In The Interest of Historical Accuracy by Duilwen

---

Chapter 1: In which the author’s journey and first encounter with the Feanorians is detailed; appended is a description of the Darkening and the murder of High King Finwë

---

Chapter 1: In which the author’s journey and first encounter with the Feanorians is detailed; appended is a description of the Darkening and the murder of High King Finwë 

I am not certain what I was expecting. A fierce, grim people, more like Orcs than Elves? The Star of Fëanor flying proudly over every home? Stone monuments of One-Handed Maedhros the Terrible, bloodied sword in hand?

No, of course not. I was a scholar; I knew better than that. I had recorded all of those myths, converting them from terrifying stories to be told around the campfire into elegant, perfectly lettered documents, suitable for scholarly analysis on the legends of the First Age and how they'd altered with the passing centuries. I was not a foolish, ignorant child, and if I had thought that these Kinslayers were any threat, I would not have come. 

(I record history, but I have never had the slightest desire to take part in it.)

But it is fair to say that I had begun my expedition without thinking overmuch on how I would identify the Feanorians, should I run across them. And once I had come across ten or so humble villages of Elves in the northern hills of Hollin, I was starting to realize that distinguishing Kinslayers from ordinary elves might be more challenging than it seemed. 

Of course, one couldn't exactly stop Elves on the road and ask if they were Feanorians. The ones that were would probably lie, and the ones that were not would probably be terribly offended. And as no one was obligingly flying the Star of Fëanor, subtlety was obviously crucial.

I stopped for a day beside a small lake on the edge of a forest, so I could give this question the consideration it was due. Also because every muscle in my body was aching with exhaustion, I badly needed a bath, and I was going to be sick if I ate any additional lembas.

(A detailed accounting of my trip would be replete with such minor annoyances. I have omitted them for the sake of the reader, and also because my pride does not permit me to dwell on them overlong.)

The solution I eventually settled on was one of half-truths: I inquired at every village I came to, explaining that I was a scholar from Ost-in-Edhil, trying to get a better account of the history of our scattered people. Fifteen hundred years of peace had made people trusting, and they answered readily enough: they had followed their lords southeast after the Bragollach, for the most part, or fled here after the Nirnaeth. Those who would admit to being originally of Thargelion, or Himlad, would quickly clarify, “But I never saw the Feanorians after the Nirnaeth.” Or “I lost a sister in Sirion.” Or “Even back then, you know, I knew they couldn’t be trusted.” 

(A full account of the populations I encountered on my journey, and their origins, can be found in the appendices).

I am not sure why it affected me so much, hearing these references to days long past. I had read all of the histories – I had written some of them. I had studied alongside people who had lived through them. And no one I encountered during my long months of searching said anything shocking – no one spoke of blood and gore, or shared the names of their lost loved ones or the manners of their deaths.

Maybe it was because there was so much unspoken that their words haunted me – because I had assumed that we had healed enough to speak those words out loud. Because I had never realized that these wounds, after 1500 years, still hurt to touch, still burst open to bleed anew at even the slightest pressure.

For the first time I began to wonder at the wisdom of my mission.

(I wondered only briefly. Self-doubt is virtuous, a characteristic of a healthy and skeptical mind, but it should not be crippling.)

And then, finally, I came to a town[1] of perhaps 5,000, nestled in the foothills, where the woman I stopped in the street would not answer my questions, but met my eyes (the light of the Trees shone in hers) with a sort of dry amusement. 

“That is not your reason for being here.”

I was tired and irritable; I had been camping for nearly three months and having nightmares about One-Handed Maedhros the Terrible and reluctantly beginning to admit to myself that perhaps everyone else had been right. This does not excuse my lack of diplomacy, but perhaps it in part explains it. “That is my reason for being here, I assure you. Do not presume to tell me my own goals.”

She smiled, then. It was not the wicked smile you would expect from a Kinslayer, or the bitter, wise smile of those Exiles I have encountered in Ost-in-Edhil. If not for the Treelight, I would have thought her around my own age. “We trailed in the wake of the Host of the West, when it came, and watched the world sink below the waves. We wandered for a while, and then we settled here. You will hear the same story in every town, city boy; surely you already have. You are dirty and unhappy and near-fainting with hunger; you did not make this journey to ask people where, precisely, were their homes beneath the sea.”[2]

I sighed. It stung a little to realize that my pretense was so obvious.  “I’m looking for Feanorians.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to them! Why else?” And then, when her eyes darkened with disapproval and something that looked vaguely like disappointment, I clenched my teeth and tried diplomacy: “I am a scholar in Ost-in-Edhil, and I have set before me the task of writing a more accurate account of the events after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad and before the War of Wrath. All our accounts are very incomplete, and I desperately need to speak to some people who were with the sons of Fëanor – you know, all the way until the end.” 

She turned around and started walking away.

“There are none.”

“I’m sorry?” 

“They were alone at the end.” Her voice wavered just slightly.

Then she continued down the path, and I was left standing there like a fool, fighting the childish urge to run after her.

(Fighting the childish urge to run after her was a very silly thing to do, of course, because I have never been able to constrain my impulses for long and so the only effect was to ensure that, when I did run after her, I had a longer way to go.)

 __________________________________________________________________________

They call the town Ndûn na Thrûn, Uttermost East, and they agreed to answer my questions on the condition that I not reveal where it is; they have kept to themselves for a long time, with good reason, and have no desire to rejoin the rest of our world. 

I agreed readily to keep their secret – I am a scholar, not a cartographer, and in any event I rather liked the idea that anyone who wants to replicate my research will have to endure the same hardships that I did. 

(I am not entirely without empathy for the entrepreneurial Elf who does follow my path, though, so I will mention that Uttermost East is not, in fact, in the East. I pointed this out to my hosts, who explained that it is named as a reminder of the Curse of the Noldor: that those who follow the House of Fëanor face the wrath of the Valar from West to uttermost East, will see all they achieve fall to ruins, and will find no joy in Middle-earth. I enquired as to why they would possibly wish to remind themselves of such a thing, and received no satisfactory answer then, though in time (see Chapter 4) I think I came to understand.)

And so the following day, having slept in a bed and bathed and told my hostess with genuine joy that it was wonderful to have returned to civilization (which comment, for whatever reason, earned me a disdainful glare), I sat down to begin the investigation which had dragged me halfway across Eriador to these Valar-forsaken lands.

I had a detailed and thoughtful list of questions prepared; every night on my miserable journey I had reread it, adding to it and altering the wording as I saw fit. And yet, somehow, when I met those Tree-lit eyes and opened my mouth, none of my careful scholarly questions could find their way out. 

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again, and then opened it again and finally managed only a single word: “Why?”

She reached out and plucked the leather-bound book from my hands, flipping deliberately through each blank page, leaning in to enjoy the scent of new parchment. “Lord Maedhros would have appreciated this, you know. He was a scholar before it all began. An acclaimed one.”

I had not known this.

“You bring a great deal of paper.”

“There is not enough paper in all the world to record all that I wish to learn, but there is sometimes enough to record all that I will forget.”

I thought it was a clever answer, but she shook her head impatiently. “There is not nearly that much to say. And it is not a tale that… I will not aid you in embellishing it, or in adding glory and tragedy where there was none.” 

“There was, though.” I said quietly, wondering how little they know of the tales that fill our libraries. “Great glory and tragedy both. That is why this story still speaks to everyone, why it will be remembered unto the ending of Arda…” 

She let my book fall to the floor. “The story speaks to everyone because they do not know it. They fill in the details with their own hearts, and then marvel at how closely their mirror resembles them. You will color in the lines, and then the story will be complete, and they will not wish to hear it any longer.” 

“I want to hear it,” I said, “all the moreso if we’ve got it wrong.”

We sat in silence for a very long time. I watched the shadows inch down the wall. (Sometimes Elves who were old before the sun first rose forget how slowly time passes for the young; a responsible researcher should be willing to work around the shortcomings of their interview subjects. I was not new to this.)

That said, there are limits to my patience, and I was reaching them. Just as I arrived at the conclusion that it was bad academic practice to talk to the first person you encountered in a town, and that I could probably go out and find a neighbor less inclined to poetry and more inclined to explanations, she spoke.

And after that, I did not note the passage of time at all.

 

“If Fëanáro had never been born, if Morgoth had never been released, if the Trees still shone … the Rebellion would have happened eventually anyway. That is the first thing you have to realize – he did not start it, he captured it. We were not happy there. We could not have been happy there. The Valar – you will find plenty of people in this village who believe them evil, and will tell you why, and if you truly mean to make an accurate study of the question you ought to talk to them. For myself, I do not believe them evil. I believe them ignorant.

They say that Manwe freed Morgoth because he was incapable of truly comprehending evil. Have you ever thought about what that means? To just look out at the world – the world the way it really is, not the way you sing of it in Ost-in-Edhil, and to find fully half of it beyond your comprehension…”

I knew, of course, that Fëanor’s rebellion was against the Valar; I knew there was a philosophical element to it. But that was not what I wanted to hear about. Objecting, though, earned me a sharp glare and an invitation to leave. “But if you want to hear this tale from me, you will have to listen to it as I tell it, without interrupting.”

I could not let an ultimatum like that go by without at least challenging it. “Except for clarifications.” 

To my surprise, she does not argue. She just continues.  “I think he was also incapable of understanding disobedience. I think that, as he saw things, if you were Good you would follow the path set out for you; all that was necessary was to inform you of it, and aid you on it, and praise you for reaching its pinnacle – it never occurred to him that anyone Good would be informed of their path and choose a different one. 

And for a while, we didn’t. We thrived there. We made jewelry so beautiful that now, here, it is prized beyond measure – but there, we gave it away freely, and the beaches were strewn with gemstones, and even the homes of peasants – for my family was neither rich nor important – were lit in the silver hours by Fëanorian lamps… though they were not called that at the time…” 

“I have already published several detailed accounts of daily life in Valinor,” I interrupted, hoping that this would be counted as a clarification.

She gave me the sort of smile that one grants a very small child who has successfully written their name but has gotten one of the tengwa backwards.

“In Tirion you could not see the stars. Telperion was too bright. But in the North, in Formenos, where I grew up, you could, and astronomers came there to study them and watch their movements, and to wonder at the explanations we were given by the Valar – because there were some things that did not make sense, even then.”

“You speak of the controversy over the orbits of the stars? I am familiar with it.” 

This time she continues as though I had not spoken. “We had learned all we could from them. We had surpassed them in the areas where we could – Fëanáro’s work, of course, comes to mind, but he was not alone – and in the other fields, where we could not surpass them, we stood ever impatiently at their shoulder – for who would tell the Star-Kindler that her stars do not move as they should? Who would tell the creator of the world that under certain conditions the elements did not behave as he claimed?

Morgoth was credited for setting Fëanáro and Nolofinwe at each other’s throats, but in truth, they were fighting over their father's attention for years before that… because there was nothing else to fight over. When everyone has everything they need, when there is no death and no evil and nothing to expect from the future but eternal bliss in paradise, there is nothing left to fight over except status. And we were excellent at that.” 

She was not half as eloquent as the theologians who have made the same arguments in the great debates in Ost-in-Edhil, but I was nonetheless impressed. There are not many people who could have developed such a sophisticated philosophical framework for rebellion alone, without the benefits of the academic community to point out wrong ideas and build on right ones. (It is easy to say such things with the benefit of hindsight, but even then I had a feeling that she would have something very interesting to say about Doriath and Sirion, when she finally got around to speaking about them.) So I did not point out that she was, once again, off topic.

“In later days, you know, when everything had fallen to ruins and it was absurd – utterly absurd – that we had once worried about growing bored of eternity, we used to debate who would have lead the rebellion if Fëanáro had never existed. Findaráto was the favorite, of course. Though personally, I always thought that it would have been his sister. ”[3]

I swallowed and disguised my consternation by scribbling furiously. That would cause some debates in Ost-in-Edhil. 

And then, finally, she came to the topic that I had been hoping she would begin at. “But, of course, it was Fëanáro. And once I first heard him speak of these things it was impossible to imagine that it could have been anyone else.

They say nowadays, in your stories, that he was evil, yes? Jealous, prideful, a traitor…”

She was not really looking for an answer, and I did not interrupt her with one. I was, in any event, not sure what I’d say. 

“When he spoke it was as if the world ceased to be, and his thoughts could remake it. He was the most brilliant of our people, and the most gifted, and some would say the most beautiful – and it was as if he encompassed us, as if every objection that we would think of in a thousand years he had already thought of, and improved upon, and presented in its strongest form and then rejected. And yet he was not distant. He was not jealous. He was rarely rude… 

If he had been the monster they painted him as, do you think we would have followed him? There were those who never heard him speak before the Darkening who packed up their families, their children, all their world, and followed him to Araman, and when he left them there the dream he had planted in their heads still burned so brightly that they crossed the ice for it.

“About the burning of the ships-”

She shook her head. “I’ll get to that. I was telling you about Fëanáro. He was not jealous, not until Morgoth’s lies started to tear our people apart. Every work of his hands save the Silmarils, he gave freely – I don’t think there was a soul in Formenos who did not treasure at least one gift from him. He remembered our names, and our begetting days. His sons went hunting with ours. 

I have told you of his gift for words, how he could make a crowd believe anything – and yet he never lied to us. He always told us exactly what he wanted, exactly what he planned to do, exactly what he wished for us to be a part of. He was above the courtly intrigues and careful half-lies. When he was angry, we knew it. When he was pleased, we knew it. And when he grew troubled, when he told us that the peace in our lands would not last, when he began forging swords… we knew, even then, that if trouble came we would stand with him until the bitter end.

We swore fealty to King Finwë every year, did you know that? It was a tradition carried over from the Outer Lands, but stripped of all significance: we would dress up in our best robes and braid gemstones into our hair and kneel (they had an especially thick carpet for the occasion, so that it would not pain our knees) and make promises that carried only the weight of tradition. 

It was then, more than ever, that we felt the emptiness of paradise. Because we admired Finwë – it was impossible not to – Finwë who had led our people out of darkness, Finwë who seemed always to float above the gossip and intrigue of his court, Finwë who stood for the promise that, should darkness ever trouble our people, we would know who to turn to and we would know him worthy of the burden. We wanted to offer him something that mattered, and our oaths of fealty didn’t. 

Except, of course, for when they did, and by then it was too late.

 

 

No one born outside of Valinor can understand the Darkening. Here Tilion rests once a month, and you can experience the world as the One made it for us, lit only by the stars and the light of our own faer.  Perhaps the Valar have learned wisdom, and that is the reason they permit us our one night of darkness, or more likely they have their own, complicated reasons in which we are incidental.

But in Valinor it was always light. Formenos was far to the North, and the Tree-light was fainter there, but still it was always bright enough to read well into the silver hours without a lamp. Our home had no curtains on the windows. I do not think I had ever experienced total darkness, until the moment that it devoured the land.

Unlight, they called it later, what that monstrous spider did – but at the time we did not know the cause, or the name. Which is well, for if we had we would have been even more frightened. We knew only that we were all blind, that the homes that had sheltered our family since we first arrived in Valinor were strange places to us, walls reaching out to smash against our elbows as we tried to find our way down the hallway. My sister was screaming from her bedroom down the hall but her voice echoed like it was ten leagues away. Something cold closed around my shoulder and I punched and kicked and it was my brother, trying to drag me away from the house to safety.

So we fled. With nothing – we hadn’t even put on shoes – and we had no way of knowing if there was safety anywhere in the world – if the world still existed – but we fled and met with others who were fleeing, and when the ground had torn the skin away from our feet at last we reached the edge of the Dark and saw the starlight.

My first thought was that we had been running so long we had accidentally crossed the Pelori, but then I heard someone shout “The Trees are gone!” and I knew in my heart that it was the truth.

I wandered through the crowd of shocked and terrified refugees, looking for my brother, and when I found him we crumpled to the ground and wept together for a very long time.

King Finwë was absent, and in his absence no one was certain what to do; we huddled with our families, and everyone who had a sword nervously fingered it and paced the camp.

It was there that Fëanáro’s sons found us. They had been out hunting, as is their wont, when first the Treelight vanished, and they had sensed the moving of that terrible evil in the Darkness and ridden towards it – towards us – as swiftly as they could.

“They felt… that… and rode toward it?” my brother whispered, and then, as if taking heart, somehow, from their bravery, he jumped to his feet and went to join them.

Fëanáro’s sons rarely dressed as the princes of the Noldor they were. They took their example from their father, perhaps, who went about more often than not in his soot-blackened work clothes. But that night, in contrast to the rest of us half-undressed, ragged and bloodied by our run through the forest, they shone. All eyes turned to them, and at the news that King Finwë was missing Prince Nelyafinwë jumped back onto his horse and said, “We will return to Formenos. We will find the King, and we will see what damage was done in that evil creature’s wake, and whether it is safe to return.” His youngest brothers, though, he left with us, which was sufficient reminder (as if anyone needed to be reminded) that terrible danger might still face them in Formenos.

And yet – they were Fëanáro’s sons, their weapons forged by the greatest hand the world has ever known, their training begun in early childhood at the knee of our peoples’ greatest teacher. No evil could touch them. It was unimaginable. As I watched Fëanáro’s sons ride off for Formenos I felt safer than I’d felt since the Treelight vanished.

Everyone else must have felt the same, for we wept no more; those with knowledge of healing started gathering herbs and bandaging wounds, one of the lords organized the armed men into a sort of watch over our camp, and – tentatively at first, but then louder and louder – someone began singing one of the songs of the Outer Lands, a hymn to Varda sung before our people even knew her name, a song of the glory and beauty of the stars, and more voices joined in, and soon we were scuttling around the camp organizing things properly, and one could almost pretend that things would be all right.

And then the sons of Fëanáro returned, their faces twisted with an emotion which would soon become far too common but which, at the time, was strange to me. They stopped only briefly, to share their news with a few whose face twisted in the same terrible way, and then two men joined Prince Nelyafinwë and Prince Tyelkormo and the four of them rode off, their forms quickly swallowed by the dark.”

“Tyelkormo?” I whispered, and she blinked, trance interrupted. 

“Celegorm in this tongue.”

I knew Quenya well enough to know that. “I was merely surprised. Do you know how they chose –”

“Ah, yes,” she said with a bitter laugh, “in the stories they tell in these days he is the especially evil one, is he not? They chose Tyelkormo because he was the only one who could control the horses. Valinorian steeds, you know – they were as unaccustomed to darkness as we were, and thrice as twitchy. But Tyelkormo could calm them, and somehow when he was riding, with Huan at his side, no horse ever stumbled. Did you never wonder how they reached Taniquetil so quickly? That’s not a trivial journey even with the best of light.” 

It was another question that she did not really expect me to answer. I stayed silent, and after a moment her eyes softened with something which might have been approval. Then she continued.

“My brother came running to us, sobbing: King Finwë was dead.

It felt like jumping into freezing water – for a few moments all I could feel was the pain and shock and horror, surrounding me, squeezing the air out of my lungs, and though I thought I had already cried as much as was possible I cried some more.

Word spread around the camp almost instantly: all around us I could hear voices in song abruptly cut off, replaced with shrieks of anguish and grief. I hugged my brother and we sobbed together, and I was clutching too tightly at his arm which I’d injured earlier, but if he felt it he didn’t say anything. 

I doubt he felt it. Once the pain faded I couldn’t feel anything at all. Just a dreadful sort of calm, numb horror. This could not have happened. The King could not be dead. 

And eventually – we had always known the passage of time by the Treelight, and without it I could not tell you whether minutes passed or days - the numbness and disbelief faded too, and all that remained was the guilt.

We had fled.

We had sworn oaths to defend our King with our lives, and we had run and left him to die alone. And our crime was worse than that, because by now we knew more of the story: Morgoth had come to steal the Silmarils, the only hope left in Arda now that the trees were dead, and Finwë had tried to stop him and died facing him.

A Vala. 

Alone. 

Even all together, we might not have been able to stand against Morgoth. But better to have died by our King’s side, defending the most precious treasures of our people, then to have abandoned him like this.

The sons of Fëanáro felt the same; I could see it in their faces as they patrolled the camp even when it wasn’t their hour, their eyes smoldering with the emotion that I was now all too familiar with: the special guilt born of grief.

I could hear it in their voices when at last Macalaure, who had sat alone since he returned from Formenos, pulled his fingers across his harp and began a lament which seemed to draw the raw emotion from our bodies and weave it through the air so that, shared, it was lessened.

And I could sense it in their posture when Fëanáro returned, his own grief too wild for Macalaure’s song to catch it. His sons stood stiffly before him, and the rest of us stiffened as well. We failed. We failed our King. We failed you. We failed our people.

“No,” he said, and no one needed to ask what he was refuting. “To aid him was beyond you. Only I could have saved him. But I obeyed the summons of the Valar –” he spat the word – “ and so I was at a festival on Taniquetil the one time – the only time – my father needed me.”

He looked around, and once again he seemed to encompass us, his rage and grief and pain so much greater than our own that we were free to release it to him, to know that he would tear the world apart to set our failures right without ever once blaming us for them.

In front of me, Lord Nyellaurë knelt. He looked up at Fëanáro, and in that instant the Greatest of the Noldor looked more a Vala than a man. Then Lord Nyellaurë spoke. “To you, my King, I swear my life for good or ill, in peace and war.”

For an instant I was startled; then I understood, and at the same time so did many others, and on the cold rocky ground outside of the shattered town that had once been our home, we knelt to our King.

And one by one, we said the words that we spoke, every year, to King Finwe. 

 “I pledge my honor and my fealty to you and your House, unto the ending of Arda. This I swear before all those I love, and all the powers of the world.”

At first I tried to hide my tears, but then I realized that I was not the only one weeping.

This King, I promised myself, will not die alone.

 

 

---

[1] I have, above, stated that this place was a village – but I feel obligated to clarify for any potential future audience unfamiliar with Eregion that it was an Elven village, and a Noldor Elven village besides that, and so it was more glorious than most Mortal cities. The paths were stone, evenly laid so it exploited the curve of the land and gave the impression of a river painted alongside the hill. The houses were also stone, well-built and decorated with the unapologetic frivolity that characterizes everything – calligraphy, architecture, jewelry, weapons – our people possess from before the Darkening. 

 

That surprised me, a little. I had expected that they would want to forget.

 

[2] She had the strangest accent I had ever heard: measured, precise, so that even though she was pronouncing everything completely wrong she left you with the disconcerting impression that it was you who had no comprehension of the language.

 

[3] An astute reader will note that, while my interlocutor spoke Sindarin fluently, she occasionally still spoke of those Elves and Valar who feature prominently in this tale by their Quenya names. I have tried to be loyal to her original usage, capricious though it may seem.