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The survivors of Doriath are grateful that she won’t be a child-queen for long, that she will grow swiftly to fill Dior’s vacant place, but they’re a little afraid nonetheless of how quickly she changes, how soon she grows. They met so few mortals when they were still safe inside the Girdle.
Elwing is something new: not elf, not human. And there is that touch of Melian’s ichor, that strangeness running through her blood. There is no life line stretching out ahead of her, no pattern to follow, no women in her family to think through. Her mother’s life was cut short by the sword before she was old enough for Elwing to know her, but their life lines would never have matched, one stretching out into infinity, and the other galloping past break-neck, headed towards – what?
Lúthien her grandmother lived thousands of years perfect and unchanging, and then fell in love, and losing Beren faded away into death. When she came back she was mortal: touched by death, released by it. She walked lightly on the earth, leaving no footprints, and vanished with Beren into Ossiriand to build their leafy bower there.
No one knows what happened to Beren and Lúthien after Dior and his family left. Elwing has heard people say that even now their voices can be heard on the wind in Tol Galen: they say that those who returned once from death can never truly die. But they also say that when the extra time Mandos gave her ran out, Lúthien began to fade as she had once before, stardust leaking away, and that Beren sought her dancing shade through the green lands as he had once done through Neldoreth. They say that in the Land of the Dead that Live, these famous lovers can still be seen in their ancient chase under the right phase of the moon, that her laughter can still be heard sounding silver through the trees.
Elwing knows better. If Beren sought Lúthien through the grasses, it was probably a trick of an ageing mortal mind; perhaps he thought himself running through Neldoreth once more while his body stumbled in Tol Galen. Did Lúthien worry, watching him lose himself in time? Or was she dead and buried first? Did they lie down together in the long grass and close their eyes to the stars, still holding hands?
They fell out of story. No one knows. Dior didn’t want to, and he never sent scouts back to the green land of his birth to search for their bones. He was another child who came untimely-fast of age in time to fill Doriath’s empty throne. He might have been a pattern for Elwing to measure herself against, but he never lived to be old. He was Dior the Beautiful in life, and Dior the Beautiful in death, and Elwing will never know if or how the passing years would wind silver into his hair and crease his face and thin his limbs, to what degree he was mortal and to what degree he was stardust.
-
Everyone knows that Elwing threw herself into the sea from the cliffs at Sirion, and that she rose up again into the sky, woman into bird. What sort of bird depends on who is telling the story and what they want it to mean. Those who knew the Havens of Sirion remember the salt-marshes and the seabirds calling: the curlews, the terns, the dewy-feathered sea eagles coming in with the tide that was like galloping horses with its flying seafoam.
Some of those say she became a gull. There is little poetry about gulls, their hoarse cries, their white bodies, their grey and black wings. They snatch at things, they scream. For those who blame her for keeping the Silmaril, for taking it with her, this is a popular choice. In later Ages, though, once the way to Valinor is open again, the way she opened, the gull’s cry on the wind will have more and different meanings. Others will take it up.
Some say, a tern, also grey, white, black. They feed by diving, too, but they hover over the sea, their icy-feathered wings like fans. This is an image with something to it: the magic of something suspended in time, the woman who falls but does not fall, who defies the law of falling thing to rising ground or water.
A gannet seems logical. On the cliffs at the mouth of Sirion they nested, their chicks black-faced balls of silver fluff. There is more poetry to them. They blend with their surroundings, their feathers as creamy-white as foam on the waves, their wings black-tipped as the sea’s depths, a faint yellow blush on the crown of their heads. Gannets are made in sharp, sleek lines, with long beaks like knives. They make a better self than gulls for the stories about Elwing, because they drop from on high in a long straight fall, violent and precise, slicing through the air.
That’s how many like to imagine her long fall: a deliberate and beautiful thing, one she was always made for. They don’t like to think of her girl’s body tumbling over and over as she went, all grace leaving it, her arms flying wide, her mouth open in a scream. They like the way the body of the gannet elongates with its dive, lengthening, thinning, to join the sea like falling rain.
Gannets can hold their breath underwater for a long time.
Long after, in the land of the Uttermost West, they will say she became a swan. No one asks whether a swan could fly as long as Elwing needed to, over the sea, could rise in a sudden burst from the water with a beat of its wings. Swans have great meaning to the Eldar, who also pair for life. They are beautiful in a way that has no ruthlessness to it, their long arched throats lovely, attenuated. It is an image with much poetry and little pain, and it makes the kind of rhyme that the Eldar like: the swan-boats that brought the Noldor to Beleriand, the swan-star who will bring the first of them home, leading Eärendil through the Valar’s sleep-spelling mazes and the necklace of islets which bar the way to Eldamar.
It is very neat, very clean, which is how the Eldar like their stories.
-
What the stories forget is that Elwing Half-Elven was married at twenty-two, a mother at twenty-nine, and thirty-five when the Fëanorians came with flame and sword to her again.
She was three years old when they killed her parents and her brothers. These are ages that don’t trouble the Edain much, those that know and tell the stories. They marry at such ages, even younger. They might pity the orphan of three, but thirty-five is old enough for adulthood, for anything.
The Eldar don’t like to think of it at all. To them, twenty-two is painfully young. Even thirty-five is a time for blushing children just stretching out into adolescence, still a time for innocence, for childhood. None of the Eldar marry at thirty-five. Twenty-two is obscene, an outrage, a nightmare. The orphan of thirty-five is as much an object of pity as the orphan of three.
The truth, like Elwing herself, is in-between. She was not Eldar or Edain. She is older than one of the Eldar would be at twenty-two, in mind and in body, but younger than one of the Edain, who would be at twenty-two fully grown. She is still very young.
And thirty-five is very young to survive two massacres, to lose two homes, two families: to lose everything twice. Young by anyone’s measure.
-
Her ladies and guardians turn to Idril when the survivors of Gondolin arrive, Noldor though they are. Idril will surely know what to do with her. Eärendil is exactly Elwing’s age and the only other person of her kind, if not her kin, left alive. She can’t plan her future through his example, but their lives run side by side, their strides match, and their strange futures, whatever they hold, are perhaps the same.
She loves him for that from the time she is old enough to realise it. She loves that they grow at roughly the same pace, in fits and spurts the Eldar find unsettling, that they learn skills and crafts and words together. Whether they grow slow, or fast, or simply at the right speed for their kind, Eärendil releases her to be Elwing: if she is swifter than he to learn something than he is, it is because of her herself, not the bounded yet uncertain nature of her flesh. If she is slower, that too is due to her and to her alone.
As a child, she loves him with a mindlessness that perhaps her dead brothers once felt for each other: the suffocating passion of like for like, for the self that is other and the other that is self. They are different from each other but in a world of Eldar and Edain, they are made of the same mix of dust and starshine.
As a young woman, she tries to think through her love for him rationally. Is it love, or only inexorable logic that winds them closer and closer together, the only true match that the other will ever have? Everyone expects them to marry, Noldor and Doriathrim alike. It makes sense. It seems fated, that two of the same kind should be born in the same year, and that their lives, which might have been kept forever apart in their different hidden kingdoms, should come together at the same narrow spit of land, where the river Sirion opens her mouth to the sea.
There is a current sweeping them together, and in the end it will knock Elwing’s feet out from under her.
-
She dreams about them for many years before they come for her again: Fëanorians, carrying their blood-dipped standard with its eight-pointed device, promising pain like a spiked morning star. Bright-eyed hordes brandishing swords. One of them slit her father’s belly. Another pierced her mother’s heart. The blood of Doriath is still caked on their boots, their hands, their faces. They come for her every night. Walls don’t stop them. Guards fall before them.
She dreams for years about her brothers’ heads on Fëanorian pikes. She is thirteen when she learns they were left to starve and freeze instead, and then the dreams change. Now she sees them wandering under the trees, their bright eyes large in their pinched faces, and the snow coming down.
They were older than her, Eluréd, Elurín. They were meant to pave her way, to enter life and adulthood a few steps ahead, to prepare the ground.
She was always meant to be scrambling to catch up as they vanished into the distance, but where they have gone she cannot follow.
-
The Dark Enemy and all his creatures fear the Sea. It is poison to them, death, sterility. It is also death to the trees the Doriathrim love, the beech, the oak, the elm, which wither in salt air, in salt soil.
How do they make a life on the shores of the Sirion, the forest-people of Doriath, the Hidden People, the Starwalkers?
It is very hard. Even when the dark earth was star-mantled and the Great Enemy bound somewhere over the Sea, they were not Sea-Folk. The Falathrim were their kin, but not their kind, their ears tuned to the lament of the waves in a way that those of Doriath were not, their silver skins salt-damp, their silver hair twined with red and brown kelp instead of oak-leaves.
The Doriathrim worshipped Araw deep in the glens and clearings of Neldoreth, under the moonlight. They saw him in every red deer, heard him in every calling horn, sang of him riding through the dark on his silvery horse. They cannot find him in the salt-spray, even in the white rushing horses of the incoming tide.
This is how a culture changes. The Doriathrim begin to wear horny coral where they once wore sacred antler. They learn to use salt-pans, to catch fish. They learn which seaweeds are good to eat, and how to dry them. They weave creels out of sea-grass and catch strange craggy creatures which look like armoured insects. In the mudflats, where the redshanks hunt at high tide, they fight the birds for oysters and cockles and clams, digging them out of the sandy mud and silty sand.
These can be eaten in the shell, raw or steamed. Scallops take more work: there is meat in them, but so little. (Pare open the shell with a sharp knife, remove the roe – that is edible – and the coral, which is not. Cut the flesh from the shell, excise the ring of dark guts from the whiter flesh. Discard).
The Doriathrim become very clever with their knives.
Their houses fringe the Sirion, by the life-giving freshwater, and are made from whatever is to hand. Wood, rocks, mud. They are temporary. They are not grand, although some decorate them with sea-shells, grey and white, in patterns that resemble the map of stars in the sky, or form diamonds, flowers, portraits. Even when the Gondolindrim come, with their skilled hands, they build little that is grander. They cannot risk going too far from the shore to quarry deeply for good stone, too far inland to find tall, straight trees with which to build tall, straight houses.
There is a cave they find in the cliffs, and there they begin to worship Ulmo.
Gondolindrim and Doriathrim alike begin to wear dark cloth dyed with squid-ink. They weave pearls in their hair, they wear them on their fingers, around their throats. Sea-pearls of rose and silver and cream, grey and green and black, smooth and round. River-pearls of white and purple, peach and gold; blistery, ridged and notched, gritty against the teeth.
They teach other what they know, they build a new life together by the Sea, they trade songs and tools and tricks. There isn't enough of Beleriand left to live apart in. They have the same Enemy, after all, the Dark Lord of all the World –
– and the day Sirion dies in fire, they will share an enemy in the Sons of Fëanor, who will make no distinction between Doriathrim and Gondolindrim. They will fight together, the survivors of Gondolin and those of Doriath, for the little salt-stained world they share: and they will die together, Fëanorian steel ripping through their throats and bellies like fish-knives, discarding their bodies.
-
Eärendil is not flawlessly handsome in the way Elves are, although his face is as lovely as his mother’s. Idril is a carving in ivory, her hair pure gold, a cool and perfect statue of chryselephantine. Her son has freckles and burns in the sun. His hair is a strange tow-colour, the golden-brown of sea-silk that their people have learned to coax from clam-shells. The freckles over the bridge of his nose seem to her like a spray of stars. He’s taller than her, and he laughs often, and the survivors of Gondolin smile to see him.
He brings them only joy, not fear. If they worry about his strange swift growth, they say nothing. He seems to her like a summer’s day without shadow, and they are in their teens before he tells Elwing about the dark things he doesn’t like to think of.
He remembers far more of Gondolin of the White Towers, the Stones that Sung, than she can of Menegroth of the Thousand Caves. This is both blessing and curse, because he remembers in better detail both the days of its last glory and the fire of its fall.
She remembers only the small carved animals she loved, hiding among the carved forests of stone, and her mother’s white hands, and, always, the star whiter than white on her father’s breast. He remembers the flames of Morgoth’s fire-servants, the white rubble charring black.
“At least it was the Dark Enemy which came for you,” Elwing says, hugging her thin knees. “That is his nature, and the nature of his kind. Elves came for us.”
Eärendil’s arm tightens around her shoulder. It is then that he tells her for the first time about his cousin, the dark man on the wall, the dark man in his dreams.
-
Here is a story about how Ossë made the seabirds:
He didn’t make them in the first instance, because creation itself was given to the Valar, not the Maiar. But when birds black and white came flying from the Gardens of Yavanna they settled onto his great brown shoulders, which became islands in the sea where he was swimming, and he loved them.
Because he loved them, he did what he could to keep them by him always. He taught them to fish, and he gave strength to their hollow bones to match his own swimmer’s power, and their feathers he coated with oil so that they could bear the water. They became gulls and terns, snipes and seamews, petrels and sea-eagles.
When the sea came in, they flew above the tide, calling hoarsely over the sound of the sea-horses of the surf thundering towards the shore.
-
Tuor is going long before he goes. He knows Idril, but sometimes he sees Eärendil and does not recognise him. The unchanging Eldar faces around him seem to help, but it is the ones which are not there which he looks for. Annael, he says, over and over, and sometimes my lord King. He wants to talk with Glorfindel, to Ecthelion, to Rog. He has a pressing matter to take up with lord Maeglin, and no, it won’t wait for later councils.
When he is very bad, he whispers, mother?
He needs to reach Gondolin, he tells Elwing one day, his hand gripping tight on her thin wrist. He can see that he is by the sea, and that means his work is not yet done. He must bring them Ulmo’s message. He must warn them. The city will fall! The city will fall!
He is fading in the way the Edain do, a fading that is more than a fading. Elwing worries that Idril will fade in turn once he is gone. She knows it is selfish, to want Idril to linger on without a beating heart, but Idril’s calm white hands and wise counsel have been all she knows of motherhood for a long time now.
Eärendil begins to spend his days with Cirdan, learning how to build boats. Cirdan smiles to see his blond head the way the Gondolindrim do. He takes to ruffling Eärendil’s hair like Tuor still sometimes remembers to do.
The boats of the Falathrim are shallow and swift, made for raiding along the coast, striking here, there, and then vanishing back to the fastness of Balar. The Sea protects them, but they live always in the margin between land and water, the borderline of sea and shore.
Idril asks Cirdan and Eärendil to build her a boat for deep sea sailing.
-
There is a saying: the children of lovers are orphans.
-
The first time Eärendil kisses her, their mingled tears make everything taste like salt.
His mouth is so warm. So is his skin, and his hair, warm at the roots where it’s close to his skull. His ears are like hers. They are the only people in all the world like each other.
She touches his face with the very tips of her fingers. He kisses her again.
They are twenty-one. What does that mean to them?
To the Eldar, it is still the age of childhood, but their bodies have been changing for years now. Eärendil is as tall as Tuor, and promises to grow taller yet, although he can’t seem to grow a beard. Elwing bleeds every month and her breasts are small but present. There is hair between her legs and under her arms, something that worries her maid, but Eärendil has it, too. It must be normal for them.
She feels old enough for this.
When the next kiss ends, Elwing isn’t crying any more. She holds his face in her hands, and looks into his sweet, worried eyes, still tear-stained. The map of stars on his skin is suddenly clear to her: it’s the sky guiding her home.
-
I tell you again, the children of lovers are orphans.
-
Her people do not say, but their faces do: we are so few. You are Elu’s last heir. All life is uncertain now, and yours more uncertain than most. No children are being born in Sirion. Perhaps none of the Eldar will ever feel safe enough in Beleriand to bear children again. What will become of us when you are gone?
Because go you will, Lúthien’s grandchild, whether they come for you or not.
-
Idril and Tuor journey out to oblivion. Tuor is smiling. The mortal disease has taken the memory of all Gondolin’s drowned mariners from him, and Elwing does not know if this is a blessing or a curse.
Idril knows better, her face more marmoreal than ever. Her hands are cold on Elwing’s face when she kisses her goodbye, her lips cool on Elwing’s forehead. She is not crying.
Eärendil looks lost. It is hard for him, harder than it is for Elwing. She knows the story of Beren and Lúthien, and she knows why Dior never looked back once he left them. She understands that this is the best gift parents that must die can give their half-elven children, to spare them the sight of their ends.
It is a gift of love from Idril to her only son, a brave gift, a great one. At sea Tuor can die, as he he has been fated since birth to do, and then Idril will be left alone to meet whatever fate holds for her. Whether the waves take her swiftly or whether she chooses to lie down and cease to move, to leak slowly away, her fëa will leave her form and go winging across the Sea.
Whatever happens will happen far away from Eärendil. Like Dior, he will know, but not know. He will be able to imagine that it was kind, that it was gentle, that his parents held hands and lay down together in their white ship and together closed their eyes.
Elwing knows they are already gone from the moment their ship disappears into the horizon.
-
Eärendil doesn’t.
He longs for the sea. Once they are married, she feels it moving in his dreams, calling him. It wants him as much as he wants it, and it knows his name. In bed beside him, she feels Ulmo’s hand on him, and his flesh stirring to it.
He dreams of the deep water, the Sea itself, the dark blue forever beyond all sight and succour of land. It is a very solitary dream, Elwing thinks, a selfish one. There is no fight with Morgoth in the deeps. There is no path back to where the Noldor came.
Earendil doesn’t believe that. His mind is always out there, searching, wondering. Where are his parents? Are they well? Are they alive? Are they dead? Have they, perhaps, found their way to the green and gold land where Idril was born, the land where there is no shadow, no death, and much healing?
Are they well there, and only waiting for their people to join them?
-
Women of the coasts always lose their husbands to the sea.
This is an old story, and one that will happen again and again, all the years down until the last Music plays at last. Men go away on long voyages, to seek out new worlds or for a few night’s fishing. Storms come, and sirens sing, and some are never seen again. Their women are called fish-wives, sea-wives. Husband is elided, husband is gone.
Women are bad luck on boats.
Women stay on the shore. They are left to stand with the water curling around their ankles to stare out at the horizon.
Elwing is a queen, so she sits alone in their shared star chamber and gives judgment. She preserves food in sea-salt, she mends creels, she weaves hangings out of machair-grass. She licenses the hunting-parties that dare to leave the shore and forage in the woods, and know that not all of them will return. She speaks with Cirdan about the progress of the war. She lends warriors to his efforts. She grows heavy with her children.
She says goodbye to Eärendil again and again. He is tanner every voyage, bronzer, and the stars are becoming hard to make out across his nose. He is looking for Valinor or for his mother, or both. He names his boat for her, Vingilot. Wingilótë. The foam-flower, the whitest of white ships. It is a promise to carry her with him always, however far he goes. It is a love-poem, a love-song, a lie.
Every time Elwing sees him disappear into the horizon, she knows he is gone. Every time he returns it is a miracle, a wonder, a eucatastrophe. It is a pattern as sure as tide going in, tide going out, the same rhythm they find in bed, but she never learns to trust it.
Every time he returns she sinks her nails into his back and her teeth into his shoulder, drawing blood, making marks, pulling him into her as deeply as she can get him. Remember me, the scars say. Don’t forget. Don’t you forget.
They tell Ulmo, mine.
-
The Eldar bear easily. Elwing doesn’t. She hurts all the time. Her belly anchors her to the shore, pulls her down to the land. Turning over is always a long, complicated, painful process. When she lies on her back the babies steal her breath. When she moves too swiftly, her joints click in and out of place; all day, all night, the babes kick up into her lungs and low in her belly and at her bladder. She hurts all the time.
Eärendil is at sea. He promised to come home well before the year had passed, and he keeps that promise. But they are not Elves, and it turns out that their children come to term sooner than they do for the Eldar.
Birth is another thing that comes easier for the Eldar.
Elwing wants Eärendil, but he is not there. She wants her mother, but she is dead. She wants Idril, who is gone too.
Her handmaidens whisper about the difficulty. They don’t talk about Edain women who die in the bearing, but she knows they’re thinking of them. So is she.
The Silmaril cuts into her palm as she clutches it.
Her children are born at dawn in a room lit by warm red-gold light. They are red, too, and very small, and terribly alike. Their hair is a dark, wet swirl on the backs of their heads, their eyes slatey and curious. Their gazes begin to follow the light of the Silmaril around her neck from the first hours of their life, and their hands are like little red starfish, opening, closing. Their weak cries are like the hoarse sound of gulls.
How can she look at them and not see her brothers? How can she sleep, and not see the Fëanorians coming for them?
-
Elros: star-foam, the shining wave crashing to shore. Elrond, firmament of stars, starry-dome, the wheeling sky itself. The one so bright and fleeting, the other eternal. Does Elwing know what the names will mean when she gives them? Women of the Eldar see their children’s faces in dreams before their births, sense their futures. She is not properly Eldar. She will be, but not yet.
-
Eärendil is sweet and sorry when he comes home. He looks at the babies with such wonder, such fear, seeing the same thing Elwing does. They are all sailing on an unknown voyage, and what fate waits ahead for them they cannot know. They are the only ones of their kind in all the world, Eärendil and Elwing, and now their sons.
She often finds the twins lying curled together, first as babies, and then as young boys, staring calmly into each other’s eyes, making no sound at all. They seem supremely comforted by the perfect balance of like for like, the completed union of the self that is other and the other that is self. They do not like to be separated. Whatever fate holds for them, Elwing thinks, at least they will be together.
Elwing and Eärendil sleep less calmly. In the brief times they have, they snatch, they clutch at each other like spars in a stormy sea. She still wakes crying, night after night, the way she has since she was no younger than their little sons. She sees them coming, the men in red and silver with their rusted swords, but now the boys lost in the woods have the faces of her own children.
Eärendil still dreams of the Sea, but sometimes he still sees the dark man on the wall. On those mornings she wakes to find him sitting by the window, one of the boys in his arms, staring out at the horizon.
-
He is at sea when the letter comes.
-
He is at sea when the Fëanorians come.
They want the Silmaril that their father made in that faraway land of green-and-gold. They are coming for it. It is theirs to take back, they say.
But much water has flowed to the Sea since then.
It’s the last thing her parents gave her, the thing they deemed more important than their own lives. She has never been able to ask them why that was. They were never able to tell her. Elwing can only trust that their choice was right, step out into the unknown and hope that the earth will hold her.
It passed from Beren’s dead hand to Thingol’s, from Thingol’s back to Lúthien’s, from Lúthien’s to her son’s, from Dior’s to Elwing’s. Elwing never knew any of them. What she knows is that they all died for it in different ways, her parents, her grandparents, her great-grandparents. Her brothers. They died to keep it from other hands, again and again, and they all passed that down to her. It is the only thing she has left of them, that faith: and the jewel. She must keep both. She will.
-
Her sons are very small. Her husband is at sea. The Fëanorians are coming.
She is thirty-five, whatever that means.
-
Here is another fact about birds: when predators come, some birds feign injury to draw them away from their nests. They fly in half-shaped spirals, as though their wings are broken: they hop away along the ground, their wings quivering, offering themselves as a target.
-
Dior sent away the two things dearest to him: his infant daughter, his Silmaril. He tied their fates together, and cast them out into the night, a hope and a prayer he did not live to see fulfilled, an arc sailing away into a future he could not predict.
Elwing sends her sons away with a nurse and a guard to Ulmo’s cave. She does not send the Silmaril with them. She will not burden them with a target that will call down danger to them wherever they go.
This is the best gift parents doomed to die can give their half-elven children, after all: to spare them the sight of their ends.
-
When they come for her, she is ready. She has always been ready. She is standing on the edge of the cliffs, looking down at the sea. The cliff-edge is crumbling under her bare feet and the Silmaril is very heavy around her throat. It blazes, calling them to her, the monsters of her dreams.
Somewhere below, the settlement at the mouth of the Sirion is burning, their little houses falling. Gondolindrim and Doriathrim are dying together, side by side. Somewhere further away along the shore is the small cave where her children are secreted. Somewhere beyond the horizon, Eärendil is sailing in Vingilot, his eyes squinted against the glare of sun of the water, straining to make out a faraway shore that he is forbidden to ever reach. He keeps throwing himself out into the unknown, again and again, trusting that something is out there.
What does death hold for them, the half-elven? Is there a life beyond, and will they share it? Where are they going, where will they go?
“Elwing of Doriath,” says the Fëanorian. He has a beautiful voice, and his eyes are very old, and very sad. It is the kind of voice that could call the birds down from the trees. He has his hands held out to her, open-palmed, empty. His sword is on the ground where he’s thrown it. Behind him, his brothers are disarming, too. He takes another step forward. His voice is very gentle, like he's speaking to a child. “Elwing of Doriath, I mean you no harm. I want only the jewel. Give us the jewel, and all can still be well.”
It is many years too late for that.
Elwing of Sirion opens her arms. She leaps into the unknown.
-
Elwing the White, her Flight; an image for story, for song, for painting and for stained glass. A woman on the edge of a cliff, a woman suspended in the air, a woman diving into the water like a silver knife. A bird rising from the waves and into the heavens: a woman diving again from the ship-side into the foam on the shores of Aman, the first to break the doom of hundreds of years. A bird flying out to join a ship in the stars.
Here is one such painting. It shows a woman turning to look over her shoulder, something bright clutched to her chest, caught in the moment before she vanishes. Her hair is a black tangle down her back, and her face is long, her eyes wild, afraid. Her white dress is almost part of the white foam on the sea, the white wings of the birds rising around her. Where does the woman in this painting start, the wings end, the sea stop?
Here is another, of a woman falling on her back into the Sea, into the waiting hands of Ulmo. This image is loved by those who pray. There is such trust in that image, such fatalism. That Elwing falls knowing she will be caught; that Ulmo will always catch her.
Some show her as a bird. As a gull, a tern, a swan. One shows such a bird being clutched to the heart of Eärendil the Mariner, his fair face grim and set over it. Her claws cut trenches in his shirt, but he holds her to him anyway.
Others show a bird-woman walking over the waves to Vingilot, more Maia than anything else: a winged spirit glowing with inhuman light. Her painted husband and his mariners stare, half with horror, half with awe. She is both star and harbinger.
The most famous image of her is kept at Rivendell. Half the panel is devoted to the Sea: it rises in a green-grey-brown swell, tremendous with fury, edged with white, poised at just at the point of curling over, crashing. Above it is a bird, white against the black sky, a numinous shape difficult to see because the jewel on its breast sends out a brilliance which obscures it. From its molten heart its rays split out into six perfect, stylised arcs. These reach out to touch the edges of the frame, fading away into the wrath of the waves. This is the image Elrond keeps in his house.
It is very beautiful.
Elwing is barely in it at all.
-
She is falling.
Woman. Bird.
Woman?
Bird?