#i promise this started as a crack-theory but it went down the angst rabbit hole so fast

[camille-lachenille]

I’ve been rotating the potential of elves coming back wrong from Mandos, like missing chunks of memory, or with some traits of their personality completely changed, bc try as they want, the Valar just can’t get Elves right when healing them. And I was thinking about the many, many fanons about Lindir’s backstory.

So I mashed the two ideas together

Finrod died in… extremely traumatic circumstances, to use an euphemism, and the Valar found they couldn’t heal him while he kept these memories. So they erased them. Only, whoever did the erasing went a little too strong on it bc they didn’t know how to dose their power for an Elf. And Finrod got re-embodied a little too soon, and was lost bc he didn’t know who were these people around him calling him by names he didn’t know, in a language he didn’t understand.

He knows two things: he likes singing, and he wants to get back home, over the sea.

So Lindir smuggles himself on a ship leaving for the War or Wrath, and just kind of bumbles his way through the whole thing without understanding what it happening. Círdan and Gil-Galad recognise him, so they take him under their protection and set him in charge of the women and children in a refugees camp bc Lindir can’t fight but he sings the best lullabies and loves kids.

At some point, Lindir befriends Elrond, who feels strangely familiar in many ways, and he ends up following him around like a happy, singing shadow. Elrond is put into the secret of Lindir’s real identity and he starts working even harder in his healer studies.

Over the centuries, Elrond manages to help Lindir recover some memories from his first life, though only the happy ones. Lindir forgot Barahir and Beren, forgot all the grief and loss he felt after the passing of Bëor and his other mortal friends, hence the reason why he is so confused by mortals in FOTR. He still loves singing, and regains his taste for jewellery and clothes, and Elrond is only too happy to indulge him.

Eventually, Lindir meets Galadriel, and even tough he can’t reconcile the faint memories of little Artanis clinging to him with sticky hands with the lady in front of him, they become fast friends and Lindir spoils Celebrían rotten bc he’s an uncle!!!

And when time comes to Sail, Lindir follows Elrond like he always has since the end of the First Age, but this time he remembers the family waiting for him in Valinor, even though he still struggles to think of them as his family.

The first thing Elrond does when he sets foot in Valinor, after kissing Celebrían silly, is to walk straight for the Ring of Doom with Lindir and a gaggle of Very Angry Relatives in tow to scream at the Valar with the whole power of the Voice he inherited from Lúthien and trained with Maglor, until the Valar fix Lindir. Galadriel gets to do her scary show too, as a treat.

It takes some time but then the Valar manage to put the memories back into Finrod and he’s as fixed as he can be. He also gets intensive therapy and Huan as a service dog bc 6000 years not being himself are a bit traumatising, but he’s mostly fine at the end of the day.