#there's also the holly trees by the Doors of Durin which must have been at least five thousand years old

[undercat-overdog]

Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone.

So sad, so very sad. The Elves who are gone have been gone for almost five thousand years, and still the stones remember and mourn. (This is what I think may be missing with the emphasis on embalming: these stones miss the people who wrought them fair. Perhaps it was a work of collaboration, perhaps Elves always collaborate with the stones and woods and metals. The stones talk and Legolas hears them, after all; they probably had opinions on how they wanted to be wrought.)

Eregion was not the only place where the Elves built with stone. Do the rocks of Gondolin and Nargothrond mourn too, bereft of the creators that loved them, the creators who were loved in turn, and now those rocks are drowned under the sea, with no one to hear their cries and sorrows? 

Perhaps there are Elves who think that Morgoth’s corruption of Beleriand, the land itself, the stones and the trees, was his foulest deed, fouler than the wars he waged and the slaughters of loved ones.