become impossible to overlook. Across this collection, Celebrían will be written, rewritten, and repeated, until her absence is not only rectified but reversed — until she looms larger than the moment of violence that defines her. To put it bluntly, she takes her story back, and does whatever the hell she wants with it.

For now, however, we end with the Celebrían that the collection might open up to us. The one who chooses to stay.  

My love of nature is not like Elrond’s, though we adore the same trees and grounds. Mine is deliberately simplistic, wilfully ignorant. And in that refusal to ascribe grass and trees a greater meaning or moralistic value, lay its power: the way it moves me, absorbs me even, grounds me in ways that the other Eldar perhaps could not fathom. These days, however, I am lost and losing things, unable to find my way in even the smallest, squarest garden, snow-blind.

Snowfall, after all, makes one directionless in a way entirely unattached to maps. One feels detached and homeless because the person that walked this ground before, who was once held comfortably in the bounds of green things — gardens and hedges and forests — whose feet moved lightly on fresh leaves and soft grass, walks no longer. It is not snowing in Imladris, though it may as well be.

I stand in the garden, and approach that odd looking bees nest on the teak tree. The bees themselves sing around my head, nibble at my toes like mice — Arwen has painted my toenails green while I was asleep; my favourite colour. A second skin. From above, it does not seem a tragedy. From above, I am simply one jogged-loose tooth in a constellation, cosmically jetlagged by a single catastrophe, a wrinkle in the skin of the world. The garden, all its oval curls, micromanaged hedges, carpets of flowers. And then there is me. Yes. And then there is Celebrían, an entire honeycomb in her bare hands.

The texture of it is familiar, yes, but the shape remains strange. The bees have formed their comb around an irregular thing, one which turns the whole hive into a glowing, radiant, discoloured thing. The octagons of the comb wrap around over and over the object, another second skin I am meant to peel off, and it is harder than I thought it might be, as if the strange object belonged in the comb. The sunlight shines into and through it and honey is glistening and dripping over something small and incandescent. As I pull it out at last, I see a reflection of billowing clouds floating over its curving topography, and underneath it, the patterns of a star-map from an older sky.

The bees continue flitting about it and as honey drips from the Elessar, it shifts colour rapidly from chartreuse to verdant to emerald, before coming to rest on a single hue, darker than it was before yet strangely more luminous. It is the colour of moss emerging out of a stone wall, deep within a cave — a dazzling, despairing green. 

References:

1. Leela Bhansali, Sanjay. Devdas, Mega Bollywood, 2002. 

2. Amrohi, Kamal. Pakeezah, Mahal Pictures, 1972. 

3. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (June 1, 2007): 754-780.

4. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press (2005): 13.

5. Winnicott, Donald W. “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites.” In Oxford University Press eBooks, 433–46, 2016.

6. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Introduction: Feeling Utopia.” In New York University Press eBooks, 1–18, 2020. 

7. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe a Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14.

8. Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1, no. 4 (July 1, 1976): 875–93.

9. Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Continental Women Mystics and English Readers.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace. Cambridge University Press, (2003).

Chapter End Notes

Would love to hear any thoughts you might have - I've been an essayist for a while but this is my first time trying to work fiction into it as well, and would very much appreciate general discussion/feedback etc :-) Also, please do let me know if I use too much jargon, or if you'd like a Works Consulted list as well, trying to balance the essay form with scholarly writing means I don't want it to look too much like 'homework' haha.

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