#fantasty body dysmorphia

[notreallystars]

I've read a lot of fics that show elves being reborn into bodies that retain evidence of the things that happened to them in Middle Earth - like Maedhros being reborn with only one hand - and this makes sense. Their bodies are sites of trauma, and this will change them and they way they relate to their bodies so it makes perfect sense that they might return scarred or missing limbs.

But consider: the Valar do not understand Eru's children. They do not understand what it is to inhabit a body rather than simply wear one, do not understand the interrelation of body and self.

Finrod returns. There is joy, there is sorrow, there is confusion. He looks well enough but he keeps rubbing his hands over his wrists (he had pulled so hard against Sauron's shackles that there had been little skin left), over his throat (the memory of teeth sinking into his flesh screams at him, more vivid at times than the faces of his parents as they sit before him), over his face (claws drag through his cheek daily in his memory so where are the scars). Eventually he paints onto his body the scars he knows would have existed, and this at least stops him rubbing at them for fear of smearing paint all over himself. It is not enough, but at least he is still.

It seems grotesque to the Eldar of Aman who see only an obsession with past hurts, a playacting of injury, but Finrod is loved and so his eccentricity is tolerated. As more elves return, however, it becomes clear that this is not Finrod's trouble alone. Many take Finrod's lead, painting on their bodies the patterns of scars they remember and those they know they should have borne had they survived the attacks that killed them. Some wore eyepatches over eyes that had once been injured. Some walked with limps their new bodies did not need.

When Fingon returns he paints his whole body red. It is long before he speaks at all (his voice ought to be hoarse from shouting, scratchy and painful to use but no! - how does one reconcile the memory of being beaten to a bloody pulp in the mud with the perfect, unharmed body of one's youth?), and even then he will not sing.

Much, much later when Maedhros returns, he begs Fingon to cut his hand off again.