Archive of Our Own

THE STAR TREE

A Profile in Three Sessions of Lord Fëanor, Son of Finwë, formerly High King of the Noldor, currently Lord of Formenos and Proprietor of the Third Formenos Gemological Survey (Unsolicited)

By Bilbo Baggins, Editor in Chief, Hello Valar Weekly

Issue 24. Subscriber Edition.

Before we begin, a note from your editor. 

This profile was conducted across three sessions at Formenos and one session I have chosen not to count, as Lord Fëanor spent the entirety of it presenting seismological analysis, psychological scare-tactics and gemological data I had neither requested nor commissioned, and insisting that its publication was, in fact, my primary editorial responsibility.

I have attempted throughout to represent our subject faithfully. I have not, it must be said, always succeeded. Though I hope across the reading of this, you too will become increasingly uncertain that success, in this context, is the correct ambition. 

— B.B.

Here are three facts. 

1. I have lived in the Shire all my life. 
2. Both times I left the Shire temporarily, I assumed I returned with a deeper understanding of my home, gleaned through a deeper understanding of the world around me. 
3. The Shire operates by a logic I only recognised after leaving it for good.

I have described the Shire often, here in HELLO VALAR, as it has proven to be something of a fan favourite. There are no guards posted, the fences only knee-high to most of the Eldar. There are no high walls marking where our land ends and elsewhere truly begins. There is no sundering sea, no thundering falls. The boundary exists primarily in the mind, though often reinforced by tavern talk that turns distant places into cautionary tales, or relatives who speak of the outside like bad weather one sensibly avoids, by a carefully chosen garden of comfort in which departure was a failure rather than a choice. 

Each time I walked out of the Shire. I walked out believing I'd broken free. The Shire is very good at making everywhere else feel like exile. I've been gone for ever so long, and still when I wake in unfamiliar rooms I'm measuring how far from it I am, how many days' journey it would be, back to something I'm not sure I even want anymore, but which my body still orients toward like true north.

I mention this because the road to Formenos put me in mind of it. Though it bore little resemblance (no road could resemble the Shire less), the contrast served as its own kind of recognition.

On the final slope, the path climbed through fields of volcanic glass, black and glittering where ancient fires had cooled into furious angles. The ground bore a fine dust of pulverised stone as grey as ash and as fine as flour, that rose in small clouds with each step and soundlessly settled across everything. Stunted trees clung to crevices in the rock, their bark the colour of well-cleaned teeth, their leaves a deep arterial red that bled against the bloodless sky. At their bases grew formations of crystallised mineral, some cordoned off into quarries by generations of Fëanor's workmen, translucent and many-faceted, catching what little light penetrated the perpetual haze. My cart shuddered over one of the many deep cracks in the stone, crevasses reaching down thousands of feet, their depths glimmering the same organic crimson as the bleeding leaves. 

I looked at those crevasses, and wondered how Maedhros Fëanorian felt about visiting his father.

Maedhros had denied me an interview, of course. Sent back his response the very next day. I had first thought him rude, but by the time I had contacted the rest of his brothers and suffered through the wringers they put me through, I had decided he was the most decent one of all. Maglor did not grant me one interview but in fact demanded six. When I first spoke with him, he seemed to me to possess a confessional eloquence hitherto uncommon in his race, but by the sixth interview I had come to understand it was an amalgamation of performance masquerading as genuine atonement and genuine atonement masquerading as performance. 

He would share pieces of himself in a manner that felt unguarded, vulnerable even, but he only ever offered what had already been refined through countless retellings, shaped until the rough edges no longer showed. He did not die, so his grief had nowhere to go but inward, circling through him like water seeking lower ground, eroding channels where tenderness might have flowed. His was not the story of a good man but the story of a bad man who tried his best to be good even though it was far too late, delivered with such precision I couldn’t tell the difference.

Celegorm did not bother to respond to my letter at all, and when I turned up regardless and waited in his guestroom, he never showed. A grinning groomsman appeared at the fifth hour to inform me Celegorm was out freeing snared pigeons from their traps, as if I would believe Celegorm the huntsman would concern himself with the welfare of pigeons. Which was when I realised that was precisely the message the lord wished to send: that Celegorm the huntsman cared little for the welfare of pigeons, and that I was the pigeon in this equation. 

Curufin invited me to his house, conducted some manner of study that appeared to involve taking my measurements, then refused to answer a single question and sent me on my way with a pleasant smile and a cup of tea I had to actually ask him for. The letter I sent Caranthir came back unopened with NOT AT THIS ADDRESS, because Caranthir was apparently of no fixed abode at the time, though his manor twisted its towers further into the sky as though fashioning a rude hand gesture at me specifically. The Ambarussa granted me an interview jointly and spent the entirety of it contradicting each other with such committed enthusiasm that every single response was rendered unusable.

I had also written to Elwing.

Her reply came back on grey parchment in a controlled hand that had learned to fear politely worded missives gloved in the guise of friendship. I folded her letter into my breast pocket, and did not take it out again until it came time to write this interview up.

Lord Fëanor’s manor came into view in the middle afternoon, grey stone wheezing through the grey mist, tall and proud against vertical ash-coloured fields. The towers rose in natural-stone configurations predating buildings themselves, as if they were not constructed but coaxed into existence, the joins bearing no trace of chisel or seam, as though the stone had simply shrugged and agreed to verticality. 

How loud it was, this stone, how unintentionally loud. The wind whistled sharply through the apertures in sustained, overlapping, diverging, divine tones, a polyphony composed by the greatest of craftsmen from materials that had little choice in the matter. Trundling beneath them in my cart, I found myself wondering why the joins needed to look so seamless. I found myself wondering how many problems there were in the world whose existence I was entirely unaware of.

Even the light itself was altered by the fact of being refracted off the high windows, as if Fëanor was setting his own atmospheric rules… which, I was to discover, was precisely the impression he intended. Though it was not the strangeness that unsettled me. I have, as you may know, a penchant for the odd. What truly confused me was the structure’s sheer confidence which made no concession to my incomprehension and informed me, through every medium available to it, stonework, wind, the angle and shade of the shadows, that I was the anomaly here.

Lord Fëanor was funny. Did you know that?

Such a fact seemed comically unbelievable to me at first. Like the lost language of the First Easterlings, Fëanor's sense of humour had clearly been hidden away in some padlocked room in the centre of a labyrinth. Never to return. And yet there he was. He entered the receiving hall ahead of his steward, preceded by nothing more threatening than a somewhat impatient footstep, and greeted me with the polite observation that I looked considerably smaller than he had been led to believe.

"I wasn't aware my dimensions were under pre-emptive discussion," I said.

"Everything about a guest is discussed before the guest arrives," said Fëanor. "That is what preparation means. You should know that if you call yourself a… what is it? A journalist.”

He and I sat on either side of a table bearing nothing but an unlit lamp, and warily regarded each other like two people who have read each other's reputation and found it, on balance, probably exaggerated. He was (and I note this as a reporter, not as a flatterer, the distinction being something I am still occasionally able to maintain) simply extraordinary to look upon. Every line and angle of his face refused the ordinary laws of diminishment, more so than the average elf even. He had spent an age in Mandos, been re-embodied into relative insignificance, stripped of court, following, throne, and a good percentage of the political apparatus that had once inflated him into a figure of mythic proportion… and still the face insisted on remaining the face that had once bent the light of the Two Trees into something small enough to hold. I tried to remember that this same face had given the speech at Tirion that preceded a kinslaying and found it, I am sorry to report, genuinely difficult.

Which told me something about myself I did not much enjoy.

For most of the preamble, as I made him swiftly run through his early childhood and educational pursuits, I watched Fëanor's stare attempting (often strangely, but with great commitment) to scalpel away the tenderest parts of me, the beauty of his expression intensifying the depth of his incisions, leaving me uncertain whether I was observing a person or a blade. Each time this happened, I would attempt to look away and resist a confrontation with a force that resembled life but operated by entirely different principles aggravatedly occluded from me, as though I were staring into a well that had no bottom.

I opened my notebook, uncapped my pen, and looked at my first real question.

"My great-aunt Batshiba used to read me a story about an ancient elf who had a tail," I offered Fëanor placidly, before giving him a piercing look. "Was that you?"

"Pardon me?"

"Did you, at any point in your ridiculous and temperamental lifespan, possess a tail?" I repeated, as though the difficulty were with his hearing rather than my sentence. "You can confide in me, friend. I will not give your secret away until the next issue of Hello Valar."

"No, Master Baggins. I can assure you I do not have a tail."

"You don't, do you? I see. But that was not my question. I did not ask do you? I asked did you? And so, when you designated yourself as a 'self-made man' twenty minutes ago—"

"You have not been here twenty minutes.”

"—can I take it to mean that you were not, as I initially assumed, obfuscating the fact that you were the son of the High King and heir to the throne in order to fashion yourself as a maverick underdog — I understand such impulses, you see, being of the gentry myself — but rather referring to the self-performed surgical removal of your tail?"

"Why do you think I was the elf who had a tail?" Fëanor asked, sitting back in his chair with an expression approaching professional respect for a completely unacceptable line of enquiry. "Did someone tell you I had a tail? Whom? Elves don't have tails. I don't have a tail. I have never had a tail."

I nodded sympathetically, and went so far as to lean over and pat his thigh in commiseration: "I too would say that, if I once had a tail."

The silence that followed called to mind the time an official in Bree held my travelling papers upside down for forty seconds before righting them, and both of us deciding to proceed as though nothing had happened and nobody had held anything upside down.

Then: "Then tell me, what on earth would I use a tail for?"

"A tail has countless uses."

He leaned forward. "Such as?"

"Balance, for one. And display. My great-aunt Batshiba always held that a tail was the mark of an honest creature. Nothing to hide. Nothing tucked away or folded under, everything displayed proudly."

"Your great-aunt sounds rather affected in the mind."

"She was. She was also right about most things, which made her considerably more affected in the mind still." I paused, and let the implication settle into him. 

"Do you think," I continued presently, "That High King Finwë might still be alive if he'd had a tail?”

“Yes, most certainly,” Fëanor raised an eyebrow, having measured me at last. “He would have hung upside down from the rafters and waited for the Foe to look all around the manor, before dropping right down on the fellow’s head and driving a sword into his accursed eye—-” he pointed up to a spot in the rafters—-”he would have hung right there. But unfortunately, he did not have a tail. And so, he is dead.” 

I told you. I told you he was funny. 

“So what you are saying is that the kinslaying at Sirion was precipitated by the biological fact of High King Finwë not having a tail.” 

“Indeed I am. All nine hundred and sixty six deaths upon the sands.” 

I was too small for my chair, and Fëanor somehow too tall for his own. A man, watching himself from a great distance and finding the distance not quite as great as he had imagined.

"You are," said Fëanor, crossing one leg over the other though refusing to lean back, "not what I expected."

"No," I agreed. "People rarely are."

Unsurprisingly, the first thing I saw when I set foot in Valinor was a gull.

A gull, so white it seemed to burn against the flawless sky. Its cry merged briefly with the sound of a re-embodied child laughing at a long-awaited reunion, both sounds high and piercing, and for one instant they were indistinguishable. The same brilliance, I thought, the same terrible purity of Gondolin’s white walls. To exist in this realm of the deathless is to witness how whiteness accumulates, and so turns into beauty so immaculate it leaves no room for the grimy, the scarred, the mortal.

There sat Tirion; somewhat remote, somewhat certain, though not untouched by time. Its chronicles, as removed from my own world as moonlight from cave-soil, thickened the atmosphere into a substrate preserved in a jar. Its gardens were a quiet rebuke from the deathless, both the same and yet differing from Fëanor’s own ash fields, and its present, like the elves themselves, seemed less a living moment than an echo of an ancient design.

I had spent a year in Tirion before venturing to Formenos, attending orientation briefings for the newly arrived, sitting with the endearingly studious Elrond in halls whose frescoes depicted the great conflicts of the First Age, painted by those who had survived them. Outside one such hall, the carcass of an orc felled by the wonderful Finrod, who took up most of the mural in his knightly attire astride a splendid charger, was painted across the courtyard wall, its body straining stiff against death, silhouetted against the failing light. To my alien eye, it resembled what the elves once were: same basic skeletal joints, same capacity for language, a creature of unknown intelligence and utterly opaque intent. The grotesqueness of a being like this almost appeared to justify the degradation done to it. But while its appearance declared corruption, its eyes suggested something more complicated that refused to resolve into the categories we needed it to occupy. 

Its eyes said: I am of the Eldar.

I stood in front of that fresco for a long time. Long enough that Elrond asked if I required assistance. I was not thinking of anything so dreary and terrible as an orc. I was thinking about Mirkshaded, whom I had written about, whom you know so very well. 

"Oh, will you just look at that!" Mirkshaded had exclaimed to the commander of the arriving Ithilien force, smiling ear to ear. He had vaulted over my little fence as he had done so many times in that month, his eyes shining, peering at my little door with undisguised enthusiasm. "Just look at that! Real holes in the ground, like moles! Didn’t I just tell you that’s how it looks?”

For the crime of trespassing into my garden, which he had been helping Samwise weed in the three weeks I had him, the commander had walloped him hard across his face. 

Those of you who have followed this magazine's coverage of the Scouring will know Mirkshaded already, or think you do. You know the version that ran across the last dozen issues, the one with Déorhild's illustrations, the stories your letters told us you read to your children. I had told you how I had returned to the Shire after the horrors of its Scouring, briefly and near-unseen, not wishing to be seen by relatives and neighbours and well wishers, and how I had met some of the former Scourers. 

Only a certain group remained, by the time I arrived. 

Saruman’s own men had slithered away when the wizard himself turned into an ashen breeze, the men of Bree and elsewhere taken away to the prisons and punishment houses in their towns, and the collaborators among us Shire-folk were being dealt with, washed in body and soul in preparation to rejoin and rebuild. By the time I arrived, the only ruffians remaining in Hobbiton were the remnants of the swarthy men of Harad, who were made to wait until the men of Ithilien and Minas Tirith who were sent to collect them arrived at our borders. A message was sent from those parts, asking whether we good folk would take these men into our houses and set an example they would hopefully replicate once they were taken to Gondor. A precursor to integration. For Gondor was to raise them to be the future leaders of their people, to teach them and feed them, though many felt they did not deserve such kindness. 

It was in those three weeks that I met Mirkshaded, whom you have come to know very well. 

Mirkshaded was billeted within my house until the men of Gondor took him and his ilk away to be reinstalled in their lands and be united under the banner of Men, which happened to take the form of the banner of Gondor. Mirkshaded, who told me stories of his homeland in piecemeal Westron, strung left right and centre with words from whatever the lost language of the First Easterly Men had been consumed by. Whenever he was not telling me stories, he was utterly silent, and you had adored his silence too, drawn in deft inked strokes, that pensive hand on the bearded chin. Perhaps that is the version to keep. The Mirkshaded I am about to describe is the same young man and not quite.

As you know, he was sixteen, yet with a full black beard scrawled across his face, the beard of a man grown on a face still deciding what kind of face it wanted to be. He had been sent to the Shire from the East, moving further West with Saruman’s posse. He was tall enough to make my ceiling feel provisional, and he moved through my low-lintelled world with a permanent slight stoop, seemingly used to buildings that did not accommodate him. His tunic was summery-white, open at the chest, and his scimitar hung at his hip with the ease of a fingernail, or a claw. He smelled of a rich fragrance I did not know the name of and still cannot identify, though I have described it to three separate merchants in Tirion and they have each suggested something different.

What Déorhild's considerable talent at illustration could not quite get, though she came closer than anyone else had managed, was the way he looked as he told me a story. When something interested him, he became extraordinarily still, and then, a beat later, extraordinarily animated, as though his body ran on a slight delay behind his mind. He was interested in nearly everything. He was interested in the hobbit-holes and how the chimneys sat and where the toilets were and the heaviness of Shire bread and the names of the flowers in the window boxes, which he asked me to teach him and which he repeated back with total seriousness. He asked questions like he thought curiosity was the true engine of continued living, the same quality I had always prided myself on having. 

The first time I wrote of him, a small elfling from Tirion wrote to Hello Valar, telling me how much she adored the Mirkshaded stories. 

He’s so curious! she wrote. Just like my rabbit. 

I have thought about that letter a great deal since. I thought of it every time I wrote about him since. Was that the cost? Was that the cost of bringing the Haradrim so far West? Was that the burden I was meant to bear?

Before the defeat of the ruffians, Mirkshaded had been assigned to ensure that the households across two hills departed only for approved labour and returned only within approved hours. He spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him. Even afterwards, I had been frightened of him for the first week, for though he himself had hurt no one, the Shire itself had been despoiled. After that, I was no longer frightened of him at all, which felt, to my friends, like the more dangerous development. The stories of the swarthy men had frightened even me at first, you see, for I had never seen one in my life.

A full black beard, at sixteen years of age. My word. 

Just like my rabbit. 

I wonder. 

I wonder if he was ever cold in the Shire.

He must have been, wearing such flimsy clothes.

In those weeks, you know I had tried to learn from Mirkshaded. I told you that I asked him about the landscapes he came from, about how the light fell differently on red desert than on green hill. I told you he told me about spice-markets and midsummer songs and how his grandmother could read the year in the behaviour of certain birds. He told me that his people left their dead out in the sun to shrivel and be scavenged, and was insistent that such a practice was not only normal but one that should be encouraged. 

I told you I listened and wrote it all down and told myself: I am learning this. I am recording it. I am the sort of hobbit who reaches toward understanding rather than possession.

And I told you how, when he left, he had attempted to leap across my fence to show the Ithilien men my house, and had been beaten for it by someone he had assumed would take him home, though they were in fact to take him somewhere else. I had told the commander off, of course, you know me well. I had wagged my finger in his face, and he had actually apologised to the boy! Still, as Mirkshaded left the next day, the bruise had started to purple across his cheek, like black ink under the sun. 

I care little for restitution, wrote Elwing in her letter denying me an interview. I care little for the kingdom of Tirion nor its justifications, not being permitted by the Valar to venture into such places, I regret my leanings toward eternity and perhaps most of all, I feel a slightly yet potently vindictive delight at the Noldor's renewed discomfort with this land, though it comes at the cost of ignoring my own discomfort with the same. I care very little to be interviewed by you, care even less to read an interview with Fëanor.

This is because I do not know Lord Fëanor. Nor do I know you. I do not care about him, or for him. I know little of his sons aside from their deeds. I do not care about your intentions, and care even less for your interview. I will not waste what's left of my life disputing other people's version of events. I don't believe my rage or my forgiveness, whichever it is you are after, will restore what's gone. I have very little left to give you. 

But I am no miser, so I will strike a bargain with you, Master Baggins. You can have this letter. You can publish it in your interview and wave me upon your pike as a moral standard, as white and raw as bleached sand, to be read and unheard. 

Whatever you will take from me with that action, I will consider it the cost of having survived being written at all. In return, you must swear me this one thing: that for as long as you live, be it till tomorrow or the breaking of the world, you will never again speak my name alongside theirs.

"When you were in Mandos, did you have a room?"

Fëanor sighed and recalibrated wearily. "It is not that sort of place."

"Right. More open, then. Like tents. Did you have a tent?"

"It is the hall of the dead, Master Baggins. It is not a military camp."

"No, I appreciate that, I'm just trying to get a sense of the layout." I made a note. "And the other dead… were they nearby? Only I'm wondering whether it was more of a communal situation or whether you had your own… not room, you've said not room… your own corner, perhaps. Your own general area."

"One does not have a corner in Mandos."

“Not even a corner?” I sighed, shaking my head in pity. “Alas, the punishment now feels greater than the crime. Not even a corner to go to the toilet in?” 

“To go to the…” 

“To defecate in, my dear fellow. Did you at least have a corner to defecate in?”

Fëanor’s face twitched, though much to my surprise, it wasn’t in despair or defeat. It was the familiar expression of a man who was trying his very best not to burst out laughing, which I have often seen Wlrond wear around me. Somehow, that made me feel more victorious than I would have felt were he to throw up his hands and leave the room. 

“One does not defecate in Mandos,” he said steadily.

“Aristocrat or not, as eminent a linguist as you are, you should be aware that one is generally used in a plural sense these days. Just because you did not defecate in Mandos, that does not mean nobody else has done such a deed. Would you retract your statements if I brought to you specimens who have absolutely defecated in Mandos? For instance, my dear friend Glorfi—”

“Then let that be so. I did not defecate in the Halls of Mandos, though I suppose, going by the logic of probability, certain others may have done such deeds.” 

“Who?”

“Pardon?”

“Who defecated in the Halls of Mandos?”

“I do not know.”

“Six thousand years, and yet you still have no names? Utter poppycock. I ask you again, Lord Fëanor. Who defecated in the Halls of Mandos?” 

“Not a single soul that I am aware of.” 

“There is no shame in it, you know. In fact, I was told by the recently-arrived sons of Elrond, that on one of the vessels sailing back to Aman, though thankfully not mine, there had been a mechanical malfunction which caused… if you can believe it, both lavatorial conveniences from, well, functioning,” I recounted, a finger raised to blur my view of his nauseated expression. “Which of course, could be mitigated by the ingenious repurposing of the humble bucket, stored later upon the unmanned upper deck. Alas, on the fifth day, the sea turned, revealing its most vicious face. The sloshing, said Elladan, was the worst: a harbinger of the precipitation to arrive. And arrive it did, a shower of regrets.” 

“Thank you for bearing such a tale to me,” Fëanor grimaced.

“Is that what you said to the Valar, when you first discovered you had a t—” 

“I will have you thrown from my halls.” 

“You probably should. I’d climb back up in a few days, not to worry. But such diversions are a waste of both our time, and your secrecy in this department tells me that it is someone close to your heart you wish to shield. So tell me. Who defecated in the Halls of Mandos?” 

“Close to my heart?” Much to my surprise, Fëanor actually laughed, revealing an impish, wolflike canine. “…you wish for me to name Nolofinwë, do you not?” 

“After much pressing, Lord Fëanor claims that his half-brother Fingolfin defecated in the Halls of Mandos,” I muttered, as I noted down something else entirely. "Now, back to the layout. From what you’re telling me, it’s something like a very large dormitory.”

"It is nothing like a dormitory."

"A very large, very quiet dormitory," I clarified helpfully by repeating the same sentence. "With no curtains, and no corner for toileting."

"Why do you keep mentioning curtains?"

I noted he didn’t ask why I kept mentioning toilets. He had seven sons. He understood.

"I find curtains very revealing about a place," I informed him. "The Prancing Pony has terrible curtains, for instance, and you can tell everything about the Prancing Pony and its clientele from that. Rivendell has no curtains at all, which I think explains quite a lot about the elves generally, and Elrond specifically. A brilliant mind, and yet a nosey old coot. Now, Bag End has excellent curtains. Yellow. Very cheerful, and almost opaque."

Fëanor appeared to be constructing and then dismissing a series of responses. "I do not see what this has to do with—"

"So when your sons arrived," I barrelled on, "not all at once, I understand they came in over quite a long period… was there any sort of acknowledgment? Between you. Or was it more like a large party, or perhaps being a secondary guest at some relative’s wedding, where you simply don't make eye contact because the situation is too overwhelming and you’re all hungry and everyone has somewhere else to be?"

"My sons," said Fëanor, with great control, "are not secondary guests at some relative’s wedding."

"No, they were dead. That's rather my point…” I turned a page. "I suppose what I'm asking is whether, given that you were all there for such an enormously long time, in this open-plan curtainless communal space with no corners for toileting, you had occasion to, well, talk about things."

“Things you wish to print, I presume?”

"The things that one might reasonably want to talk about, after Alqualondë, wherein I suppose you had all had your final communal talk, for I do not count the re-swearing of the Oath as much of a conversation. For them, perhaps after Doriath. After Sirion. The things that were, shall we say, waiting."

“That you wish to print.”

“That Tirion wishes to read.” 

A silence.

"We are not," said Fëanor carefully, "discussing Mandos. That was not in the list of questions you had sent to me. And whilst I am willing to venture into uncharted waters, I am also cognisant of the fact that my generally reasonable… history… of speeches made without preparation… is somewhat sullied by a handful of my final attempts at the same.” 

"No, you're right, I've rather lost the thread." I flipped back through my notebook, genuinely searching for where I went wrong, before finding the question I intended to dress in all the toileting and the curtains. "Oh yes, here we are. Were you pleased to see them? Or at least, to see the ones who came first.” 

"The ones who came first," said Fëanor, and his voice had changed significantly—hoarser, somehow. "Did they tell you who?"

"They didn't, no. Though it is, of course, a matter of record.”

"Then you should ask them, which ones came first, and what it was I said to them," He looked out of the window, the volcanic glass outside holding the flat grey afternoon in its teeth and shaking it, sending white light swivelling into the room at everchanging angles. "You should ask Maglor which ones came first, and in what order, and what the interval was between each one. Ask him whether he counted, because I am certain he counted. Then, you should ask them what we spoke about. If Tirion wants to know.” 

"And were you," I asked again, quietly, for the first and only time in the interview abandoning the tone entirely, "pleased to see them?”

"No," said Fëanor. He turned back from the window. "I was not pleased. Pleased is not—" He stopped. "Would one run themselves through with a sword six… seven times over from joy? In those moments, though not before, I would have given everything I had ever made," he said, "for them not to have been there at all."

And there it was. There it was. 

The man, the monster, the monument. 

What else do you want to know? And why?

Because he was Fëanor? 

Who was Fëanor? 

Country, city or Shire, every group elevates a figure who embodies their aspirations, and that figure's narrative, whether heroic ballad or cautionary tale, comes to define the group more powerfully than any verifiable history. The actual events beneath (what was justified, what was rationalised, and what simply happened) grow increasingly inaccessible, buried under the weight of the representative story we require him to tell. The Eldar forge and refine and build ever more intricate stories about Fëanor as doggedly as Fëanor himself splintered light, refusing to admit that creation pursued as consolation for loss eventually becomes indistinguishable from the loss itself, denying that makers who cannot stop making have forgotten how to live. 

Aman was no exception.

What was the story of Aman? 

Who was the hero of the undying lands? It was someone who woke once in a labyrinthine garden where every tree had been pruned back to identical height, leaning against bark smooth as river stone, stripped of the gnarl and twist that marked each season's growth. And having walked every path laid with white gravel and trod ashes into his footprints, he turned at last to the centre where a fountain ran clear and tasteless to his tongue, only to come to the conclusion the water that once fed his people — dark with minerals, sharp with iron — had been replaced with something pure and without character, and decided he, and so they, were meant to drink from fountains springing from richer lands. Which was to say, if we were to follow the logic of the elevated figure, the story of Aman must necessarily be the story of Fëanor. 

Because Fëanor was Fëanor, and Fëanor was once their king.

By the second session, Fëanor had stopped testing whether I was stupid and had begun testing whether I was corruptible, which I considered progress of a kind. He did this through the strategic deployment of questioning uplifts after certain sentences, through the offering of clarifications that were not truly clarifications but the installation of a preferred narrative into the gaps where my ignorance about him had seemingly made room.

I asked whether he had reconciled with Nolofinwë. He smirked at me, and shook his head. 

“If you cannot stand beside someone when their choices lead to ruin, if you lack the spine to watch them fail without offering rescue or judgment, better to sever the bond entirely than maintain the pretence of kinship while withholding what kinship actually requires,” he said calmly. “Do you agree?”

“Certainly,” I said, thinking of Thorin, and Gandalf, and Frodo and Samwise. “I certainly agree. But are you telling me that Nolofinwë is to blame?” 

“I have told you no such thing. Nolo and I, we had been allowing each other our certainties unchallenged, for a very long time. Eventually I stopped pretending his convictions and mine could coexist, and we separated with embarrassing incivility. The incivility was reprehensible, perhaps. The divergence had been going on for quite some time.” 

“But he is still your brother. Full brother in heart, he had said to you.” 

“I am still his brother in the way a scab is still skin. And what you wish to continue the sentence with is, and yet you left him behind. Yes. I left him behind, and I burned the ships in such a way that he could see them from afar. That spectacular rupture revealed how completely we had already abandoned each other, because the dissolution of a bond as deep and innate as you mention should rightly be slow, requiring both parties to gradually reshape themselves around the absence. Instead we had arrived at incompatible conclusions and planted our feet, the ground beneath us having been split for so long that we only noticed when the chasm could no longer be crossed.”

Though I was not particularly struck by the content of what he said, I was by his bearing. The stiff, academic lean, the posture of decision-making turned physiological, and the flatness of his voice. He spoke of Fingolfin like Fingolfin were the terrain itself, metaphor made man: here, there was elevation. Here, the ground gave way. The distance between Point A and Point B widens. The voice that had moved half the Noldor across the sea, reduced to pure technical description, the removal of feeling from the account itself a precision instrument, the most accurate way of conveying something that could so easily be distorted by emotion. 

I have met people who speak this way about the worst things that happened to them, and it is never, in my experience, because they do not feel it. It is because they have felt it so many times, across so many retellings, that they have worn a groove in themselves, and that groove became a surgical channel the account ran through automatically, bypassing sensitive internal organs and arriving at the scab without passing through the wound. He did not say he was sorry. And unlike when he spoke of his sons, he did not express pain. When he finished, he looked at his hands, which were trembling slightly. The drive to remake the world in the shape of your own convictions, I thought, does not announce itself as such. It arrives as a natural chasm, gasping open from a trembling, clenched faultline. It looks, from the inside, exactly like being right.

I had almost not returned for the third session. 

I told myself this was a question of time, because my deadline was the following Thursday, I had sufficient material, and the cart that brought me up the volcanic slope was available on the Tuesday. I wondered if this was a loss or a victory? I knew what it was in my eyes. What I did not know is how Fëanor would receive it. 

Did I wish to be a victor in the eyes of Fëanor?

I returned for the third session, and told myself it was because I wished to ask him about the boats. 

On the third morning, the sunlight shot in at a lower angle and turned the glass outside to a copper tone that reminded me of the four red rivers of Harad, and Fëanor seemed, for the first time, to have stopped preparing. He was not relaxed for I do not think relaxation was a mode available to him, but certainly less armoured and therefore, I suspected, considerably more dangerous. 

Now, I told him. Now, the boats.

He did tell me about the boats.

I had not expected him to tell me about the boats, even though I said now, the boats, I had asked him the question anticipating a wall, only to find that either the wall simply wasn’t there, or that it was there but he’d apparently decided to open a very small door and let me through. There were no theatrics in the telling, though I suppose that was the most theatrical aspect of it from a man who had spent the last two sessions acting on a very small stage. He sounded like he was telling me about crop rotation. 

What I did notice, however, was where the story slowed, which was neither at Alqualondë nor the moment the ships themselves burned, or even at the thought of Fingolfin’s men watching the vessels burn. 

It slowed at Maedhros. 

At the argument he did not describe in full but which was present in every word he chose to describe what came before and after it. Maedhros who had followed him, Maedhros his eldest, who had stood at Losgar and saw what his father intended and said whatever he said, in whatever voice he said it, to whom Fëanor had not listened to, and whom he had left behind when the fleet was ash, and whom Morgoth had then taken and hung by the wrist from a cliff face for several decades while Fëanor was dead and unavailable to feel responsible, while it was impossible for Fëanor to rip his own heart from his chest and cast it across the floor. He did not say any of this. He told me about the boats. But the story he was actually telling was about the last time a member of his family tried to stop him, and what it had cost that member of his family to disagree with him, and how it broke his father’s heart when he found out what he had suffered.

There were fathers whose entire existence had been a series of catastrophes authored by their sons. There were fathers who should kneel before every son and beg forgiveness, who should tear their robes and wail at what their hands had done. I had thought Fëanor would be one or the other. But when the reckoning came, when he stood before me amid the wreckage of his wonders, his mind turned first to his sons: whether they would disagree with him still, whether they would forgive him, whether they had learned to defend the legacy he had left to them.

I recognised it the moment he began talking about those closest to him, when I first brought up his sons in the Halls of Mandos, then again when he spoke of Fingolfin. Like summons like. That was all it was. 

The man, the monster, the monument. 

I understand how exhausting it must be to carry this tripartite contradiction throughout this image I am drawing of him, but I tell you, hand on heart, that the most honest things he said in our hours together were about his brothers, about his father and mother, and about his sons. Fëanor was an individual who parsed love into hierarchies, who measured the grief of others by its proximity to his own. And yet, a being who altered the fate of the world, because he was once the High King of the Noldor, and at least some of the Noldor loved or feared him enough to follow him across the sea.

Let him at least admit that. Let us admit that about him. Let you and I stop this charade. 

Let him stop pretending his sorrow extends equally to the unnamed dead, simply to satiate the baying of redemption, and let us stop demanding it of him as if it matters. What else can we ask of the mighty but that they name truly what they're willing to protect, and at what cost? 

Now we know. At least now we know. 

On his first day, much like the last day, Mirkshaded vaults the fence with his eyes alight, and presses his beautiful brown face close to the round green door. He has just been assigned to live in my house until the Men of Gondor come, and he thinks he will be home soon, so he is all smiles and more. The sheer delight of encountering a thing that is, to me, merely a door. Seventeen questions, he asks me on that first day. He crouches down, this six-foot soldier of Harad with his full black beard and his tunic open at the chest in the grey Shire autumn, and he peers through the round window beside the door and cups his hands around his eyes to see better, and I think: he is sixteen. 

I tell you this, my readers. I tell you all this. 

I write him in the past tense. That is the thing that happens before anything else, before the adjectives or the structure or the question of which details to keep, yes, I write him in the past tense, which is the tense of the safely concluded, the tense that puts a frame around a thing and hangs it on a wall where it can be looked at without danger. He was sixteen. He had a full black beard. I say was and had, and both are choices I make. I choose the details that will make him beloved to you, because they make him beloved to me, because they make me think of my Frodo in his youth. 

I write him in gesture, in inanimate objects. The fence-vaulting, obviously. The door. The flowers and their names, which he repeated back to me with total seriousness, elanor, rose, nasturtium, hollyhock, foxglove, committing them to another record of my observations. I choose the details that make him vivid and warm and real on the page, because I know, I have always known, that a vivid and warm and real Mirkshaded will make my readers feel something because he had made me feel something, and that something had been good, and I only wished for us all to be good to our fellow creatures, as different as they are from ourselves and I tell myself that is a good wish, and that is all I am doing. 

I tell you that he tells me about the stars over the Harad. His own language is glottal, so his accent is as harsh as the Gondorians claim it to be, the khs, the ghs, and yet I tell you his stories to soften those consonants. I tell you he tells me that stars are a tree of great living fruit connected to a singular tree, and what a delightful picture it makes. 

A tree of stars, he says.

I tell you I cannot reproduce phonetically his word for the configuration that appears in midsummer over the red desert and show you instead the the shape he makes with his hands when he says it, both palms up and fingers spread, as though he is holding something large and fragile at arm's length. I tell you he tells me about songs sung at midsummer and how their four rivers, the Kovīr and the Harun, the Naila and the Vashem, all run red with minerals in the wet season. I tell you how he insisted the dead should not be put in the dark but buried under the blazing sun. I tell you of a game played with flat stones that he tries to teach Frodo and Frodo cannot learn, though he cannot stop laughing. 

I tell you I understand him. 

I tell you so you will. 

The telling is good. 

Why must we pretend that understanding a place requires having lived there? The accounts travellers bring back are cleansed of their complications by distance alone: by the time the story reaches the drawing room, the people who actually inhabited those hills have become scenery. Every frontier is a blank page we are invited to inscribe with our own meanings. Every wilderness exists most perfectly in the moment we learn its name. 

I am in Aman. I have been invited into the light. I stand in it.

I tell you these things because I want you to know that I receive him as I receive the world, my notebook open, my pen moving, my curiosity genuine and my nails clean, and the kettle on the stove behind us gone completely cold. I tell you because I wish for you to think we are open-hearted folk, extending the hand of friendship toward those who built smokestacks and mills, who kh-ed and gh-ed across the greenest of our hills. I tell you this, because I do not realise that the desire to rebuild what was lost and the hunger to prevent future loss are not the same thing, though they feel identical in the making.

"Whilst I am looking forward to our inevitable turn towards the Oath, at this moment I would like to ask you about the moments just before the speech was given and the Oath was made."

"What about those moments gives you such concern?” 

"Well… the Oath was just a thought, at that point, wasn't it? Before you said it out loud, it was just sitting there in your head."

"It was considerably more than a singular thought, Master Baggins.” 

"No, well, not a single thought. But technically,” I shrugged. "Before the words came out, it was just an idea floating about like any other idea. It is not only you who has ideas, you know. I have ideas all the time that I don't act on. Would you like to hear one?”

“My ears are trembling in anticipation,” he said dryly, and actually twitched one in my direction. I had not thought him capable of such an act. 

“Excellent. Now, last Tuesday, I had quite a strong urge to write a strongly-worded letter to the kitchens at Elrond’s manor, about the rather watery nature of the soup that was served, threatening to raise a complaint that might put at least one cook’s livelihood at risk. But Frodo (my nephew, as I note you are pretending not to know) opened a tin of biscuits and I didn't do it, so nothing happened and the soup is still watery, and no one has been harmed. Do you think if you'd treated the Oath like that… just had the idea, felt very strongly about it, and then had a biscuit and gone to bed… it would have counted?"

"Counted as what?"

"As the thing. As the Oath with all the—" I spread my arms and waved it around the room for just long enough to convey, in general terms, the kinslayings, the burning fleet, the seven sons, and several Ages of cascading catastrophe. "Would it still have been that if you'd kept it inside your head and just privately felt it very intensely? In the privacy of your own mind on your own time?"

Fëanor regarded him. "That is not how oaths work. Oaths are a communal undertaking. What you are describing to me is a feeling.” 

"No, I understand that, an oath you don't say out loud is just a feeling, which is my point. Because I'm wondering whether it's how violence works. Whether an intention is the violence, or whether the violence only becomes the violence when you let it out where other people have to deal with it." I paused, tapping my pen against the bowl of candied nuts between us to make my point land within said bowl. "Like flatulence."

A silence.

"I beg your pardon," said Fëanor.

"Well, flatulence tends to smell. Now, I do not wish to engage in another futile back and forth with you over whether or not you have personally let a ripe one out at some point or the other, so let us pretend that you have just learned this fact. So, a smell is just a property of a thing, isn't it, while it stays at the source? It's only when it gets out into the room and other people have to breathe it in and make decisions about whether to mention it or pretend they haven't noticed that it becomes—" I searched for the word. "A shared malaise. A matter of general inconvenience to parties who did not necessarily ask to be involved." He looked up with perfect sincerity. "Were you the source of an instance of flatulence, do you think? And the Oath then being the smell? Holding, of course, to the assumption that the Noldor are the room.” 

"I want you to know," said Fëanor, his voice somehow still incredibly steady, "that I find such a comparison extraordinarily offensive."

"Yes." I nodded sympathetically. "But here's my difficulty." He leaned forward. "A smell that finds the smell comparison offensive is still, at the end of the day, a smell. That's rather the nature of the situation. I am not saying you're a bad smell, necessarily. Like I said in our last session, perhaps I would have produced the same smell were I in your position. I'm saying your flatulence got out into the room. And once a smell is out in the room, all the subsequent discussion about whether it meant to be a smell, and whether it was a smell before it left the source, and whether we can really hold a smell accountable for the olfactory experience of everyone who happened to be present… none of that is actually about the smell anymore, is it? It's about the room now, and about what the room does next."

"Master Baggins," said Fëanor.

"Yes."

"You have just described the entire philosophical problem of collective moral responsibility through the extended metaphor of a bad smell."

"I have, yes." 

Fëanor looked passively at me for a moment, then strode to the window. Then, as if having decided that the most dignified available response to having just been compared to an escaped smell is to proceed as though the conversation had a floor and that he was standing firmly on it, he looked back at me.

"The room did not have to follow."

"No," I agreed. "It didn't."

"The Noldor who crossed with me, who took up swords at Alqualondë, who watched the ships burn from the shore and stayed, they made choices. Each and every one of them."

"Yes."

"So the room," Fëanor mimicked my all-encompassing gesture from before, "bears at least some responsibility for how it reacted to the smell."

"It does," I said. "I'd never claimed otherwise. That's rather the problem, isn't it. Everyone in the story of Fëanor’s crossing made a choice, and the choices all point in the same direction, and at the end of the direction there are thirty two ships launched from Alqualondë, of which five had sunk in the crossing, twenty seven ships burned in Losgar, twelve hundred survivors of Doriath and six hundred and three survivors of Sirion. A great many rooms, and a great many smells. All quite different in character and yet somehow, when you open the windows, dissolves into the same air."

Outside, the last light had left the glass entirely and the room had contracted to the small glittering pinpricks of the jewels on the bowl of candied nuts between us. The wind, normally deafening at this time of night in this rather badly windbroken construction, seemed to have gone on strike, just so that the two of us would get to our points and say what we truly came to say. It was in that quiet that I asked him what I had been intending to ask him since the cart ride up the volcanic slope, since the Havens and the boat and the long approach to a land I had always thought of as the answer to everything. 

I asked him whether anything had changed in Mandos. Whether he had learned something he wished to tell me. Whether there was anything at all he wanted to say to the people who would be reading this.He straightened in his chair, having sat back down as I spoke, going from the forward lean to the old uprightness, that spine which had clearly decided long ago that leaning back was a concession to something he had no intention of conceding to. He spoke, and spoke, and spoke.

"And finally, that intensity, whatever its source, demands vigilance," Fëanor finished his monologue in the final hour, like he were reading from an equation someone else had already proven and had no desire to dispute. “The forge that powers transformation, whether toward creation or destruction, originates in appetite. What begins as devotion can curdle into despair, the alchemist can love his work till it becomes alibi, certainty can metastasise into persecution. Fire serves and consumes, depending on the hand which tends it. A man’s error is in believing that the strength of his conviction proved its virtue, and that what is most deeply felt is righteous. I have learned that temperature is not evidence of truth. Is that what you wish to hear?”

“Is all you have learned in the Halls only about yourself and the wrongs you have done, and not the cost that was paid?” I leaned further forward, almost entreating him, half-begging, if you could believe it. “Do you have naught to say of the kinslayings? No word for those who fell, who will be reading this for some form of—”

 "What craft and song vanished when Alqualondë fell, and when in its image fell Doriath and Sirion. What children who might have composed new music, or worked metal in ways I myself could never have imagined. I mourn this. I know it is gone, I have always known. I suspect that is what you wish to hear, or what you think your readers wish to hear from me. But we who remain inherit only the aftermath of our own making, and rather than build something that might redeem what was destroyed, what else do we do but spend our time constructing justifications and polishing our grievances until they shine bright enough to blind us to what we had actually done?"

He stopped. And then he stared at me in the very same manner I had stared at him when I first asked him about the tail, his lip quirking into a swiftly-smoothened dimple. 

"What do we do, Master Baggins? What do we do but write, rewrite and overwrite the multifaceted histories of Fëanor, son of Finwë, High King of the Noldor?"

He stopped speaking, and I realised my throat had closed. A heaviness settling beneath my ribs, a sense of shame for having come here, for having listened, for not having interrupted enough. A vast, useless guilt. 

What craft and song vanished? 

It was not that Fëanor did not care, but that he did not know. It was not that Bilbo wished to know, but that he thought it should be known. 

The tree of stars, Mirkshaded had said. The star tree.

He said it only once and even then only in passing, so natural to him it did not occur that it required explanation — star tree, he called it, gesturing upward at the Shire sky with the flat of his hand, and then continued whatever he had been saying before, about the river, or the bread, I cannot now remember which. I did not ask him what he meant because the conversation was moving and I did not want to interrupt its momentum, and because I could always ask later, though neither of these things were the reason. 

The reason was that I did not have a frame for the tree of stars. I turned it over and could not find the angle from which it made sense aside from being a beautiful, if primitive, image, and I filed it away in the part of my mind reserved for things I had encountered and not understood, next to certain passages about the dwarves and the way the elves of Imladris sometimes spoke to running water as though that was a normal thing to do. I did not ask. I wrote down tree of stars in my notebook with a small question mark beside it and moved on, because moving on was what I did, because I was a recorder and a recorder keeps pace with the thing being recorded and does not stop to crouch in the garden of his own incomprehension and peer through the window of someone else's story. He doesn’t. He doesn’t.

All I recorded was his gesture. Both palms up, fingers spread, the arms lifting slightly as though the sky were something he offered me, not pointed at or indicated, but offered, held out, like he wanted me to take it and keep it close. I have looked at the Shire sky since, and the Lindon sky, and the sky over Valinor which is technically perfect and from which the light never wavers, and I have tried to find the tree in it. I cannot find the tree. I like to think that it is not my vision that is at fault. I like to think that perhaps you have to have grown up under a particular sky in a particular desert learning to read a particular night sky, for the tree to be there. I think perhaps it was always there, and I was simply standing in the wrong garden, looking up with the wrong eyes, holding my notebook upside down.

I took up my pen again for the final few questions, though my hand had started to shake. 

"I want to ask you," I attempted, "whether you have ever been stung by a bee."

This time, he didn’t even flinch. "No."

"Not once? In your entire—" I made a shape with my hand indicating the incomprehensible span of Fëanor's existence. "All of that. Not once stung."

"Not once."

"That's extraordinary," I wrote it down, breathing fast and hoping he didn’t notice my breathlessness. "I've been stung four times. Twice on the ear, which I found very offensive. Do you know why? The left ear specifically?"

"Do I think… no, I have no opinion on why you were stung on the ear."

"Only I'd been quite pleasant to the bee up to that point." I turned a page. "Do you think the Valar have ever been stung by a bee?"

"The Valar," said Fëanor, "are beyond the reach of—"

"Because Manwë has the eagles, and I've always found that where you get large birds you tend to get disrupted bee populations, and I wonder if that's contributed, over the Ages that is, to a certain remove in the Valar's decision-making. If you've never been stung by a bee you've never had the experience of intending one great, worldchanging thing and a small creature simply disagreeing with you. Physically. With its body." I looked up. "I think it's quite a formative experience."

"I cannot stress to you," said Fëanor, "how little the Valar's relationship to bees has to do with the history of the First Age, or to the story of my life, which you are ostensibly attempting to record."

"Hmm. Your father. Finwë. Do you know if he was ever stung?"

"I have absolutely no idea whether my father was ever stung by a bee."

"Only there's a school of thought in the Shire… Mrs. Sandybanks of Tuckborough pressed it on me very forcefully at a bring-and-buy sale, and I've never been able to entirely dismiss it… that the great sorrows of history can be traced, if you follow the chain far enough, to a single moment of avoidable poor judgement by someone who had simply never been sufficiently inconvenienced by something small..." I paused. "She was talking about her nephew Folco at the time. He'd bought a boat. But I've found it applies more broadly."

Fëanor gawped. "Are you suggesting that the tragedies of the First Age were the result of insufficient bee stings?"

"I am not not suggesting that," I turned a page. "Now. Your sons. When you asked them to swear the Oath—"

"Finally."

"—were you aware that none of them had ever been stung by a bee either? Because it seems to me that if one is going to ask seven people to swear something unbreakable, with consequences spanning several Ages and multiple—"

"Master Baggins."

"—kinslayings—"

"Master Baggins."

"Yes?"

"I have," said Fëanor, white-faced, exhaling sharply, his eyes bright yet lips taut, shoulders slack as if he were setting something down that he has been carrying for some time and has decided to set down here, in this room, in front of this particular hobbit, "read your magazine."

I looked up.

"For longer than you might expect. I told you, everything about a guest is discussed before the guest arrives, I read the Scouring pieces. All the issues. Déorhild's illustrations are quite masterful," his eyes glittered. "I read about the boy."

“So has most of Tirion.”

"He asked questions," said Fëanor, "just like how you ask questions, didn’t he? Wanting the thing itself, not the answer to the thing, but the thing. You wrote him very well, oh, how well you wrote him. His beard, the tree of stars, the fence, the door. The image of you but not quite. The image of me but not quite. You did not write what happened to him as though you knew where he would be taken, as though you had known since the moment the boy stepped through your door."

I said nothing.

"You were a recorder, and your purpose was to witness. The impulse was curiosity, the instinct understanding rather than possession," he looked at me steadily. "I believe that is more or less the formulation you go for, journalistically."

"Yes," I agreed, because I was not deceitful. "That is more or less the formulation."

"And yet you came here." Fëanor leaned forward, seeming to thrum on the spot like a candle-flame faced with an open door. "You came to Formenos, to interview me, of all the people available for interview who would not have required three sessions and a cart up a steep volcanic slope." He smiled at me. "You came to interview the kinslayer, the burner of boats whose Oath ate his sons, whose son ate the world. Did you come to atone for the boy, Master Baggins? By understanding me the way you understood him, so well, so fondly, leaving yourself, once again, as the one who was only there? Only watching? Only recording, with his very fine recorder's instincts, from the wrong side of the gate?"

The lamp held between us, as unlit as it had been since the day we began speaking. Outside, the light was gone entirely now, the volcanic fields black and lightless, the crystallised minerals at the base of the pale trees catching nothing, giving nothing back. And yet there it was, silver on the mountainside, tracing over the shadows below: a pattern repeating itself across every encounter, a mechanism of perception that sorted the world, repeating everywhere I looked, always adapting its reasoning to new circumstances, always arriving at the same answer, the same order.

Was this me, giving Fëanor of all people, the last word?

But did that matter?

Did where Bilbo Baggins stood truly matter?

A great bruise purpled over his black-bearded cheek.

I was a recorder. My purpose was to witness other peoples' tragedies, to be touched by them and document what I found. The impulse was curiosity. The instinct was reaching toward understanding rather than possession. I was on the side of the good. I was invited to the land of light everlasting, the land I had always wondered about, the untouchable land. The land of good.

Fëanor's land.

Seen from the Grey Havens looking back toward Middle-earth, the Shire, the roads I'd walked, the landscapes I'd moved through, all transformed by distance into innocence, a storybook geography, remarkably tidy, a place where my presence had been benevolent. Each time I recounted those journeys to the elves of Aman, my own memories took on this air of necessary adventure, as though I'd been invited rather than intrusive, as though observation left no mark on the observed. As though ink did not purple in the sun.

I gathered my notes in the long blue corridor outside the receiving hall, and thought about the fresco of Finrod and the orc, and the gull cry in Tirion indistinguishable for one instant from a child's laugh, the fountain running clear and tasteless in the white city's centre, the water that had forgotten its minerals, the four red rivers rich with the same and about the window of my room in Elrond’s lodgings that looked out over nothing that was not eternal. I thought about the word displaced, and how cleanly it functioned. 

How much work such a word could do, if you let it.

Three full sessions, and between the recognition of constraint and the abdication of sense, there still remained that vast territory of intention that Fëanor refused to map for me. The unmapping was, of course, as casual as such things often were: the implication was that I should understand why Fëanor was Fëanor without being told. As if it were common sense, an easy path for a Hobbit to follow from Mahanaxar to Losgar. But desperation was not the same as compulsion, and I like to think I have lived long enough to know that those who speak most eloquently about choicelessness are often the ones who chose most deliberately.

Many of the Eldar, the Noldor in particular, seemed to crave the assurance that atrocity (both done by them and done to them) always cohered, that there existed some tribunal capable of balancing what was taken against what was given in return, regardless of their attitude to the tribunal itself. Even those who never spilt a drop of their kindred’s blood incessantly hoped that the fall of Morgoth balanced out the shame of the kinslayings, that after a sequence of justifications and the long cataloguing of necessary cruelties, reconciliation would arrive right on schedule. For them, the unmarred state of the individual soul was the sole benchmark for a life worth living.

But I believed that however thoroughly violence mars the map, there remained small territories it could not occupy, like the miller's daughter in Sirion who hid seventeen children in her cellar, or the Fëanorian soldier who looked inside and told his commanding officer that it housed only bags of flour. Even when massacres were framed as requirements, there persisted those minor refusals, those unrecorded divergences from inevitability.

While Fëanor spoke, I searched his account for these moments. For it was my belief that they constitute the actual measure of a life, not the grand tragedies we narrate our kingdoms into. As immense as the ruin we inherit is the intricate ecosystem beneath it: root systems, aquifers, badger sets, buried ancestors. Mortal or immortal, Valar or Eldar, nobody in this world can step outside causality; we all move through the accumulated consequence of ten thousand prior choices. Living means navigating the dense, everchanging thicket of relations between Ages and Peoples: debts unpaid, harms unrepaired, atrocities unmarred. Insofar as nothing remains static in those shifting layers of our world, there is but one constant I have noticed, from the Shire to Gondor to Aman: that in all the songs sung in courtly halls and state funerals and city squares, transformation persists as eternal promise rather than actionable possibility.

One day, someday, they will understand that the task is not to atone for what was done or to reconcile with those it was done to, but to never do it again. And a world in which nobody takes Fëanor seriously, in which no single voice is invested with the authority to speak on behalf of history itself, in which no man's grief is so loud it blots out every other name. That is the way to never do it again, and so, the correct ambition. I still believe this. I will continue to believe it. 

To ask whether Fëanor had a tail was simply a diagnostic instrument to me, a lateral pressure applied to a subject too accustomed to being interrogated on his own terms. The fellow had spent millennia either being taken far too seriously or dismissed as a monstrous anomaly: no one had ever asked him a question he simply could not process. I asked him about tails to unsettle him enough to begin showing the machinery underneath, and then, crucially, I counted on him being quick enough to recognise the game and play it back, which made him a worthy opponent for study rather than a passive subject. I think I understood him, at last. 

And yet.

"Master Baggins," he called after me, walking faster than I’d seen him move this far, raising an imperious hand. "I have reconsidered. I think you should tell them."

"Tell them what?" I asked, fearing another dispute about editorial responsibility, or worse, accusations of censorship.

"That after hours of incessant questioning, I caved to your demand, wept at your knee, and admitted your great-aunt Batshiba was right after all," he said, a near-imperceptible smile turning his mouth at one corner. "That's what you should tell them. Tell them Lord Fëanor had a tail."

"Why?"

If you can believe it, the fellow winked at me. "Why not?"

“Absolutely not.”

Still, as you can see, I have left it in. I left it in because I hope this wink in that doorway is this story’s most human moment and its most ambiguous, simultaneously Fëanor acknowledging the game and choosing to step outside his own myth for an instant, and Fëanor demonstrating that charm and intelligence are not the same thing as accountability. I hope it shows that he has, across these three sessions with this interviewer, recognised something true about himself and chosen to name it obliquely rather than directly, which is, at last, the best and worst that can be said of him.

The wink refused to resolve itself through the entire process of writing this behemoth up, and kept presenting a different face to me each time I edited it. I have not decided what it means. It could mean he had chosen, like I said, to exist outside the weight of his own significance  and turn into merely a person in a doorway, finding something faintly funny about the whole impossible situation. It could mean he understood, as I understood, that the only honest response to the complete impossibility of adequate reckoning is to make no claim to it. 

Or it could mean (and this is the reading I return to most often, in the dark, when it keeps me awake) that Fëanor, who had always known exactly what he was doing with light, was doing it again: offering me something bright and small and warm that I would carry away and turn over in my hands, so that I would spend less time thinking about what he had not said, and what I had not done, and what a sixteen-year-old boy with a full black beard had looked like, going quietly, cheek bruised in the cold.

I thought again, walking back through the cooling darkness to the thankful stability of my donkey-cart, about the pattern. Not about Fëanor specifically but about the pattern that produces him, and the pattern that produces the council table in Minas Tirith, and the pattern that produced the invisible wall of the Shire and also the visible one of the Scouring, the one made of scimitars and approved hours and the low red ring around the bruise. All the pattern requires to exist is someone who has already decided the shape of the world before they arrived in it, someone else with the power to act on that shape, and a language capacious enough to call all of this benevolence. And a recorder, standing at his closed gate, watching the warm world lap at his feet.

This interview, much like this story, does not need a Fëanor. It needs the right people to read the right words, and someone with the luxury of having survived long enough to write them down and tell you it was the truth.

I have been composing this ending in my head for three weeks, and every version I write sounds like an apology I have no right to make.

Let me try to be honest instead.

There is a certain kind of mindset (I know it well, having lived inside it for over a century) that is drawn to the extraordinary the way snow is drawn down the mountainside. This mindset is neither moral nor immoral, though it classes itself above the brave and the vicious. Here is an example of it: 

I went into the wilderness because it was there. I went into the wilderness because it was there and because I was curious and because the road promised me something my plush armchair, for all its considerable virtues, could not replicate.

I dressed this up, over the years, as growth and understanding, as the examining life. I became, in my own accounting and perhaps that of yours, a hobbit who had learned things. Who had been changed by what he had seen. I brought the world back to my drawing room in the form of stories, and the stories made me interesting, and being interesting was a thing I wanted more than I had admitted, and the world I brought back, drained of the remarkable people who were lost along the way, I refined that world down to landscape and incident. This world sat on my shelves and confirmed that my presence in it had been, on balance, a net good.

The first lie I told about Mirkshaded was that I knew his name.

For I did not know his name.

The second lie I told about Mirkshaded was that I told you the stories he told me. 

For Mirkshaded spoke almost no Westron at all. 

He understood quite a lot of it, yet spoke very little. There were scraps, here and there, picked up from his weeks in the Shire and the long journey from the Southeast, scraps of Westron, though he showed a passionate distaste for Sindarin in its pure form. I called him Mirkshaded because it was the closest I could reconstruct from something he said about himself in his language I did not speak, that I wrote phonetically into my notebook and later assigned a spelling that suited my ear. Then, I went to Elrond, who knew more of the Eastern languages than most, which was not saying very much, and he told me the closest translation he could engineer. I would have thought, quite wrongly, that the boy was illiterate, had he not handed me a letter on that final day.

And it was dear, long-suffering Elrond who looked at that letter on the white ship to Aman, with wider eyes than I’d ever seen on the fellow. Practically popping out of his skull, I swear to you, all his seasickness vanished in an instant. 

“The script!” he exclaimed, waving the parchment across my face. “Master Baggins, look at the script!” 

It turned out that the lost language of the First Easterlings had not been lost at all. It had not been eaten by a greater language, or died out entirely. It had instead done what languages do when they cannot be destroyed outright: it had negotiated, pressed its edges up against Westron and Haradaic and half a dozen others and blurred, exchanged, borrowed, left deposits of itself in words for stones and stars and the names of winds that had no equivalent elsewhere. When Elrond told me this he seemed genuinely startled by it, a scholar’s surprise at survival. 

He managed to make out some of it, a single paragraph about the star tree, some of which I had already known from the story he told me of it. But then Elrond had looked so stricken that I asked what was wrong, though I realised it myself before he had said even another word. 

We were on the swan ship to Aman, where those in our circles, well, his circles, were unlikely to know where much of these other words and phrases had come from. Even if we were to conduct a study and examine all the existing tracts on the Eastern languages and interview the elves who had ventured into the region, it would take years, centuries, perhaps an Age. I did not have even a decade left. And so, I would never know. 

Mirkshaded, when he said Mirkshaded, may have been telling me his name. He may have been telling me something else entirely: the word for fence, or stranger, or the word for a person who writes things down while other people live their lives. I do not know. I wrote it as a name and then I wrote him as a person. When he tried to tell me stories in the little Westron he had, I filled in the gaps with what I thought was most sympathetic. 

I wrote about what I imagined he felt at the sight of a round green door, and I put the joy in his face myself, with my own pen, and I believed it because I was there and I saw him smile. I had thought, when I wrote the first piece on Mirkshaded, that it would do something. I was not so naive as to assume it would change everything but that it might shift something in a city where the Easterlings are known only by their ancient treachery, shift some some small interior thing, in the reader who encountered Mirkshaded on the page and found him vivid and warm and real, who laughed at the fence-vaulting and felt the cold of his unsuitable tunic and perhaps, over breakfast, thought: well. He was only a boy. 

Your letters told me it had worked. They came in for weeks, from all across Aman, from elves who had been at Alqualondë and elves who had been at Sirion and elves who had been nowhere near either but had heard the stories of what swarthy men did and what they were, and the letters said: we wept. They said: we had not thought of them this way. They said: oh, your Mirkshaded, your poor boy. And I read these letters and felt that the writing had been worth doing, that the record had become what I needed it to be. 

Just like my rabbit.

What I did not ask Mirkshaded, told myself I could not ask, across the languages and the scimitar and the knee-high gate between us, neither of us having consented to our respective positions in that particular arrangement, was what such a smile at the sight of my round door meant to him. I feared asking.

I feared asking because I feared the answer. 

The Eldar do not understand what it costs me to recognise this. I do not say that seeking sympathy and neither am I expressing intellectual superiority or superior morality. I say it because I think the Eldar are still, in their deep and careful hearts, incapable of understanding it, and because they view this incapacity as an inevitable consequence of having an unbroken memory that functions as an unbroken mirror, always showing them the same face at the same flattering angle.

At some unwritten point in this interview, Fëanor asked me what it was to be mortal and I told him it was to be subject to forces you cannot see, and he nodded, and said: yes, exactly, yes, that is precisely what I mean about —

But that is not what I mean. Or at least, not entirely, because I do mean that too. I cannot see the Valar nor understand their immensity, but across these few thousand words you may have come to the realisation that I could not truly see nor understand Fëanor either. What I mean is that the forces I cannot see include my own habits of perception, the ones laid down before I knew to name them, the ones that let me stand at a gate and watch ink purple in the sun. The Eldar suffer from their own catastrophes, their own losses, their own vast and operatic griefs that reshape the world. I do not dispute that neither Fëanor nor all the inhabitants of this Undying Land are constrained by its limitations, gagged by certainty. What I am saying is that they do not suffer from the fear of not knowing how much of what you take from a story is simply what you need it to tell you. 

The elves of Aman receive my stories of the events in Middle Earth and the chronicling of Fëanor and his sons and all the losses they have faced and they have wreaked, and they grieve, yes, grieve genuinely, I do not doubt the grief. And then they fold the grief neatly into a chamber of their heart, which is by now so vast and so elaborately organised that one more tragedy can always find its alcove, can always be given a place in the sequence, and the sequence is always (if you follow it back far enough) the heartrending tale of what was done to the Eldar, and what the Eldar were forced to become in response, and how the world was diminished by their diminishment, and how even their failures have a magnificence that the failures of lesser peoples cannot approach.

Fëanor said to me: what craft and song must have vanished when Doriath fell. 

And he was right. He was entirely right. Yet in the same sentence, spoken aloud or not, lay the assumption that still clouds this land, the assumption which gave rise to Fëanor himself. The assumption that craft and song are the measure and that Doriath's value is denominated by the perfection of its pitch and the beauty of its sculptures, that mourning is proportional to productivity, that the children who might have composed new music and carved towers of marble are more grievable than the children who might have grown up to become petty thieves or tinkers or, worst of all, nothing that historians would trouble to record. 

I noticed this only later, not when I wrote it in my notebook. And then I wrote around it very carefully for three weeks and produced a portrait of a difficult man reckoning with his difficult legacy, and almost published it as such. 

The Eldar have a word, derived from Quenya and later adapted into Sindarin, a word I have forgotten now or perhaps never learned correctly, for the heroic act of attempting to improve upon the quality of a thing made so well it seemed impossible to be improved upon. It is a triumphant word. They apply it deservedly to Fëanor's Silmarils. They apply it to certain passages of music, to delicate gold filigree, to marble sculpture and the finest of wines. Never, I have noticed, is it applied to a choice. Never to a relationship, never to anything that requires an ongoing negotiation between multiple people or peoples where nobody is certain about what they are doing or what might come next. They trap the perfect and the permanent within the same word, with no room for divergence. I have been thinking about this for the three weeks this interview took me. 

I think it explains a great deal.

I am not exonerating myself by condemning the Eldar. I want to be precise about this. The problem I am describing is not elvish. It is not even Fëanorian, though Fëanor is perhaps its most extravagant expression in recorded history. It is the problem of the person, of any person, of me, of the men in the white tower in Minas Tirith, of the scholar who asked if I needed assistance in front of the fresco, of the respectable hobbits of the Shire who had very understandable reasons for every border they maintained, who has found a way to convert their position in the world into evidence of their own rightness. Who has arranged the furniture of their experience so that wherever they stand, they are standing in the light.

I stood in the light for a very long time. I was invited into it, and I accepted the invitation, and I was grateful, and I did not ask who had not been invited or what the room looked like in the dark.

Mirkshaded vaulted the fence and exclaimed in delight at the sight of my round door. That sole gesture is all I truly know. The fence he was stationed at and the fence he vaulted were the same fence, and for four seconds the world held still, and his face had not yet been fully processed by history, until I saw it and recorded it and turned it into the most bearable version of itself and I am still, to this day, uncertain whether that was an act of witness or a final, irreducible theft. Ink purples in the sun. 

Here are three facts. 

1. I was there.
2. I saw it all.
3. I wrote it down.

And somewhere in that sequence of three true things lives a fourth thing, which is not true at all, which is what I have written. 

Bilbo Baggins is the Editor in Chief of Hello Valar. He is the author of There and Back Again, Errantry, Translations from the Elvish (Vols. I–III), and a pamphlet on correct mushroom cultivation that remains the magazine's highest-selling back issue. He lives in Tirion with his nephew Frodo. 

Lord Fëanor is the ruling lord of Formenos and the proprietor of the Third Gemological Survey of the region. Formerly, Fëanor had been crowned High King of the Noldor, constructed the Tengwar alphabet and had crafted the exquisite Silmarils from light itself, where one remains to this day as the star Gil-Estel. He does not have a tail, despite his claims to the contrary. 

Excerpt from letter to Bilbo Baggins, translated across two Ages from the Fourteenth Easterly Language by Elrond Peredhel, and completed in the Sixth Age of Arda. 

You have to understand that Harad is not waiting. 

That is the thing I need you to understand before anything else. Harad is not waiting to be understood. We are not at the beginning of something you have already finished. We did not start late, and we are not behind, because late and behind are your categories and I am not in them. When I was thirteen, I had a teacher who said that the worst thing a mind can do is measure everything from where it is standing, as though the standing place were the centre of the world rather than just a place you happened to stop. I think about that a great deal, here, in this place where everything is very green and very certain and the roads all know where they are going and they seem to be going forward from where the people they carry stand and these people are not surprised to find themselves heading in that direction.

I want to go home. Not because this is bad: it is not bad, it is very green and very lush, I have said that. And as you know, I like your round green door very much. I want to go home because I too have stories to tell for the people who wait for me. I have a grandmother, who will ask me questions and who will know when my answers are thin and will push on them until they become honest, and I want to sit with her and give honest answers about what I have seen. I want to tell her about how a people can be clever and good and still believe, so completely they have stopped noticing the belief, that the shape of their life is the shape all life naturally takes if left alone. They believe their fences are not fences because those who live within them are permitted to vault over them if they wish. 

For that was what I meant when I told you stars were fruit strung across the branches of the world tree.

 I was not telling you anything about what the stars looked like, only that each star lights up those proximal to it, knowing they are all connected by the same branches and so on and so forth until there is not a single unlit sky in our world. I was telling you that living means navigating the dense, everchanging thicket of relations between Ages and Peoples. That to keep living is not to regret or to reconcile, but to forge new ways of relating to one another, even if at the cost of burning older branches and burying rotten wood. To make choices that are different from the choices made before, in the hopes that this time, something else might come of it. I was telling you why I wished to tell my grandmother of your round green door. 

I told you this, even though you looked as though you did not understand what I was saying. 

But I think you understood. 

I hope you will pass it on, and tell them it was I, Mehrzād, who told you the same. 

I will go home soon. It will be warm and dry and my grandmother will be alive and I will report to her, as I said I would, and she will ask me questions I cannot answer, as I said she would. I will describe the green and the low doors and the language I could not comprehend, your seven meals each day and you, the particular you of Master Bilbo Baggins, as carefully as I can. I think I will find that I cannot describe the Shire without describing what it cost me to leave it, nor will I be able to describe what it cost me to leave it without describing what it would cost me to stay. This is the problem with having been somewhere. You carry the place even when the place will not carry you, will not register your weight and goes on being itself in your absence with the completeness of things that were never incomplete without you. I think, my friend, that you will understand this, being as well-travelled as you are. 

I will think about this when I look at the sandstone mountains, which I have looked at my whole life without thinking about them. They are very large and very old and they cast long shadows on barren ground. I used to find this simply true. Now I find it true in a way that has more room in it, that holds more than one thing at a time, which I think is what happens to a fact when you have lived long enough inside its consequences.

The Great Foe. How much you have told me of the First Great Foe, Morgoth the demon, and the Second Great Foe, Sauron the sorcerer, without ever asking what I knew of Great Foes. Under our Second Great Foe’s command, early in the Second Age of our world, our four rivers, the Kovīr and the Harun, the Naila and the Vashem, were rerouted from the mountains to feed the Anduin. This was meant to be a solution to two problems at once: to punish us for having turned to your First Great Foe in the First Age of Arda, and to provide more drinking water to the new settlements run by the men who had taken the coastline by force, men who carried the banner of our First Great Foe, a being none living had ever set eyes upon aside from being a name written upon the banners that were raised on our razed coastlines, and the name taught in the lesson-houses our children were made to attend. Our Second Great Foe, you see, had aligned with these men. 

And so, the scraps of river we were left had dried into dark red dirt, indistinguishable from dried blood, and we turned our backs on our Second Great Foe and turned in desperate devotion to yours. From there, you know the story, for you have told it to me. But had you asked me what I had known of Great Foes, I would have told you all I know of the Second Great Foe, whom you know as the High King Ereinion Gil-galad, and why we named Elros Tar-Minyatur as the First Great Foe, though he had died centuries before his men stepped foot upon this land. 

On the warm nights in which I liked to sleep upon the top of your hillock, I spent a lot of time thinking about mountains. Not only the sandstone mountains of home or the cold stone mountains from which the Kovir springs, but all of them, the low hill within which your remarkable home burrows, every frozen range I crossed to get here and every range I could see from the places I stopped and every range I only knew was there because someone told me, the ones in the north where you are from and the ones further north than that and the ones at the edges of maps where the cartographer's confidence runs out and the line gets tentative. They all do one thing. Every mountain on Arda, the old ones and the young ones, the ones with names and the ones that have only ever been described by the people who live: such vast shadows do they cast.

This is not a metaphor, because, I am so tired of things being metaphors for other things. This is just what mountains do, this is the most basic fact about them, and nobody who has not thought about it finds it strange, and I did not find it strange until I had been far enough from home to step outside the shadow and look back and see the mountain, and realise that the mountain could not see what it was doing to the ground. 

They could not. Because that ground was where the light was not, and some called that shadow and feared it, some mastered their fear and ventured within it to carry stories home, and others lived there, and built there, and called it home. This was so, this is so. And Bilbo, my friend, I fear that it will always be so, as long as the shadows cast by mountains fall upon ground the mountains have never touched and will never know. 

Mehrzād was the first lord of the settlement of Halkovīr, after its unification under the banner of Gondor. After completing a decade of education in Minas Tirith, young Mehrzād served as the Gondorian Ambassador to Halvashem and de-facto minister, and he is known for implementing the widespread teaching of Westron and Sindarin in schools across the region. 

The Kovīr, Harun, Naila and Vashem still feed the Anduin, though regular shipments of drinkable water are sent out to the Easterly Settlements from Ithilien and Minas Tirith. Mehrzād, whose name translates to ‘Born of the Sun’, is buried in the crypts of Gondor, alongside his fellow ministers and liege lords.