Chapter Text
Once upon an Age in Middle Earth the Elves fled the land of Eregion, following Elrond who led them west to a secreted valley where they could establish a home.
Times were dark; life was full of pain; and there was only so much hope to divide among them. Broken families, limbless warriors, sightless artists, minstrels without hands, orphans, widows, widowers, lords without land to lord over, gypsies, rebels: all of these came to the place called Imladris. So too came failed shipwrights from the Harbors and gender deviants exiled from the Greenwood and gilded youths from Lothlorian and refugees from Hollin.
Leading and embracing this grim assembly was a mourning Half-Elf, a frightened reborn legend, and a guilty drifter.
Elrond, Glorfindel, and Erestor took charge of the place.
Elrond was responsible for building. First came the Houses of Healing, in a long row beside the quietest part of the river. Places for sleeping. A temple for worship. Soon after came other places. A great kitchen for feeding so many unexpected immigrants. A forge for those things they needed: hardware and tools and buckets upon buckets of nails. Though he oversaw all these things, Elrond always was in the Healing Houses, calling back too many Elves from the shores of death, and losing too many more.
Glorfindel was in command of security. He kept the riffraff at a minimum and ensured that there was at least some line of defense between the realm of Imladris and that dangerous outside world. He put people to work and found places to sleep for people who had none. He gathered what weapons were available and began at once training those who needed it in the art of defense. So determined was Glorfindel to protect this new place that he went years without truly sleeping.
Erestor was in control of almost everything else. He greeted every Elf who came. He assembled messengers to run to and fro in the world overgrown with fear, so that the other realms knew what had happened to those who had fled Eregion, so that families could search out loved ones, and so that the Elves of Middle Earth remained bound in some familiarity and comfort in a time of need. He also took particular care with any saved relics: from the few bits of furniture and art that had made the trundling journey to the Valley to every book, novel, tome, text, and scrap of paper. Erestor built a library.
And over the course of hundreds of years, Imladris grew from a shadowed hole of despair to a beautiful Haven of art, music, love, and especially homeliness, as determined as the river that shaped it and as safe as the valley that hid it. Imladris was the sanctuary of Middle Earth, crafted by minds scarred by horrors and hands scarred by war. Those who had only heard of the place could not believe the stories that the misfits, outcasts, pariahs, recluses, eccentrics, rebels, and exiles of their own societies could have created anything of worth. But they had.
The Valley was as a land of magic. Few knew the depths to which it was truly protected, truly governed by its Lord. Few knew how safe they truly were in a land where evil could not go unrecognized. The Valley was a place hidden away from the outside world, protected by magic and by a fierce guardian, secluded by the mountains and the River, but still open to any who had a wish to go there. Imladris never stopped receiving immigrants. There came gypsy Elves and other outcasts, human traders, and even Dwarfs who had nowhere else to go. And none were turned away.
Imladris was many things. A place of Council, a place of worship, a place of study. A place of art and beauty, yes, and of rest. But above all else it was a home. A home to Elrond and to Glorfindel and to Erestor and to any else who wished it.
But it was odd. And there were visitors to the Valley from other realms, and they did not understand the beauty of Imladris. In and of themselves, there was nothing strange about the gorgeous white wooden and marble structures, nothing intimidating. The angles were not too sharp, the paths were not too steep. The people of Imladris were always welcoming and friendly and good. But how could they be? Everywhere were signs of the horrors of the past. The Elves of the Valley were overshadowed by it. But still there was hope. The visitors did not understand.
They did not comprehend how an imperfect society could be so joyful. How a Court Minstrel could have only one hand, a librarian only one eye, a warrior only one leg. How did such scarred persons function in a society? How had they not succumbed to the call of Mandos? Why did they not go to the West?
But the residents of the place only answered these silent questions with pitiful smiles. Wholeness of soul did not require wholeness of body. Perhaps this was only understood in the Valley, where so many scarred Elves led such rewarding and harmonious lives.
And in this land, a new culture of symbology grew. Where so much new life was celebrated, from Glorfindel’s resurrection and the start of so many new lives to the reaffirmation of life for so many others, from the revivification of an empty Valley to a bustling city, the symbol most associated with Imladris was that of the butterfly, a creature born of an egg to crawl upon the earth only to spin itself a sleeping cocoon to emerge a creature capable of flight. Butterflies were everywhere in Imladris, subtly embedded into the architecture and prevalent in jewelry and other adornment. Butterflies were incorporated into the weapons by the smiths and into the clothing by the tailors. And in the gardens bloomed all the plants that would welcome real butterflies to come feed and rest. Butterflies were rebirth.
Another icon unavoidably associated with Imladris was the River itself. The Bruinen was central to life in the Valley in so many ways. They drank the water, ate the fish from it. It turned the wheels that fueled the forges and flowed into the bathhouse. Water was life, and that was never more evident than in this sanctuary, where tiny tributaries led off to flow into the irrigation ditches of the southern fields and through the gardens. It was in the fountains and pools all over the House. The River flowed to the Sea. The Sea led to the West. Water was life.
Finally, the struggle that they had lived through would never be forgotten and as a sign of that perseverance and of the healing that had happened there, the Elves of Imladris idolized the winter solstice, the holiday of Yule, and with it the mistletoe plant. Yule was a time of death, but also birth. It was the end and the beginning. It was life and rebirth. And the three Elves who had founded the place were all entwined in some way with the parasitic plant. Elrond, a great Healer, used it in many of his potions and remedies. Having found it growing in abundance in the high boughs of the many oak trees there, he took advantage and had harvested the plant that healed so many in those first years when athelas and so many other growing things absented themselves from the valley.
Erestor, a drifter and a follower of the old traditions, worshipped trees above all else. Mistletoe, which fed off the trees where the birds deposited the seeds, was a plant that took all its sustenance from the tree it lived upon, usually oak, and Erestor and others like him believed that when a tree was thusly compromised, its soul was kept within the mistletoe plant. In his drifting days, these trees were prisoners and he had sought to keep them company. He had followed where the prisoners had told him to go, to Eregion, to Elrond. And from there, elsewhere. In the midst of that crazy flight from the old place in the Misty Mountains, it was Elrond they followed, but it was Erestor who led them where the trees imprisoned by mistletoe told him to go. And how did the mistletoe know?
Glorfindel’s connection with the plant went far deeper. Mistletoe had long been hated in Gondolin, for it diseased the oak trees, which their culture held as sacred. It was said that the high path that Glorfindel trod when he battled the Balrog was blocked by a fallen oak tree, a tree so riddled with the cursed plant that it had succumbed to insects and disease; it withered and died. Glorfindel was trapped upon the mountain pass and when he fell, he scrabbled at the branches, but they were weak and could not hold him and he fell dying with a sprig of mistletoe clutched in his hand.
When he awoke in the Halls of Waiting, Mandos was there to greet him and saw that Glorfindel still carried in his hand the red-berried plant of softly curving leaves. ‘Warrior,’ he said, ‘why are you here? Has this little plant been the death of you?’
Glorfindel answered him, ‘Nay, twas a demon of shadow and flame that threw me down.’
Mandos persisted, ‘But warrior, twas this little plant that failed you in your hour of need. Do you not blame it?’
Glorfindel answered, ‘Nay. How can I blame such a little thing for my fate? Destiny finds us all.’
Mandos persevered, ‘But warrior, do you not hate it? For it meant your death, your end to life.’
Glorfindel answered, ‘Nay, I cannot hate any thing for its role in my death. Not this small plant nor the Balrog that killed me. I cannot hate. Why do you question me? Do you greet all your poor souls thusly?’
‘No,’ Mandos told him. ‘This has been a trial.’
‘Why have you tested me?’ Glorfindel demanded. ‘Am I so unworthy of death?’
‘In a way,’ the Vala answered. ‘You were not marked for death. If not for the tree that blocked your way, you would not have died. But this little death-marked plant took that fate away from you.’ He took the sprig of leaves from Glorfindel’s hand, and the dead warrior could see tears in Mandos’ eyes. ‘Yours was meant to be a life of much greatness and goodness. Your people will suffer without you. But I have spoken with Manwe and we have agreed that if you were worthy of a second life, it would be granted to you.’
‘How am I to have a second life?’ Glorfindel questioned. ‘I have never heard of any such resurrection before.’
‘You would be the first,’ Mandos promised him. ‘I do not know how long it will be before such a thing shall come to pass, for even the magic of the Valar is limited. There is no precedent, so there is all too much room for error. I do not want to lose your soul in the rifts of time.’
‘Nor I,’ Glorfindel agreed, for the first time afraid.
And Mandos, whose tears finally trailed down snow-pale cheeks, fell onto the plant in his hands. His tears turned the blood-red berries white.
And too many years later, when Glorfindel finally was returned to the earth, all mistletoe turned white.
The plant regained a lost innocence. The death it had caused to so many trees and one fallen warrior was redeemed.
And when the flight from Eregion began, Mandos himself embodied all of the mistletoe plants on Middle Earth and he told them and the trees they lived upon that mistletoe would no longer be associated with death and decay, that because of what it had done for Glorfindel and what it would do for all of the world, mistletoe would be something else. Because it could heal, it would be a gift, and because it would help to escort the people to Imladris, it would be sacred. Mistletoe was now a celebration of life, and its association with rebirth, and with Yule, began.