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Of the Rumour and the Name
Being an Account of What Was Said and Left Unsaid in the House of Elrond upon the Hills of Aman, in the Weeks Following the Coming of Maglor Fëanorion
A Tale of the Fourth Age
Here is set down, after the manner of the lore-masters of Tol Eressëa, certain events that passed in the house of Elrond Half-elven during the season called Nosta-tuilë of the three-hundred-and-seventeenth year of the Fourth Age. The account is drawn from the testimonies of those who were present and those who stood at the edges of what was present, and it is offered not as full history but as a partial light upon a matter that was spoken of in whispers for many years before it was spoken of openly, and in some quarters of Aman is spoken of in whispers still.
I. What the Household Knew
The servants of Elrond's house had, over the long ages of their service, developed a particular and refined understanding of the difference between things their lord wished to be known and things he merely had not yet troubled to conceal. These were not the same category. Lord Elrond communicated his will in many registers: the explicit decree, the unspoken permission, the deliberate silence that was itself a kind of instruction. His household had been trained — as much by the gentle patience of Lady Celebrían in the older days as by long proximity to Elrond himself — to read these registers with care.
The presence of the stranger in the east wing was, therefore, a matter of the third kind: not announced, not concealed, and consequently the subject of significant private discussion.
His name was not spoken aloud in the lower halls. This was partly because the steward, Rúmendil — a grey-eyed Noldo of middling years whose family had served the house since the days of Imladris — had looked very deliberately at two serving-women who had begun to exchange speculation across a corridor, and they had not continued. But partly it was because the name itself carried a weight that rendered casual utterance difficult. There were names in the history of the Eldar that were not curses and were not blessings and were not merely names: they were events, compressed to syllables. Maglor son of Fëanor was such a name.
Among the younger members of the household — those who had come to Elrond's service in Aman, who had been born, some of them, into a world from which Morgoth had long since been expelled and Sauron was a receding shadow in old songs — the name produced a quality of feeling that they were too young and too fortunate to have any right to: a cold recognition, the way one recognises the smell of lightning before the strike. They had heard the tales. Every Eldar child in Aman had heard the tales. The Kinslayings were not ancient abstractions to them as they might have been to Men who had inherited only the distant echo of those years; the Eldar forgot nothing, and what they did not remember they were told by those who did.
Síreth, who was Telerin by blood — her grandmother's grandmother had stood on the quays of Alqualondë and watched the ships burn — did not go near the east wing at all during those first weeks. She was not reproached for this. Rúmendil, who observed everything, made no remark upon her altered routing through the house, and assigned her duties accordingly, and if his own expression held a particular quality of compressed care when he watched her take the longer way around the inner court, he kept that care where it lived and said nothing of it to anyone.
Cúven, who was Noldorin and had no personal memory of the Kinslayings but whose father spoke sometimes of the crossing of the Helcaraxë and the long shame that had been the Exile's shadow — Cúven brought the morning water to the east corridor and set it outside the door, as was customary for a guest of the house, and did not linger, and did not look, and walked back through the stone passages with the particular set of jaw that belongs to a person doing something that is not comfortable and has decided to do it anyway.
It was Cúven who reported, in the kitchen that evening, that the sound of a harp could be heard through the door.
This produced a silence in the kitchen that lasted rather longer than such silences usually last. There were four people present. None of them, afterward, when asked by others to describe the sensation of that silence, could do so with adequate precision. One said it was like hearing, very distantly, the echo of something vast falling into water. Another said it was like recognising a word in a language one was not supposed to know. Neither account was quite right, but neither was entirely wrong.
II. The Counsellor
Erestor, who had been the chief counsellor of the house of Elrond since the days of Imladris and who had followed his lord across the Sea with the quiet commitment of a man who has attached his fate to another's and regards the arrangement as settled, came to the east wing on the fourteenth day.
He came not because he had been asked, but because he had waited a sufficient number of days to determine that he would not be asked, and had concluded that the matter was therefore one he would have to address himself. This was not an unusual circumstance in his service. Elrond was a lord of remarkable clarity in counsel and remarkable — it could not be called evasiveness, for it lacked the element of intent — remarkable obliquity when the matter at hand was one that touched his heart directly. He had been oblique about his wife's departure for Aman, after the long horror of the Redhorn Pass. He had been oblique about Arwen. He was being oblique about this.
Erestor, who had managed the obliquities for three thousand years, went to the east wing.
The door was open. This was either a deliberate signal or an oversight, and Erestor was not in the habit of assuming oversight in those older than himself. He stopped in the doorway.
The man sitting at the window was not, on first sight, what he had expected. Erestor had spent considerable private effort preparing himself for this encounter, and had prepared, among other things, an expectation: of magnitude, of some residual terror, of the particular quality that the great and ruined sometimes carry, which is not unlike the quality of a fortified city after it has been taken, all the architecture still impressive and all of it serving purposes it was not built for. He had expected something that would explain why Elrond had gone so still in the courtyard, that day the cart arrived; something that would justify the way the whole of the east wing had rearranged itself around a single occupied room.
What he saw was a tall elf sitting in a window-seat with a book open on his knee, and not reading it, and watching the garden below with an expression that was merely — tired. Not the tiredness of a single night or a single grief, but the tiredness of a very long labor from which one has lately been permitted to rest. The hands were still. The famous dark hair, the Fëanorian darkness, fell loose to the shoulder. There was, about the set of the whole figure, a quality of extraordinary quietness that was not peace.
"Erestor," the man said, without turning. His voice was what the stories claimed: low, and precisely controlled, and underneath the control, something else that Erestor's ear — an ear that had sat in council chambers and great halls across two Ages of the world — could not quite name. It was not resonance exactly. It was more nearly the quality a deep-carved riverbed keeps, long after the flood that shaped it has ceased.
"My lord," said Erestor, and was then briefly at a disadvantage, because he had not meant to say that, and the title was both accurate — Maglor was a lord of the Noldor by blood and standing, whatever else he was — and, in the circumstances, complicated.
"I am not your lord," Maglor said, without heat. "Elrond is your lord. Sit down, if you will. You have the look of a man who has been standing in a doorway rehearsing himself for rather too long."
Erestor sat.
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable in the way he had expected it to be. It was uncomfortable in a different way, which was worse. He had prepared for anger, for the grand terrible grief of the legendary, for some quality of — monstrousness, if he was honest with himself, for something that would render the moral situation clear and simple. He had not prepared for a man who read (or did not read) quietly in a window and called him by name before he had spoken.
"You are the counsellor," Maglor said, presently, setting the book aside. "I remember Elrond speaking of you — not recently. Long ago."
"I have served him a long time."
"He trusts you."
"I believe so."
"Then you are here because he will not come himself and send his anxieties in his place, and you have come to determine whether I am a danger."
Erestor considered several responses. He settled on: "I have come to offer the formal courtesies of the house, which were somewhat — interrupted — by the circumstances of your arrival."
Maglor looked at him then, for the first time fully, and Erestor held the look without flinching, though it required some effort. The blue eyes were extraordinary. He had read descriptions of Fëanor's sons in the old accounts — the lore-masters had not neglected the sons of the greatest craftsman of the Eldar — but no description had accounted for what it was like to have those eyes look directly at you. It was not a hostile look. It was far more disconcerting than hostility. It was the look of someone who had spent so long in the company of no one that the act of being looked at, and of looking back, was itself a kind of labour, and who was performing that labour with full attention.
"I am not," Maglor said, at last, "a danger. I am — I am old and I am very tired, and I am in my foster-son's house because he wished me to be, and I have no designs upon anyone in it. If it would help you — and through you, the household — to hear that said plainly, then consider it said."
"It helps," Erestor said, after a moment. Then, because he was an honest man and had not held Elrond's counsel for three thousand years by being otherwise: "It does not entirely resolve the matter."
"No," said Maglor. "It would not." He turned back to the window. "I am aware of what I am. I have had considerable time in which to become so."
Erestor went away with no conclusion he could put into words, and a feeling he could not organise into counsel, and spent the remainder of the evening in his study with a decanter of wine and a great deal to think about.
III. The Golden-Haired
Of all those in the house of Elrond who might have been expected to regard the last son of Fëanor with uncomplicated hostility, Glorfindel of the House of the Golden Flower was perhaps highest on any reasonable reckoning.
He had been born in the light of the Two Trees. He had followed the Exile, not from fire in the blood as many had followed it but from loyalty to Turgon his lord, and in the doing of that thing had walked into Middle-earth as one who walks into a burning room to bring out another: knowing the cost, calculating it acceptable. He had died killing a Balrog on the slopes of the Cirith Thoronath, in the last desperate passage from the ruin of Gondolin, and he had lain in the Halls of Mandos and been remade, and he had come to know, in those long years of waiting in the dark before his remaking, what it was to be stripped of everything except what one essentially was. He had been sent back. He had served faithfully through the long rear-guard action of Middle-earth's slow yielding to the West, and now he was in Aman, and he was, by any ordinary measure, entitled to a settled peace that no newcomer should disturb.
He encountered Maglor in the garden on the twenty-first morning.
It was not arranged. Glorfindel came to the garden at that hour because he had always risen early and the garden in the early morning had a quality he could find nowhere else: a clean, particular silence that was different from the silence of stone halls, a silence in which one could hear, underneath the bird-call and the first stirrings of wind, something that might have been the far light of Telperion and Laurelin resting still in the very marrow of the land, dreaming of what it had been.
Maglor was standing at the far end of the garden, near the stone wall where the morning-glory climbed, and he was looking east.
Glorfindel stopped at the garden's threshold and regarded him.
He had thought about this — as he thought about most things, carefully and in advance, with the particular thoroughness of one who had learned that the distance between 'I did not prepare for this' and 'ruin' was very short. He had thought about what he would feel. He had expected — he was not entirely certain what he had expected. Indignation, perhaps. The natural righteous anger of one who stood against everything the sons of Fëanor had stood for. The bone-deep affront of the survivor, who finds that the cause of the ruin is still, remarkably, walking about in the sunlight.
What he felt instead, looking at the still figure in the garden, was something that bore a closer resemblance to recognition.
He had stood in the Halls of Mandos. He knew what it looked like to carry ages of weight in a body that continued, apparently, to function. He knew the precise quality of stillness that a person who has returned from very far away carries with them — the way they are always, at some level, listening for something that is no longer there; the way the world around them has a quality of unreality that gradually diminishes but never entirely departs. He had been told, by those wiser than himself, that his own return had taken something from him — not memory, not strength, but a certain lightness, a quality that the Trees had placed in him before the darkness came, and that the darkness had taken as its toll. He had not, in the long years since, found another word for what was absent. He had learned to live without it.
He looked at Maglor, and the recognition was specific and without sentiment.
He walked to the far end of the garden.
Maglor heard him coming — of course he heard him — and turned, and looked, and the blue eyes took in the golden hair and the bearing and the particular quality of light that those who had dwelt long in Valinor sometimes carried, and Maglor was quiet for a moment with a look that was not fear precisely but was not far from it.
"Glorfindel," he said, at last.
"Maglor Fëanorion," said Glorfindel. He was not one for unnecessary ornament. He said: "You look as I looked, when first I returned."
A pause, in which the morning-glory moved against the wall, and the wind carried from somewhere below the long low sound of the sea.
"And how did you look?" Maglor said.
"As though you cannot entirely persuade yourself the world is solid," Glorfindel said. "As though when you touch a wall, part of you is still surprised to find it there." He looked at the garden around them. "It passes. More quickly than you would expect."
"You were in the Halls," Maglor said. It was not quite a question.
"I was. Long enough." He did not elaborate on what long enough meant, but something in his voice accounted for it without the words. "I was remade by the grace of Manwë, and sent back, and I served in Middle-earth through the whole of the Second and Third Age, and now I am here. And I will tell you what I was told, because no one told me and I think it would have helped: the strangeness of being solid again is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that you have been somewhere where nothing was solid for a very long time, and the body remembers, even when the mind has stopped. You were not in the Halls. But you have been somewhere not unlike them."
Maglor said nothing. He turned back toward the east.
After a time he said: "Do you hate me?"
Glorfindel considered this with the care it deserved. He said: "No. I knew your brothers, in Gondolin's early years — knew them at a distance, as one knows the faces of those whose deeds are spoken of. They were not all that the tales later made them." He paused. "I cannot speak for those who lost kinsmen at Alqualondë. I cannot speak for the Telerin people, whose wound is their own to carry. I speak only for myself, and I say: no."
He said nothing more. He walked back to the far end of the garden and resumed the contemplation he had come for.
Maglor remained at the wall for a long while after, looking east, where nothing was visible but the slope of the hills and the particular quality of morning that belonged to these shores and nowhere else in the world.
IV. The Silver Lady
Celebrían had known, before Elrond told her.
This was not unusual. She had long had, as her mother had had before her, a perception that was something other than ordinary sight — not foresight, not the distant vision of the Valar's servants, but a sensitivity to the movements of things in the world she occupied that expressed itself as a certainty before the cause of the certainty was known. She had felt, on a particular morning in the early part of the season, a shift in the house: something like the feeling when a great weight is gently set down nearby, and the ground, without any dramatic expression, adjusts.
She waited for Elrond to come to her.
He came, that evening, in the particular manner he had when he carried something difficult: quickly, directly, without preamble, setting the thing down before he had time to find a better way to set it down.
She listened. She said nothing for a long while.
She was not the same Celebrían who had crossed the Misty Mountains in the year two thousand five hundred and nine of the Third Age. The Aman she had been brought to, broken and diminished, had given back many things — the healing of the body, certainly; the healing of the spirit, in the slow long fashion that the West's light accomplished such things; a quality of peace that she had not had since childhood, when Middle-earth had not yet had occasion to show her its worst face. She was not the same, and she was entirely herself: these were not contradictory.
She was the daughter of Galadriel, whose mother's house had been attacked at Alqualondë. She was the daughter of Celeborn, whose city of Doriath had been sacked by the sons of Fëanor — by Maglor and Maedhros who had led the host in the second Kinslaying, though Maglor had, the accounts all said, been last and least willing of the brothers, heartsick with an oath he could no longer make himself refuse and no longer make himself execute and had executed nonetheless. She had grandmothers in the Halls of Mandos who had died because the sons of Fëanor came for a jewel.
She also had sons who had nearly ceased to function in the years after her attack in the Redhorn Pass — who had ridden out with the Dúnedain for decades, hunting Orcs with a methodical and terrible patience that she knew, and Elrond knew, had less to do with heroism than with a particular kind of grief that could find no other outlet. She had a daughter who had died, mortal and beloved, in Gondor. She had a husband whose face, on the day Arwen made her choice, had contained a grief so large that she had been frightened by it.
She had, in short, a complicated history.
She went to the east wing on the twenty-eighth day.
She did not go to his door. She went instead to the outer corridor that overlooked the garden on the east side, and she stood at the window there, at an angle where she could see without being seen, and she looked at the man sitting in the lower garden with a harp across his knee.
He was not playing. He had the harp the way one holds something old and reliable and in some complex way beloved, the way one holds a tool one has carried a long time without using.
She watched him for a while.
She had expected — she had not known what she had expected, in truth. Something more threatening. Something that demanded a response. She had braced herself, walking these corridors, for an encounter with a legend, and what she found was a thin and ancient-seeming elf sitting in the late afternoon light, looking at the middle distance.
She felt, with some discomfort, the stirring of something she had not anticipated: not forgiveness — she was not certain she had the right to forgive what had not been done to her directly, and was not inclined to manufacture piety out of others' wounds — but something more difficult than anger. The Noldolantë, which Maglor had written, and which she had heard sung twice in her life in Middle-earth, and once, very quietly, by Elrond alone in his study on a night when he thought no one was listening, was the most beautiful lament she had ever heard. This was an uncomfortable fact. It sat alongside all the other facts without resolving any of them.
She was there long enough that a shadow fell from the west wall to cover most of the garden before she turned and walked away.
She did not speak to him. Not that day.
But she left a small bundle of herbs from her own garden — southernwood, and dried lavender, the kind that in Lórien she had grown in the inner court, the kind whose smell she associated with very old things that were still living — outside the east wing door. She told no one why. She told herself it was not forgiveness and not absolution and not anything so clean as either of those; that it was only the acknowledgement that something in the garden was trying to heal, and that she, of all people in this house, understood what that trying looked like, and that understanding was not approval and was not exculpation and was not required to be either.
The herbs were gone in the morning. Nothing was said about them.
V. What Was Said at Alqualondë
Rumour, among the Eldar, does not travel quickly. This is one of its more deceptive qualities. It moves slowly and with great patience, the way a tide moves — inch by inch, without drama, until one looks up and notices that the landscape has changed entirely.
The rumour of Maglor's coming reached Alqualondë in the early part of the second month.
The lord of the Telerin harbour-house to the south of Elrond's estate — a tall, sea-silver elf of the old blood, whose name was Voronwë Súrion, and who was not that Voronwë though his ancestor had been — came to the gate of Elrond's house and asked to speak with the lord.
Rúmendil received him in the outer hall, because Lord Elrond was engaged, and because Rúmendil was competent to receive visitors who came with political rather than social intent, and this visit was clearly political.
Voronwë Súrion said: "I have heard a thing that I do not credit, and I come to ask whether it is true."
"I would ask you first what you have heard," said Rúmendil, "as a precaution against confirming or denying the wrong thing."
Voronwë Súrion's jaw was very fine and very set. "I have heard that the house of Elrond shelters one of the sons of Fëanor. I have heard a name I will not repeat in any house that looks toward the sea."
The silence between them lasted long enough to establish that Rúmendil was not going to deny it.
"There is no law," Rúmendil said, carefully, "that has been broken. The Valar have not forbade it. Our lord has made his choice in a matter that falls within his right to choose. The house receives whom the lord declares it shall receive."
"Your lord," said Voronwë Súrion, "did not have a grandmother who was slain at Alqualondë."
"No," said Rúmendil. "He had a mother who died of the Kinslaying at Sirion."
The silence that followed this was of a different quality.
Rúmendil said, with great care: "I am not telling you that your grief is wrong. I am not telling you that the Telerin people have no standing in this matter. I am telling you that there are griefs here in several directions, and that Lord Elrond is not unmindful of any of them, and that if you wish to speak with him directly, he will receive you, and he will hear you, and he will not dismiss what you bring him." He paused. "He is good that way. He always has been."
Voronwë Súrion looked at him for a long moment. He was perhaps three thousand years old. He had a kind of ancient anger that was not heat but cold, the kind that has been kept long and therefore kept very well; and behind it, at a distance the cold was clearly intended to maintain, something else that Rúmendil recognised without being able to name it, which was the peculiar quality of the very old who have outlived all the uncomplicated feelings they once had about a thing.
He left without asking to see Elrond. He came back three weeks later and asked to see Elrond, and was received, and what passed between them in the inner hall was known only to those present, and none of them told it.
VI. The Nature of Silence
Three matters were remarked upon in the household, in the weeks that followed.
The first was that the stranger from the east wing came to the evening meal on the fortieth day, and sat at the far end of the long table, and ate without speaking, and was not spoken to except by Elladan, who asked him something in a low voice about the birds in the garden below the east wall, and received an answer, and the exchange was brief and ordinary and lasted perhaps five sentences, and was apparently unremarkable enough that no one mentioned it afterward — which was, Rúmendil thought, itself remarkable.
The second was that Glorfindel, who had a habit of walking in the lower garden before dawn, was seen on several mornings to stop and exchange some quiet words with the figure who stood, on those same mornings, at the east wall. The conversations appeared to be brief and without ceremony. No one knew their content. This, too, was not spoken of directly, but was known.
The third was the harp.
The east wing was far enough from the main hall that it could not be heard there; but it could be heard in the outer corridor, and in the kitchen garden if the wind lay in the right direction, and on the terrace where Celebrían sometimes walked in the evenings. The playing was not constant and was not performed; it had the quality of private thought, the kind that does not know it is being overheard. It was, to those who heard it — and all of them admitted, later, to having stopped whatever they were doing to listen — very beautiful in the way that very old things are sometimes beautiful, with a beauty that is inseparable from the grief of what they have survived. It was nothing like the music of the halls or the bright clear singing of the Noldor in their high days; it was, rather, what that music might have come to resemble after it had been taken down to the ground and had made its long slow way back up through the dark.
Síreth, who had not gone near the east wing in seven weeks, was found one evening sitting in the outer corridor not far from that door, with her knees drawn up and her back to the wall, listening. She looked up when Rúmendil found her with an expression that dared him to remark upon it.
He did not remark upon it.
VII. An Evening
Late in the season, on a night when the stars were very clear and Eärendil's light burned steady in the West, Elrond sat in the outer hall and played a game of draughts against Elladan, which he was losing with the focused attention of a man who is thinking about something else.
Elrohir, who was not playing, sat in the window-seat and watched both his father and the garden. After some time he said: "He is in the lower terrace."
Elrond made a move on the board. Elladan countered it. Elrond studied the result without comment.
"He goes there often in the evenings," Elrohir added.
"I know," said Elrond.
"You do not go to him."
"He knows where I am." Elrond studied the board. "He has always known where I am. He will come when he is ready, or he will not come, and either is within his right."
Elladan looked up from the game. He and Elrohir exchanged something through that silent channel the twins had always maintained, quick and complete as a note passed under a door. "He seems — " Elladan began.
"He seems less like someone who is drowning," Elrohir finished. "And more like someone who has stopped drowning and is not yet certain what it is to stand on land."
Elrond looked at his sons with an expression that was, for a moment, unguarded. It was the expression of a man looking at two things he loves simultaneously and finding the sight of them together something that language has not entirely kept pace with.
"Yes," he said. "That is very nearly right."
The game continued. The stars did not move in the way stars move in Middle-earth; they moved as they move in Aman, with a stateliness that acknowledged, in its unhurried passage, that the world below had sufficient weight to merit their patience.
In the lower terrace, the harp played something that was not quite the Noldolantë and was not quite silence and was not quite anything else, but that carried in it — for those who stood near enough to hear, and were willing to listen, and had enough history to understand what they were hearing — a quality that had no word in any tongue the Eldar had yet made, which was the sound of someone returning, very slowly, to a world that had not expected them to return, and finding, against considerable expectation, that the world had left room.
Here ends the second account of the Coming of the Last Son of Fëanor to the Undying Lands.
What followed is told elsewhere.