Of Finrod and Bëor by losselen  

Coda

The branches bare, the mountains old

the land now under roaring tide

the grasses high and rivers cold,  

all buried beneath the ocean wide.

And even in Ossiriand

on leaf and stone the ages lay

and gone of old are Elves from land,

for long ago, they passed away.  

And gone is Finrod Elven-king,

long he left the Hither-shore

into the West where warblers sing

and comes to Middle-Earth no more. 

He walks in Elven halls of old

beneath the shinning silver eaves

beneath the rustling boughs of gold

and wind among the dancing leaves.

And there the green, undying plains

roll on beside the Shadowmere

and earthen time like chiming rains

still fall in countless Elven-years.

But Bëor and his folk of Men,

where now they walk, none can tell,

away afar, beyond the ken

of Elven-kind, beyond the bell

of the changéd and the edgeless world

beyond the crowns of oak and elm,

beyond the staves of Music furled,

beyond the night’s murky helm.

The lands they walk, no one has seen

what sight or music, none shall know,

what azure skies and grasses green,

what air or water, joy or woe. 

But long ago, in Ossiriand

they walked the woods of hinterland

beneath the sunlight’s eastern rays

when the world was fair in Elder Days.

Chapter End Notes

This monstrously long poem took almost 10 years to write!

Several phrases, rhymes and lines are borrowed from various Tolkien poems—e.g. “grey the Norland waters [run]” (Bilbo’s Song of Eärendil) and “silver fire / of old that Men did call the Briar” (used several times in the Lay of Leithian), among many others. Of course the writerly reason is that sometimes I can’t resist how beautiful the imagery are, or that I’m not sufficiently inventive myself. And yet I think these lyric echoes are also true in a in-universe sense: in Medieval ballads can be found similar stock phrases or allusive echoes to older or contemporaneous poems. Therefore it’s nice to think of these echoes as evincing the poem’s literary lineage.