The Tapestries by Dawn Felagund

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Fanwork Notes

This story arose from a request from my friend Jenni (digdigil), one of the SWG's original comoderators and one of my dearest fannish friends. Jenni asked me to write a story about the Noldor arriving in Beleriand, but this was a challenge for one major reason: Much of what happens later in my epic is a secret from everyone but me. To go into Middle-earth now would reveal these things and spoil later stories. So I was left with the option to 1) spoil later stories and to heck with the consequences, 2) invent a new verse for this story, or 3) find some creative way around my conundrum.

I opted for the third, choosing to write this story from a point of view that is probably a bit unexpected. But it allows me to look at the Noldorin arrival in Middle-earth without becoming hung up on the spoilers.

The Tapestries is a multi-chapter novella that does just what Jenni asked: recaps the Noldorin arrival in Middle-earth. However, it does so from the perspective of Fëanáro, looking back at his life from the halls of Mandos. The story deals with the mind-brain problem, the malleability of memory, the issue of historical bias in The Silmarillion, and whether Fëanor was truly insane. That's a lot for a novella of a modest 18,000 words!

This remains one of my strangest stories. It was originally posted on LiveJournal in November 2006 and archived here in July 2013, with minor revisions.

Fanwork Information

Summary:

Shortly after his death, Fëanor discovers in the halls of Mandos the tapestries his mother has woven about his life. Seen through Míriel's eyes, the tapestries look back at the time from the kinslaying at Alqualondë, to the Fëanorians' arrival in Middle-earth, to his untimely death at the hands of the Balrogs. Fëanor is faced with both the weight of his deeds, as seen through another's eyes, and his contributions to the Noldor.

Major Characters: Fëanor, Mandos, Míriel Serindë, Sons of Fëanor

Major Relationships:

Artwork Type: No artwork type listed

Genre: Drama, Experimental, General

Challenges: Gift of a Story

Rating: Teens

Warnings: Torture, Character Death, Mature Themes, Violence (Moderate)
Chapters: 11 Word Count: 18, 240
Posted on 9 November 2006 Updated on 9 November 2006

This fanwork is complete.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11

Comments

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This is epic, Dawn. And so confident and ambitious well beyond its length. It for me is an object lesson in what it means for a writer to know and be comfortable in their own invented characterization and world building. This could, in many ways, be said to contain all of the theoretical underpinnings of your construct for the story of Feanor and his family--perhaps even more strongly so than Another Man's Cage.

It's brilliant. It makes me feel like a bit of a copycat and a hack to read it though. Of course, I read it years ago and I did not know how thoroughly I had assimilated. crawled into and inhabited your canon. Oh, well, I will have to content myself with believing I do it well enough to make it worth my time and that of my readers and that mine is not without interesting departures, which represent the ways in which my world view really does vary from yours.

I want to pimp it widely (although I wish I could do so with the proviso that writing internal monologue is not as easy to do rightwell as it might look reading yours!).

How do I characterize it: Vintage Dawn, Required Reading (rating: excellent, stood the test of time).

Your method of posting old stories and back-dating them makes them difficult to find.

I'm really flummoxed! Of four Silm novellas-or-longer over the years, this is the one that I always thought of as the throwaway, maybe because I was so underconfident about it in the first place and it didn't seem to have the lasting impact of the others, nor was there the level of interest in it when I initially posted it that there usually was in my stories at the time. I assumed it was weird and esoteric and probably mostly enjoyable to me as a way to put to paper the thoughts in my head at the time. I was actually surprised on rereading it that I liked it but again figured that would be just me!

So thank you thank you thank you for the boost of confidence on this one. :) I'm really still bowled over by your comment.

"I did not know how thoroughly I had assimilated. crawled into and inhabited your canon."

I don't know that I can take credit for that. I read widely before writing my own stuff and am sure I absorbed a lot from the excellent "first-wave" Silm writers. And much came from the then-endless Tolkien-related conversations post-movie. And since we generally have a similar worldview, it's possible we just have the same ideas independently! :)

"Your method of posting old stories and back-dating them makes them difficult to find."

I really am sorry about this because I feel kind of torn on this one. I'm trying to post one per day and don't want to overttake the Most Recent page from actual new stories with my moldy oldies. But then I think that if a writer I liked with very old stories wanted to archive them, then I'd want to know about it so that I could reread them! There are some classics I'd be thrilled to see here. I am planning to compile a list of those I archive here once they're all posted and post it to LJ, DW, and Tumblr. Or maybe I could scale back to posting one or two per week instead, not backdating, without feeling guilty. I really am open to thoughts on this if you have any!

Thank you so very much for this comment, truly.