I Will Not Say The Day Is Done by bunn  

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Examining the Doom of Mandos Through Tea

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It was a clear night on Tol Eressëa, the Isle of Exiles. Maglor, looking out from the hillside above the trees, could see dark leaves spread under starlit skies of deepest blue. Far below the trees, barely to be seen in starlight, he could hear the dark sea moving endlessly, waves hissing gently on the sand.  

A fire of sweet-scented apple-wood burned with a bright flame that sent up golden sparks from time to time to blaze for the briefest moment among the stars of Elbereth, then go out.  

The sparks had drifted against the stars like that over that first camp in Hithlum, above the singers at the Mereth Aderthad, while out hunting with friends and brothers in the mountains of East Beleriand...

Over the small lonely fire after peace had come to the shores north of Lindon. 

This song only needed three more verses to be finished. He wove the sparks into the music.

The sparks had gone up like that over Losgar, over Dagor Bragollach and over the Havens of Sirion too: more of them, fiercer, brighter far than this. 

The sparks had flown over Father, when he died... 

His Oath stirred restless in its sleep at that. Best not dwell on it. 

One more verse. 

The sky was a paler blue, shading towards a clear green in the east, and the stars were fading out of sight, all but the Silmaril hanging low upon the horizon, secure from all evil.  His father’s work in all its glory, and no-one here to see it, except for him. 

“Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima,” Maglor said, and nodded to the cousin who had forgiven him bloody ruin and stolen children.  The Silmaril might not forgive, but its bearer had been more generous.  And not a thief. The Silmaril did not burn him, after all. 

The fire burned to its last ashes, and he had the last verse now, safe remembered.  

The stars were gone. Arien was climbing into the sky and all the East was blushing with almost the gold of vanished Laurelin.  Gulls were crying and the waves glittered in the sunrise. From the harbour of Avallónë, a little to the south, he could hear clear voices singing.

Maglor got up and stretched, then put his harp carefully in its bag, and made his way down the hill through the dew to the home of the son of the star. 

He found the star’s grandson awake early when he stepped quietly into the house, to be greeted by the first rays of the sun slanting through the small-paned green-glass windows onto the octagonal blue tiles of the high-ceilinged kitchen, the sound of someone murmuring a cooking-song, and a delicious smell. 

“Hello,” Elrohir said, in the Westron of Middle-earth.  “I’m frying mushrooms.  Do you want some?”  

“I hope you’ve left some for the hobbits!” Maglor said in the same language. Elrohir had only arrived on Tol Eressëa the previous day. Presumably he was used to speaking Westron most of the time. “They’re very keen on mushrooms.” 

“Understatement!” Elrohir said and laughed. “I’ve known Bilbo long enough. Not to mention Sam, Merry and Pippin. I wouldn’t dare to eat the last of the mushrooms!  But as it happens, we have a surfeit.  I collected a great basketful yesterday evening.” 

“In that case, yes, I would,” Maglor said, putting the harp down.  He filled the large round black kettle and put it onto the stove.  “Thanks, Elrohir!”

“What do I call you?” Elrohir asked, stirring mushrooms.  “You surely don’t still go by ‘Lark’.”

Maglor smiled.  “That was just for Lindon, when you were small.  I am Maglor son of Fëanor.  Or I suppose you could say ‘cousin’, if you prefer, though I think you’ll find that somewhat imprecise if you need to use it in a crowded room.”

“I suppose so!” Elrohir said. “An odd thought, having cousins who are Elves. For all my life, ‘cousin’ has meant the Edain.  So you are my father’s kinslaying... cousin. We always wondered.” 

Maglor made a face. “Yes. If someone says ‘kinslayer’, everyone will turn and look at me, but I prefer not to use it as my name. Lark would be better! But I think Elrond only gave me that name because he thought you might mention me by accident to Círdan.”

“Pffft!” Elrohir said dismissively, cutting yesterday’s bread into slices. “Círdan wouldn’t care. More likely he was keeping it quiet so it couldn’t come out under torture, if we were captured.  That’s usually why Father keeps things quiet.”

Maglor winced and almost dropped a teacup. “You were little children then.” 

“Orcs don’t spare little children,” Elrohir said with alarming briskness. “They don’t spare anyone.  Why were you a secret, and not an ally, like Glorfindel? There must be a good reason. There always is, with my father.”

“I suppose because Sauron’s master had used us as his weapon before.  Myself, and my brothers,” Maglor said, discomforted. But Elrohir had every right to ask, and so he tried to give an honest answer.  “We had an oath. I still, unfortunately, have an oath. I have forsworn it, now. Easier to do that without an Enemy to take hold of it and use it against my friends.  But I’m afraid it is the kind of thing that Sauron would have used to make fighting beside Eärendil’s son and grandsons... perilous. There’s little worse than a trusted ally that turns on you.”  

“Very true.  One Saruman was more than enough. Yet here you are, trusted to wander into my father’s house at dawn, when Sauron and Saruman and all their works have blown away upon the breeze.” Elrohir said, applying butter to the bread with a generous hand. “Suggests you got something right.” 

“Perhaps I did, at that.”  It was an unexpected thought. He considered it while he made the tea.  “Middle-earth was at peace, after the Last Alliance, when Elrond brought you to see me on the coast. I don’t think he expected the Enemy to be looking for me, or thought that knowing me might put you in danger. At least I hope not! If he thought that a risk, he would never have brought you.  Or Celebrían.”   

Elrohir  thought about it, and nodded. “It was a long time ago. Sorry,” he said “I didn’t mean to be rude, Maglor.  I was only trying to fit you into the histories.” He took a mouthful of mushrooms and nodded approvingly to himself. 

“In Westron; Forgotten harper, singer doomed, who young when Laurelin yet bloomed, to endless lamentation passed, and in the tombless sea was cast,” Maglor supplied helpfully.  “The last two phrases contradict one another, which bothers me.  And for that matter, if there is one thing I am not, it is a forgotten harper. My deeds are a matter of song until the end of Arda... though I could wish they were better deeds.  And better songs! But Bilbo says he felt at the time that the last line helped the whole thing scan, and to be fair to him, translating verse is always difficult.  Modern Westron is not a language I know very well, so perhaps I’m missing a nuance.” 

Elrohir scrunched up his face in amusement and shook his head. 

“Or perhaps not, then!  I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much since, thanks to your father, I’m now on the other side of the tombless sea and have more or less given up on lamentation.  That would be the same lamentation of which not even an echo was supposed to pass the mountains to trouble the ears of the Valar in their joy, by the way.  I admit I was delighted to discover that particular ruling had been so spectacularly unsuccessful.”

Elrohir made a face that was half surprise and half amusement, and very much like Elrond. “You feel that the Valar should be troubled by your lamentation?”

“Well, I am a singer.  It seemed particularly pointed to be told we were not just exiled but would be unheard as well. And I am not so fond of the Valar that I wish to spare their ears.  But if Mandos was wrong about that, then I can hope the rest of it might have an end.  To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well he said, and yet, I feel that I have just made two perfectly adequate cups of tea. Thank you!”  he added, accepting a generous plate of mushrooms on bread and presenting Elrohir with tea in return.

Elrohir sampled the tea and nodded. “It doesn’t seem to have any particularly evil end to it,” he said solemnly. “Though I suppose I could still drop the cup on my toe, or find it had a terrible aftertaste.”

“Better drink it and find out,” Maglor suggested. “I can always return to endless lamentation if it does. Though I’m still not sure it really counts as endless if I stop and start.”

“The First Age is more than long enough to seem an endless time ago to Men and Hobbits,” Elrohir pointed out, smiling. He sipped his tea. 

“I suppose so.  But I feel endless should be endless,” Maglor said.  “You can’t doom someone to endless lamentation and throw them in the sea.”  He took a mouthful of mushrooms. They were very good. Elrohir could cook. 

“At least you get your own verse,” Elrohir said darkly.  “I’m always one half of Elladan and Elrohir, in songs.  And I always come last because ‘Elrohir’ has a better selection of words that rhyme with it.”

“My brothers Amras and Amrod used to complain about that,” Maglor said.  “Though really two people who went around with one name between them half the time have no right to carp at poets for lumping them together!  Elros and Elrond had the same complaint, when they were young, now I come to think of it.  Anything I wrote for them had to have at least one verse for each name or there would be arguments. You’d think Elrond would have remembered that and chosen names that were more different for you.  Or are they your mother-names?” 

“They chose them together, I think,” Elrohir said.  “People in Middle-earth don’t usually have mother-names and father-names any more.  Or the Edain don’t, anyway. ”

Maglor blinked.  “No name-giving or name-choosing ceremonies?  That’s a pity.  The Edain used to, at one point.  Hador gave all his children father-names, I remember.  A good excuse for a party and for gifts, the name-choosing ceremony.”   

He remembered then that Elros and Elrond had never received their father-names. They had been too young for that, when Maglor and his brothers had come down upon their home with fire and sword. Their father Eärendil had never had the chance to give them their name-choosing.  Perhaps that was why they had decided to dispense with the custom for their own families. 

“You can have a party and gifts without a ceremony,” Elrohir pointed out over mushrooms.  “Birthday parties.  Yule.  Midsummer. You don’t need extra names for those.”

 “I suppose not.” Maglor ate more of his mushrooms. A thought was niggling at him. He gestured at Elrohir with a fork.  “Surely there are more rhymes for Elladan than there are for Elrohir?”

“Not in Westron,” Elrohir said. “I do speak Quenya too, of course,” he said hastily, switching to that language. “I know they speak it here, it’s not only for books.” Taken by surprise, Maglor laughed. 

“What?  Did I get it wrong?” Elrohir lapsed back into Westron.  

“Not at all. My father would have called it perfect...  It was only that you spoke Quenya as if you were speaking Sindarin with a Doriath accent. No ‘sá-sí’. I suppose that probably means nothing to you, but if anyone mentions it, please tell them your Quenya pronunciation is only Elrond’s Sindarin accent, and not my fault. Particularly if it is your many times great-grandsire Fingolfin who asks!”  

Elrohir raised his eyebrows, looking baffled. Maglor explained. “It was very controversial, in the Years of the Trees, all that sort of thing. People got very angry.”

Elrohir rolled his eyes. “Didn’t you have anything important to worry about?”

“I suppose not,” Maglor said.  “We were all very young, it seems, looking back. Much younger than you are now in years, and certainly in experience.  It would never have occurred to any of us to hide things from our children in case they should be put to torment.”

Nobody had thought that the Sons of Fëanor might be put to torment, until it had happened.

Elrohir shrugged.  “It wouldn’t have occurred to me, either, until Angmar invaded and we were fighting for our lives.  Then a number of things that Father had said and done suddenly made far too much sense.”

“I suppose it would occur to Elrond,” Maglor said unhappily. “At least you had the years of peace Gil-galad and Elendil bought you. Your father had no such fortune as a child.  Still, here we are at peace in Aman. I have made a new song beneath the stars, and you have cooked some very fine mushrooms. It looks as though the day will be a fine one.  What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m not sure,” Elrohir said. His fair, confident face suddenly looked doubtful.  “For two thousand years, more or less, Elladan and I have been hunting orcs,making strategies, or thinking about the Enemy. Two thousand years! So many lives of Men.  And now the Enemy is gone, and I have left the last of the orcs to Elladan and sailed into the West.  That’s always seemed like the end of things.  I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, after that.  I woke early this morning, and thought, what am I doing here? I don’t even speak proper Quenya!”

“You do, really,” Maglor said.  “You only have an accent: everyone does. I was only foolishly amused by old history — and you were quite right, it was history that only mattered then because there was nothing worse to worry about. I was joking about Fingolfin. He speaks many dialects of Sindarin and Westron, and I know he’ll be delighted to meet you no matter how you speak or which language you use. You’ll have a lot of cousins to meet too, and many old friends from Rivendell.”

“I suppose that makes up for family lost, at least a little,” Elrohir said.  He sighed.  “Only a little though. Elladan chose to stay in Middle-earth with all our friends and cousins — I suppose you know that already.  He got married.  I went to the wedding before I left...  I looked at him, afterwards, and it seemed he was already all one thing, a Man, and ready to build the new world of Men, then go out beyond it. And I... was not.  I couldn’t leave our parents with no children to follow them to Aman.  I was the only one left who could.”

Maglor looked at him, and had private thoughts of the unwisdom of making important choices to please a father.  But Arwen and Elladan had chosen for love, after all.  Perhaps in a way so had Elrohir. 

“It has become a little gentler, the choice,” Maglor told him. “They asked Elrond and his brother to choose at the end of the War of Wrath. Of course the half-elven grow up faster: they were full grown and experienced campaigners by then.  But still, they were not sixty years old.  I thought that harsh, when I heard of it.  The Valar could have given them more time. It was hard on Elrond. ”  

Probably it had been hard on Elros, too. Of all the apologies Maglor had made, Elros deserved one more than most — if nothing else, for that last attack, when Maglor and his brother had stolen into the camp of the Host of Valinor, where Elros and Elrond were living by then, and slain the guards around the Silmarils. He had never had the chance to apologise to Elros for that. Elros had gone to Númenor. Maglor had never seen him again.

“We did at least have a good long time to think it over,” Elrohir was saying.  “And you can’t have both, my father says. You have to choose something to lose, in the end.”

If Maglor had been given the choice, he would have followed Elros.  Not into Everlasting Darkness, but out into the unknown.  The Darkness he knew, and he had rejected it at last; would go on rejecting it with whatever strength he had, until the breaking of the world. 

But it might be that far beyond Arda Marred, where elves were bound with all their fearful memories, beyond the darkness and the unforgiving stars, there lay something else...

Most people didn’t get a choice. You just had to make the best of the path your nature gave you.  Probably that was not a thought to mention to Elrohir just now, though.  

He smiled instead.  “I only asked what you were planning today because my mother is visiting the Lonely Isle just now. She would love to meet you.  But perhaps we should wait for the rest of the household to get up before I suggest that. It may be that Celebrían has made plans already.”

. . . . . 

“Good morning,” Elrond said, sometime later, appearing in a magnificent blue sleeping-gown patterned with a design of snowdrop flowers. “You’ve risen early.”

“Elrohir has risen early,” Maglor said.  “I, however, am ignoring newfangled innovations such as the Sun, and have not yet gone to sleep. Have a cup of tea.”  He provided one.

“Maglor is examining the truth of the Doom of the Noldor and testing its consequences by making tea,” Elrohir explained cheerfully to his father. “So far, all the tea has begun and ended well.”  

Elrond looked startled, then he laughed. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. 

“It came to me that that the echo of our lamentation had quite demonstrably passed over the mountains,” Maglor said, pouring himself another cup. “It passed them very swiftly, or else the Eagle would never have come for Fingon and Maedhros.  And if there is one person who should have fallen under the Doom of the Noldor for kinslaying and rebellion and following the House of Fëanor, it was certainly Fingon! Even the Vanyar have heard our lamentations by now, unless there are any who have had their fingers in their ears and have been humming for a very long time.  Knowing the Vanyar, that is not entirely impossible... But I’ve not allowed the Oath to drive me, not since I threw the Silmaril into the sea. If it hasn’t driven me, it can’t betray me.  That part of it is broken, too.”

“You haven’t let it drive you,” Elrond said.  “And even before that, you didn’t let it, not all of the time. You could have held us for ransom, Elros and me. That would have been obeying the Doom of the Noldor, if you had. Servants of the Enemy would have done that. You didn’t, even when the Shadow reached all across Beleriand. We never thought you would.”

Maglor gave him a dubious look. “A triumph of hope over experience!” he said.  Elrond shrugged, smiling. “You have been quite strikingly unafraid.  Celebrían is unafraid.  Even Elrohir, when I came walking into the house at dawn! And he’s barely met me...”

“I met you when I was a child,” Elrohir said. “And Father did talk about you, you know.  It wasn’t as if you were a stranger!”

“No, I’m your kinsman, but still, you were not afraid. Evil is supposed to come by treason of kin unto kin and by the fear of treason.  Those were the words.  And so, it seems to me, the Doom of the Noldor has come all unravelled at last, and is fraying into threads.”

“Yes,” Elrond said and smiled.  “Slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief. It said that too, I believe.  But it never managed to finish you off!”

“No,” Maglor said thoughtfully. “I suppose there’s something to be said for not being a hero.”

“First, do no harm, or so the saying goes. Well done, Elrohir. I have been telling him for a long time that he could be trusted.  I was starting to think he’d never believe me!”