#*one person* has died (prior to finwe)

[ailinu]

everyone in the first age is so young and absolutely no one’s prepared for it. i think if i think about this too long i’m going to cry.

[elerondo]

Sea Longing and the person of Elwing

[The Silmarillion, Of The Coming Of The Elves] At the last, therefore, the Valar summoned the Quendi to valinor, there to be gathered at the knees of the Powers in the light of the Trees for ever; and Mandos broke his silence, saying: ‘So it is doomed.’ From this summons came many woes that afterwards befell. But others of the Eldar there were who set out indeed upon the westward march, but became lost upon the long road, or turned aside, or lingered on the shores of Middle-earth; and these were for the most part of the kindred of the Teleri, as is told hereafter. They dwelt by the sea, or wandered in the woods and mountains of the world, yet their hearts were turned towards the West.

Due to the first summons of the Valar, all Eldar -whether or not they liked it- will have their hearts turned to the West. Not just the ones born on Cuivienen in the Elder Days, who were present at the speech of Ingwe, Finwe, and Elwe, but also any other elf who came much later. A prominent example is Legolas.

Sea-longing* is dangerous and it is not a choice. In order to go West, you either travel there by ship, or you die. Either way, the elves will remove themselves from Arda.

It is an unfortunate fate then, that out of a whole host of Doriathrim, it was Elwing who had the most association with the sea and the West.

How many people died before she was even 5 years old? Menegroth fell. Her parents died. Her brothers taken, thrown away, and probably also died. Should she count herself fortunate to be alive? Should she surrender the only thing that her parents left her?

If it were not for her husband and children, she would have faded into the West before the last stone of Doriath crumbled.

The same things that kept Legolas in Middle-Earth when the sea-longing found its dreaded way into his heart: Emotional connections.

Legolas stayed in Middle-Earth because of Aragorn and Gimli, no matter how much the cries of the gulls tore his heart. Elwing stayed in Sirion, despite all of the above tearing her young heart asunder, because she still had connections. Honestly, if she had no cares of Elrond and Elros, she could have gone after Earendil with the Silmaril, sparing her the agony of watching her sons taken before her very eyes.

She had the Silmaril (which bore the same Light of the Trees the Valar so wanted the elves to worship) and a husband (lost at sea for the longest time) whom she loved so much that when he loved the realm, so did she too, and found it in her heart to look over the great tragedies of the Teleri, in order to convince them to sail their ships for the host of the Valar, which in it was counted the Noldor.

The ability to forgive, her character progression from desperation to leader, then the belief in second chances: Elrond definitely has strong notes of Elwing in him.

Headcanon: Being an elf, would there have been people to console her? To tell her that everyone has passed into the Halls of Mandos, and there they will be comforted and in time, will meet again in the shores of Valinor? Doesn’t sound too bad to Elwing, right? It is a promise that she will meet all her beloved ones again.

Would Elwing have known that a Feanorian would be kind to her children? Like they had been “kind” to Elured and Elurin?

Elwing only cast herself into the sea after Elrond and Elros are kidnapped. Prior to this, we have no information if she loved her sons as much as she loved Earendil. But we do know that she loves, due to her actions after she was bore out of the sea by Ulmo. ELWING LIVED ON despite all conditions were fulfilled for her sea-longing to either take her or fade her.

Elwing's tenacity in the legendarium is quite literally every single headcanon related to "Thranduil didn't fade because of Legolas"

And consider this: she refused to surrender the Silmaril which remind her of her parents. Would she have surrendered her sons who remind her of Earendil whom she loved? It is difficult to say she did not love Elrond and Elros because we have no proof of this. But we do have canon proof of the extent of her love and power to forgive. Plus… her charisma to convince the Falmari? Elrond and Elros, both leaders of their races, definitely inherited that from her.

I will end off this post with an excerpt from this other post about similarities between Maedhros and Elwing*

Elwing would rather die than give up the silmaril, than let Maedhros reap the rewards of her father’s murder, her mother’s, her young brothers. I’ll die before you triumph over me - and she jumps. That’s something Maedhros can recognize - you won’t take me alive - that fear, that desperation. It is not just her possession of the silmaril for which he envies her. Neither of them would seem prone to half measures! Elwing’s intended suicide was Maedhros’s Nirnaeth: a last-ditch effort, far reaching and hopeless. Maedhros’s suicide was born from overwhelming despair as opposed to Elwing’s desperation. But they are still the only two of the Eldar to have actively chosen their own destruction. For a lost cause. For the family members they’ve lost, the family members they’ve failed. For their inability to protect, their inability to defeat the evil in their lives. For the lack of a solution to their pain.

The Feanorians killed everyone, they won’t kill me too. I will go West the only way I know how, and meet my family, there I will be reunited with my sons if the fate of the Eldar holds true.

Unfortunately, she will never see Elros again.

[gurguliare]

notes on the valar’s debate re: finwë and miriel because whatever i guess i’m a tolkien blog again suddenly

valar present: all the aratar minus oromë and varda, but plus vairë. apparent difficulty of getting all the valar in a room is very touchingly + frighteningly provisional government. i’m not surprised oromë skipped, mildly interested in varda’s absence since varda hallows the silmarils and that’s like, the most we see her interact with an elf ever, but apparently she wasn’t as concerned with fëanor’s parents. someone write me fëanor + varda fic that isn’t primarily or exclusively about how hallowing another person’s family jewels is Illegal, thank you.

Things I Am Interested In About The Debate Itself:

aulë argues that miriel’s death (or as he wants to frame it, fëanor’s birth) was direct action on eru’s part, and that it’s therefore a mistake to talk about it as connected to the marring of arda. i love aulë’s shitty partisan tunnel vision. characterization-wise my goal for him is always to invent a melkor parallel, so, uh, belief in absolute creative control, i guess? god can always tweak his machine.

ulmo shoots back that miriel’s death CAN’T be a [thing apart from the marring] because miriel’s death has had shitty, ruinous consequences of its own, namely, it made people sad, and eru “doth not of his prime motion impose grief upon them.” ulmo acknowledges that eru is the ultimate source of all crap, grief included, but basically rejects aulë’s concept of eru acting without intermediary in a way that causes deep harm. as always, ulmo + numenor depresses me, albeit i guess not many people were left alive to grieve. between ulmo’s stance here and his speech to tuor in “of the coming of tuor to gondolin,” i think we can go past “ulmo is a rogue agent” and say that ulmo is invested in an ideal eru who may not be the same as the eru who presently exists (or, atemporally, may not be the same as... every eru who exists?); ulmo in a pinch will guilt trip god, or to take sides when god contradicts itself---not, “the contradiction must also be eru’s will and it’s our limited perspective that makes it seem evil,” but “the things i know to be right in eru are the substance of eru that i accept; the rest is a wall to be broken down, not a burden we rationalize or reconcile ourselves to.” HEAL GOD HEAL GOD HEAL GOD ulmo is, of course, jewish.*

*caveat: i have no idea what i’m talking about

yavanna backs up ulmo, which is neat---yavanna compared to ulmo is less touchy-feely, less involved with humanoids in general, so it’s not an instant association for me, but yavanna ofc also makes one of the iconic appeals-on-behalf-of-creation, which reveals a possible flaw in the design and gets a special accommodation granted: ents! here her focus is more technical (aman isn’t beyond the reach of the marring generally, and who would know better than her; everything made of matter is affected by melkor), but in a way that reveals the solid grounding for her brand of protective ardor; she’s also an engineer, though one long since resigned to the messy randomness of creation and its collaborative basis.

nienna similarly goes pretty in-depth with a consideration of psychological as well as physical frailty; despite my jokes about nienna the neural network, she lays out a lot of theory here. ulmo gets shirty about, uh, weighting temporal creatures’ in-the-moment understanding of their own abilities above their real potential to endure; in passing he touches on the fact that the valar’s interference deffos made things worse (because miriel, given an ultimatum, of course doubled down on her decision). vairë says, no, miriel is just pigheaded. in my memory of the debate i had attributed some of nienna’s stuff to vairë---i actually don’t quite know what to make of vairë’s position, or rather, of what it adds, except that she takes nienna’s relatively external + patronizing take on fallible minds and argues instead for a kind of terrible accuracy of perception between elf souls that the valar can have no frame of reference for. (vairë and mandos in different ways both strike me as bizarrely prone to, idk, taking elves seriously---see also “If thraldom it be, thou canst not escape it,” which is brutal! but which accepts feanor’s skewed model in order to enter a dialogue with him, rather than talking over his head about how his perspective is delusional.)

i haven’t touched on manwë’s and mandos’s comments in the debate because both are interesting but fairly self-explanatory. “everything else you wrote here was self-explanatory” shh. AND NOW, onto my favorite parts of this stupid essay:

1) nienna gets the bright idea to just, stuff miriel back into her corpse, and takes it to mandos privately as though no one else needs to be consulted about this and as though all the prior objections to miriel’s reincarnation just Stopped Existing because LOOK, the body’s FINE, and i HAD THIS IDEA

2) after the rebellion they do exactly that. they just pop her back in.

Then the fëa of Míriel was released and came before Manwë and received his blessing; and she went then to Lorien and re-entered her body, and awoke again, as one that cometh out of a deep sleep; and she arose and her body was refreshed. But after she had stood in the twilight of Lorien a long while in thought, remembering her former life, and all the tidings that she had learned, her heart was still sad, and she had no desire to return to her own people. Therefore she went to the doors of the House of Vairë and prayed to be admitted; and this prayer was granted, although in that House none of the Living dwelt nor have others ever entered it in the body.

i love it. i love it so much. i love miriel standing and thinking, i love that having already had a kind of ecstatic ghost turnaround after talking to finwe, where she’s like, i will! i will come back to life!---coming back to life is still hard. she sobers up and her understanding changes again once she’s returned to the world; she gets so many pivots in two pages and it doesn’t feel silly or trivial, it feels amazing, because this is the woman who vairë thought would stay dead until the end of the world---i guess that’s the other big function of vairë’s bit, is it lets us take seriously the idea that miriel COULD have. she was feanor’s mother. and yet by some chance she relented, and it wasn’t like, break the old resolve, form a new one, follow that just as doggedly, it’s that she breaks the old resolve and ends up in this totally new, thoughtful, responsive mindset, In The Twilight Of Lorien, she has the freedom to find out and follow her own impulses at last, and if the impulse runs out she abandons it

and she gets what she wants!! although in that house none of the living dwelt nor have others ever entered it in body!

also, from when she’s still talking stuff over with finwë:

And when she learned of Finwë all that had befallen since her departure (for she had given no heed to, nor asked tidings, until then) she was greatly moved; and she said to Finwë in thought: ‘I erred in leaving thee and our son, or at least in not soon returning after brief repose; for had I done so he might have grown wiser. But the children of Indis shall redress his errors and therefore I am glad that they should have being, and Indis hath my love. How should I bear grudge against one who received what I rejected and cherished what I abandoned?’

so, 1) i suspect that ghosts’ mental processing is not exactly like living people’s, because regardless of how seriously depressed míriel was when she died, ‘had given no heed to, nor asked tidings’ is real hardcore, also i just want ghosts to not be very much like living people 2) GOD the thing about indis’s kids... i love....... the fucked up blowup of an ideal sibling relationship of mutual correction and help into this continent-wide, fairly miserable chase sequence. cleaning up after the dead. and yet miriel with the wide-angle view can’t help but see in it the seeds of what should have been and also something to be grateful for

living handmaiden miriel/ghost finwë who hovers over her shoulder while she’s weaving and asks “is that anime”/embittered single mom indis is the BEST THREESOME, qed*

*i proved nothing