The Doll's Tale by Perching  

Glorfindel of fallen Gondolin! Lord of the House of the Golden Flower, slayer of the Balrog, hero of the Elves! By all these titles and more he has been known. Mischievous little tyke, I’ve been told his parents called him in the holy light of the Trees. With what toys did Laurefindelë play when he was your age? Perhaps he played with heroes, too, those Elves of the Great Journey that brought his people to the Blessed Realm. But perhaps not. The Elves of the Uttermost West did not then know they would ever have need of heroes again.

Does that sound silly to you? Naive? In some ways you are already wiser than they were. We in Middle-earth know we need heroes because we live every day with the fruits of the Enemy and heroes teach us how to be strong in the face of that. So I, like you, was brought into a world in love with heroes. I was brought into the world because of its love for heroes. In Eregion Fëanor was one, surprising as that might be, and Beren and Lúthien wresters of the Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown. Turgon the King of Gondolin, too, and his heir Eärendil, who with the aid of Lúthien’s Silmaril sought the pity of the Gods and won it. And of course the Elf who had years before ensured the safety of Eärendil as he fled the ruins of his home: Glorfindel the Beloved.

Of all his titles, that is the only one I might claim for myself. I came into the world already beloved by Nimduil, Lindir’s mother, who crafted me as a gift for her son. You know Nimduil. You know that she is a singer by trade and that she loves the tales of the Elder Days. My first memory is of her singing a ballad of Glorfindel’s fall as she stitched my head onto my body. “But you, my dear,” she said as she tapped my still bald scalp, “have been born into a luckier time than your namesake!”

We knew of Sauron’s presence in Mordor by then, but we did not yet fear him as we do now. Eregion was paradise in Middle-earth, and paradises are eternal—or seem so. Do we sound like fools to you? How can I convince you otherwise? Shall I describe to you Ost-in-Edhil’s beauty? Shall I describe to you the hope in which the people there lived; their joy; their belief that now that the Doom of the Elves from across the Sea was a dark memory of the past, all in Middle-earth would turn to the good? I see your blank faces. That’s all right. Lindir himself didn’t understand then.

I won’t try to make you understand. Instead I will tell you that one evening Lindir took me in hand and walked the stone streets of Ost-in-Edhil until he came to a stream and a willow tree that stooped by a little white bridge. The willow wore its golden autumn dress, and pausing on the bridge, Lindir said, “See! Look! That is just like Galadlóriel!” He tucked me into the hood of his cloak and climbed over the wall into the grass below. Into his hands he gathered a few of the leaves that had already fallen. One by one he dropped them into the stream and watched them float away under the bridge. Then he ducked between the willow branches.

The light of the orange sun filtered through the hanging golden leaves and painted the grass and the willow trunk yellow. Lindir sat in the grass and took me out of his hood and into his lap. His lips pinched as he looked at me. In those days, I was beloved by Nimduil, but I was not yet beloved by him. Still I think he liked me. He did take me on his adventures, and that night, after considering me for a few moments, he sat me on his knee. “More like that imitation Turgon made in Gondolin,” he said. “The trees remember Galadlóriel too. Or maybe not. Do you know if trees turned yellow before she died? You wouldn’t, would you. You weren’t there.”

I did not reply. You may have noticed that I have no mouth. Certainly you’ve noticed that Lindir speaks my thoughts aloud to you today. That comes from a bond we didn’t have then.

But Lindir spoke enough for us both. “In Middle-earth they couldn’t have because here they didn’t bloom at all, except in Doriath. Maybe in Doriath they did. Maybe Melian turned them yellow in memory of Galadlóriel.” He dropped me into the grass, turned on his side, and looked at me. “Do you think she left her home because she was bored? Were you bored in Gondolin? Probably, except for that time your princess died. And that time you went to war. And when Gondolin fell, of course.” He leaned in and lowered his voice as if trusting me with a secret. “I’m bored here. It’s not that I want anything bad to happen! But there are no good stories to tell about our age, and that’s boring.”

Yes, Elladan. Just like your age. And you should be grateful for it!

For Lindir’s part, he would soon wish he had never said such a foolish thing. At the time, though, he thought nothing of it. He picked me up, placed an imaginary sword in my hand, and reenacted the slaying of the Balrog. Then he did it again. When that bored him, he invented some other battle that involved me—or rather, Glorfindel—slaying a few dozen Orcs and played out that story while the sun sank behind Ost-in-Edhil’s towering buildings.

It was by the raucous sounds of battle that his mother found him. “Is that my Lindir down there?” Nimduil said from the bridge. Lindir fell quiet. Nimduil was little more than a shadow in the twilight, visible through the leaves only by her white hair and the diamond cuffs she wore on her ears, but she had spotted Lindir well enough: she looked right at him.

Lindir emerged from beneath the willow and allowed Nimduil to help him climb over the wall. Nimduil grinned at me and plucked me out of Lindir’s hands. Before I knew it, I rode on her shoulder. “What are you doing out here anyway? Did you sneak away from your father?”

“I wouldn’t sneak. He said I could go.”

“Is that true, Glorfindel?”

“Mom!”

Nimduil laughed. “I believe you. But when parents allow children to go out on their own, the children should be mindful not to stay out too late. I’m sure he’s looking for you by now. Let’s go home.” She took Lindir’s hand, but he squirmed out of her grip and skipped ahead, tossing her a dark look over his shoulder. Nimduil sighed and patted my yellow yarn hair. “Don’t look so smug, Glorfindel. You might’ve reminded him to head home, you know.”

That made Lindir snort, and snort meanly, even as I blinked in shock—or would have if I’d had eyelids. Scolded for saying nothing! You should’ve seen me then. How I sulked the rest of the way home!

All our days were like that back then. For Lindir and me, at least, it was impossible to imagine that they would ever be any different.

When the war came, Lindir’s father Mírion didn’t speak of it, not around Lindir. Much of what Lindir knew came from what his friends had heard from their families. Some of it came from Nimduil. The rest of it came from the arguments he overheard when his parents disagreed about what Lindir should or shouldn’t be told.

“If you don’t want me to know that we might have to evacuate,” Lindir said once, standing on the threshold of his room with me clutched in his hand, “then you might want to talk about it more quietly. Just so you’re aware.”

At the kitchen table, Mírion leaned back in a chair with his arms crossed. Nimduil had her hands braced on the table, looming over Mírion, her hair flying about her face. They turned together to stare at Lindir. For a long moment nobody spoke.

Then Nimduil giggled.

She slapped her hand over her mouth at once. Mírion turned his face up to hers. He did not laugh, but his eyes sparked with it. “It’s a sore winner who gloats, dear,” he said, and Nimduil giggled again.

They did not evacuate then, not yet, but Mírion was soon called up for war. That night at the kitchen table is one of the last memories I have of him. I wasn’t there when Lindir said goodbye to him at the gates of Ost-in-Edhil, but I heard about it later: Nimduil and Mírion both laughing and smiling for the sake of their son, Nimduil hiding her face in Mírion’s shoulder the last time she touched him.

I know, Elrohir. It was sad at the time as well. And you know what comes next: the fall of Ost-in-Edhil and the flight of the survivors through the wilderness. I won’t go into it. You know it already from your parents’ tales and from the songs we sing to you, and I know you’re anxious to find out about the Man Lindir killed.

I know you are! Don’t look so guilty. That’s why you asked to hear this story in the first place, isn’t it? We’ve almost come to it.

In the flight, Lindir was separated from Nimduil. They’d been together until they and many of the other survivors had paused for several days around a small town in the far northern reaches of Eregion, waiting for Elrond’s army in the south to win the day. Your eyes go wide, as well they might. You know of the great dark storm that slowed the retreat and cost many Elves their lives. It almost cost Lindir his, for it was in that storm that he became lost. Later he would discover that the other survivors fled without him while he lay hidden from the Men and Orcs in the forest undergrowth. Then he only knew that the plan had been to go north, and so he struggled north.

So we struggled north, I should say. Lindir wasn’t separated from me. As she’d packed, Nimduil had lifted me from Lindir’s bed, kissed my head, and placed me in Lindir’s bag, and when Lindir discovered me there, he squeezed my hair and shifted me so that I lay comfortably. After we were separated from the others, he had me ride in his bag with my head poking out and treated me as his dear companion.

It was a week on that we found the valley. That morning, Lindir lay in the heather and held me against his chest as the sky lightened. The land was brown and dull, so dull it wouldn’t have felt lively on a clear blue day, and the clouds were thick. The heather in which we lay was damp. Lindir’s joints ached. They’d never before ached in his life. But he had it easy: I was wet down to my stuffing.

As he did every morning, he sat up in the heather and braided his hair. Then he laid me in his lap and braided mine. “Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered when he was done. “Just because we’re in dire straits doesn’t mean we can’t look decent. Do you want to go to your grave with matted hair?” His breath hitched, and he looked sharply east towards the mountains. “What am I saying? Of course you don’t. You’re Glorfindel.”

We did believe we were headed for our graves. We had no food. This land was full of hidden gullies swollen with rainwater, but for two days we’d come across none of them. Lindir had taken to gathering dew into his hands and licking them. And even if we managed to survive in the wilderness, we’d lost hope of finding the other survivors in its vastness. One of the topics Lindir often held forth on was whether we should turn west towards Lindon or east towards the mountains and Greenwood the Great beyond them. Either journey would be long and dangerous.

But fearing for our lives had become rather repetitive, so as we walked mostly we felt washed out and dull as the land. As Lindir chattered, I barely listened to him. He didn’t seem to mind. I don’t think he listened to himself.

When we came upon a valley an hour later, he stopped and stared blankly for a long few moments. It was like a wound in the land, the hills cut open to reveal the teeming of green life underneath, and Lindir stood on the edge of it, having come only a few steps away from tumbling over a cliff. The water of the stream below us was high but not overflowing, and flowers bloomed wet on the slopes.

“Elbereth,” Lindir muttered to himself. He picked his way down a nearby slope and crouched by the water. It was brown with runoff from the storms, and probably he shouldn’t have drunk it. He was too thirsty to care. “Elbereth,” he said again, cupping water into his mouth. “No. Ivann. Thank Ivann!”

He drank for a long time, and then he looked up and saw the rest of the valley. It was not a valley like the one we are in now. Maybe you wouldn’t even call it a valley for how small it was, but to Lindir it was paradise. And the plants were not all leaves and flowers. “Look!” Lindir said. “There are blackberries.”

He leapt to his feet and jumped across a few slick stones to reach them. For a moment I felt sure we were about to go for an unwanted swim, but we landed in the mud of the bank safely, and Lindir reached up to pluck blackberries from the bushes. A thorn scratched him. A blackberry burst in his hand, coating it in purple juice. He shoved a few in his mouth and licked the juice off his fingers.

And then, “These have been picked.”

Someone else had been in the valley.

Lindir fell quiet and still. Were they a friend? An enemy? Had they left, or were they lurking somewhere on the slopes listening to Lindir explore? Lindir had a kitchen knife in his bag, which Nimduil had slipped inside with a muttered prayer. He drew it out now. I wished I could help. I wished I could turn my head, wished I had a voice with which to warn him should I sense anything. But Lindir was alone.

For a long time he didn’t move. I believe he thought that if someone had come to pick the blackberries, they might soon come again for the ones that had ripened since their last visit. He wasn’t wrong, but perhaps you’re thinking that he shouldn’t have sat out in the open, that he should have hidden himself. So I thought myself. I’m not actually the Lord Glorfindel, of course, but neither am I stupid.

Lindir isn’t stupid either, but that day, he was wet as he had been for a week and hungry and sick with fear, and he hoped for rescue or at least a friendly companion. Anyway Orcs didn’t come out in sunlight, so for now he was safe. He sat there with kitchen knife in one hand, picking and eating blackberries with the other until he felt too sick to eat. The water sloshed in his stomach.

The Sun climbed into the sky. Lindir climbed up the slope to sit a little above the blackberry bushes and survey the valley. He sat there for half an hour, maybe more.

There was no sign beforehand, or none that either of us noticed. The Man burst out of the undergrowth with a roar. The confusion of that moment! Lindir was tackled, and his bag flew, and I flew out of his bag and landed upside down in a blackberry bush. In front of me lay Lindir on his back, held down by the Man, screaming, struggling. The Man had a dagger clutched in his hand.

It couldn’t have lasted more than half a second, but I only realized that later. All I knew then was that I was about to watch Lindir die. The dagger glinted in the sunlight, a strange clean contrast to the Man whose clothing was muddied, whose face was ruddy with the burn of the sun, who looked like he’d been wandering in the wilderness alone for a week just as both of us did. Lindir had his knife in his hand, but he’d forgotten it, and the Man was moving faster.

Lindir turned his face into the ground with his eyes shut tight. And the Man hesitated.

Maybe Lindir looked young, not quite a child anymore but still only an adolescent, far from full-grown. Maybe the Man had run from the war or had just never killed before and didn’t know how hard it would be. Did the reason matter when, under his hands, Lindir lived?

Lindir’s eyes opened and met mine. He stared, his mouth parting. Later he would tell me he’d thought of Glorfindel of Gondolin long ago, turning back to face the Balrog. His hand flexed on his knife as if only then realizing that he still held it.

The next moment, the Man was dead.

No, Elladan. I won’t go into that. Suffice it to say that it was unpleasant and bloody, and that afterwards Lindir washed the blood off his knife and off himself as well as he could in the swollen stream. He sat with his face over the water for a while, gagging, but nothing came up. Once that passed, he rose on unsteady legs and gathered most of what had fallen out of his bag. With careful hands, he extracted me from the blackberry bush, and I came away with no more hurt than I had already endured falling into it, and that was only a tear in my tunic.

Lindir’s knees buckled. His hand gripped my hair as he bowed his head to mine and sobbed.

He’d thought of Glorfindel turning to face the Balrog, and that had given him the courage he needed. But he hadn’t killed a demon. He’d killed a Man, a Man who’d maybe run from the war, who’d maybe never killed before, who maybe wouldn’t have killed him. Maybe. I will never know. Neither will anyone. Lindir made his choice before the Man did.

Is that not the story you wanted to hear? It’s the one I wanted to tell. And before you go, allow me to tell you a little more of it.

At dawn, a figure loomed over Lindir’s sleeping body. Lindir jolted. He raised the knife he’d gripped in his sleep and snapped, “Don’t move!” As a rule, the soldiers of Sauron’s army didn’t understand Elvish, but his tone left little room for confusion.

The figure stilled. He said, “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

Lindir lowered the knife. The Elf who stood over him didn’t look as if he’d been wandering lost in the wilderness for a week. Except for mud splattered under his knees, his clothes were clean. His dark hair was tied into a neat knot. His hand rested on the hilt of a sword, but it fell away as Lindir’s knife did. “I’m a friend,” he said. “Many of the survivors of Eregion are taking shelter in a large valley near here. The King’s herald Elrond sent me out to look for others.”

Lindir dropped the knife entirely. The Elf crouched, and as he did, Lindir’s legs rose to hide me where he’d tucked me against his stomach. He thought himself too old to be cuddling with a doll. “You’ve found me.”

The Elf smiled. “Yes, I have, and I’m glad. My name is Erestor. What’s yours?”

Yes! It was indeed your Uncle Erestor who sits behind you now. He was as kind to children then as he is today, and though at that age Lindir hated to be seen as a child, I’m sure that a child was what Erestor saw. It was! See how he smiles at my words?

Erestor fed Lindir bread and cheese and gave him a salve to put on his arm where it had been scraped when the Man had tackled him. “The valley is not a day’s walk from here,” he said, handing Lindir a flask of miruvor. “We’ll go as soon as you’re ready.”

Lindir made no reply, too busy shivering as the miruvor flooded his body with warmth. He was not going to die in the wilderness. He was going to live. He picked at my torn tunic, and I watched Erestor watching him.

“My mom,” Lindir said. “Her name is Nimduil. Do you know…?”

Erestor shook his head. Lindir must’ve looked crestfallen, because Erestor touched his arm and said, “That doesn’t mean she’s not with us in the valley. There are too many people there for me to know all of them.”

“She can’t be dead,” Lindir muttered. His grip tightened on me, and in a sudden burst of motion, he pulled me up to show me to Erestor. “She made this for me.”

Erestor leaned in to look at me. “Glorfindel of Gondolin?”

Lindir nodded.

“Not a bad companion to have! He’s a little worse for the wear, maybe more than you. It looks like his clothes need some mending. You’ll be able to do that in the valley.”

Lindir opened his mouth, but he didn’t know how to explain. It wasn’t his fault, he wanted to protest. It was the Man’s. But did Erestor even know about the Man?

“Come,” Erestor said. “The sooner we start moving, the better.” He offered his hand. Lindir let Erestor help him to his feet, then dropped his hand and followed him as he picked a path up the slope. They were on the far end of the valley from where the Man’s body lay, but Lindir couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder, trying to spot it through the undergrowth.

Erestor put a hand on Lindir’s shoulder and gently turned him away. “I saw him,” he said. “I’m sorry you were forced to defend yourself in that way. Don’t look. It won’t make you feel better.”

Lindir stepped away from Erestor, but he followed the advice. They mounted the slopes and came to the rolling hills of heather, and Erestor turned them west. Lindir put me back in his bag with my head poking out the top. Erestor watched him. After a while of silence, Erestor bent down and parted the heather to reveal a clump of small yellow flowers straining towards the sky. “They’re blooming if you know where to look,” he said. “Did you know that Glorfindel of Gondolin liked to wear flowers in his hair?”

“No,” Lindir said.

“Not to battle. That’s why you don’t see it in most paintings of him.”

Lindir blinked at the Elf in front of him. He realized that Erestor might be old, older even than his parents, which to him seemed very old indeed.

Yes, Elladan! And with his age comes wisdom, so you’d best listen to what he tells you. But Lindir didn’t ask about Erestor’s age. He asked, “Did you know him?”

“No. I hail from Doriath,” Erestor said. “But I was at the Havens of Sirion, and many of the people there did know him. They couldn’t stop speaking of him. They loved him—and not only because they owed their lives to him.”

Lindir looked down at me. He knew the songs, of course, and the tales. But Glorfindel had never felt so close as he did now.

“Your doll has locks worthy of his namesake, or so I imagine,” Erestor went on. “The flowers might look well in his hair.”

Lindir nodded. So Erestor picked a few of the flowers and handed them to Lindir, and as they walked, Lindir worked them into my hair and looked out for more. You should’ve seen me when we came to the valley! I was quite the sight, muddy with my clothing ripped but decorated with flowers in my hair, placed with care.

In Imladris—for if you haven’t guessed that the valley of which Erestor spoke was this very valley, then I don’t know what we’re going to do with you—Erestor took Lindir down to the tents along the stream where the survivors slept. We asked after Nimduil and heard tell of her almost straight away. She was well-known among the people as the young woman who’d been separated from her husband and son and still stayed up under the stars every night to lead the others in song. “It’s near midday, so she’ll be sleeping now,” said one woman, pointing them down the river. Then she cooed over me. “What lovely hair Glorfindel has!”

Any other time, Lindir would’ve teased me for being the victim of cooing instead of him. But then he was only frustrated by the delay. The pace at which Erestor guided him down the bank, though hurried to me, seemed torturously slow to him. He looked intently for the landmarks the woman had described to them, so intently that he almost missed her.

Because Nimduil wasn’t sleeping. She sat near the riverbank, her white hair tied up, staring across the water. Lindir dropped me. “Mom!” he shouted.

I could see only the sky, gray and spinning above me, but I heard Nimduil’s answering cry. Erestor peered down at me and, after a moment, picked me up and brushed me off. He adjusted one of the flowers in my hair. Then he turned me to look down the river.

They were in each other’s arms. Nimduil rocked Lindir, pressing kisses into his hair. Erestor approached, but it was a long time before either of them noticed us. When Nimduil did, she dragged Erestor into an embrace. It was awkward for me! I was caught between them with my head stuck in the crook of Erestor’s arm. I suppose it wasn’t all bad. I happened, also, to be looking out at Lindir, who caught my eye and smiled brilliantly.

“And so ends the tale of Glorfindel the Doll’s journey to Imladris,” Lindir said.

Elladan and Elrohir stared at him. Elrohir was crying. Elladan said, “Huh.”

“Not what you expected?” Lindir said. “I gave you the story you asked for—and some of what I suspect you really wanted, too.”

Elladan huffed at that. He climbed to his feet and came over to Lindir sitting on the patio floor with the doll on his knee, and he took it out of Lindir’s hand. He looked between it and Glorfindel, the real one, who stood leaning against the wall next to Erestor. Glorfindel had slipped in late and unexpectedly, but Lindir had, if he might say so himself, carried bravely on.

“Is it weird for you?” Elladan said.

Glorfindel laughed. “A little.”

“It’s weird for us!” Elladan said and went to encourage Elrohir up off the floor. Lindir sat with his hands gripping his shins, not quite wanting to look at Glorfindel and Erestor. But he was soon to be at their mercy: Elladan and Elrohir agreed that they wanted to go play in the woods.

“You have an hour, all right? No more than that!” Erestor said.

“An hour!” Elladan exclaimed. “But it’s way more than that till dinner!”

“Only half an hour more, and it’ll take that long to get you clean and properly dressed after you play. I doubt your parents would appreciate me delivering two dirt-streaked boys to their table.”

Elladan rolled his eyes, but Elrohir tugged at his sleeve, and so Elladan said, “Fine. An hour.” Together they turned and leapt off the patio onto the path snaking between the trees.

“I didn’t know that story,” Glorfindel said.

Lindir said, “Would you have had me come up and tell it to you unprompted?”

“Was I rebuking you?” Glorfindel said, and now there was a slight rebuke in his voice. But when Lindir looked at him, he was smiling. “Your mother’s craftsmanship is remarkable. I’m surprised that doll is still intact to tell his tale.”

Lindir offered up a tentative smile in return. “It’s even more impressive considering that for all she knew, only her gentle little Lindir would ever play with it.”

“Instead he’s survived a war and at least a few years with those two terrors. Even if he doesn’t survive the next few, I think he’ll have lived a good life.”

Lindir rose to his feet. “And you’ll finally stop seeing your face half the time you visit them.”

“I don’t mind,” Glorfindel said. He laughed at Lindir’s expression. “You don’t believe me! You never have. But it’s true.”

“You sang Valandil’s praises when he took down that tapestry in Annúminas.”

“Because who wants to look at a more-than-life-sized depiction of my death while they eat? And with poor Eärendil off to the side witnessing it? He didn’t actually see me fall, or so I’ve been told. I suppose it would’ve made a better story if he had, and that’s all the tapestry cared about. But the doll…”

Glorfindel did indeed like to wear flowers in his hair as Erestor had told Lindir so many years ago. Today it was sprigs of white yarrow lying flat against his braids, and as he stepped closer, the evening sun made for him a golden halo. He looked like a painting, a thought-vision, a dream until he stepped close enough that Lindir could see clearly the living twitches of his face. When he had first come to Imladris, Lindir had thanked him for all he’d done with trembling hands, unable to admit why Glorfindel meant so much to him. If he was embarrassed now at Glorfindel slipping in, it was nothing compared to the mortification it would’ve been before he’d understood that Glorfindel was a person like all the rest of them.

Glorfindel touched Lindir’s elbow to turn him towards the woods, and Erestor joined them on Lindir’s other side. “There are some legacies I like better than others. That’s all,” Glorfindel said. After a pause, he added, “With some work, you could turn that story into the Ballad of Glorfindel the Beloved Doll and perform it for everyone in Imladris sometime. I think your mother would like it.”

“She would. Her taste is horrible,” Lindir said. “Your taste is horrible.”

“I didn’t know you spoke about your mother like that,” Erestor said.

“I’m leaving,” Lindir said, but Erestor linked their arms together and held Lindir in place. Lindir leaned against him and thought of the day he’d gifted the doll to the boys, having found himself ready after long years to part with it. If they’d taken one look at it and put it in a box to be forgotten about, he would’ve been all right with that. But they loved it as he did, and he was glad.

For a long time he and Erestor and Glorfindel were silent, peering into the woods, listening to the river and the shouts of the boys echoing off the trees.

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