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Of the Idleness of the Sons of Elrond, and of Their Settling — or Unsettling — in the Blessed Realm
Being a tale from the Undying Lands, in the age after the passing of the War of the Ring, set down here for those who wished to know what became of Elrond's twin sons after they at last departed the Hither Shore.
Now it is a well-known thing among those who study the lore of the Eldar that the Blessed Realm of Aman is a place of surpassing beauty, of light that does not weary the eyes, of music that does not grow thin with repetition, of halls so gracious and shores so fair that an elf of the west might wander them for an age of the world and never once exhaust their wonder. It is a place of peace, and of rest, and of profound and deeply considered contentment.
Elladan and Elrohir found it, at first, enormously dull.
This requires some explanation — for the sons of Elrond were not, by any measure or account, ordinary elves. They had not arrived in Aman by the road most commonly taken: born in youth to grey ships and the slow westward sailing, carried thither in that gentle diminishment that the passage of ages and the fading of the world imposes even on the mightiest of Elven-kind. No. They had arrived rather as a pair of arrows loosed from a bowstring — sudden, swift, and with considerably more commotion than the harbour at Avallónë was quite prepared for.
The Elves of the haven had watched the ship come in. They always watched ships come in, for arrivals from the Hither Shore were less common now than they had been in former ages, and each one carried news, and faces known or unknown, and sometimes grief, and sometimes joy, and always — always — some quality of the mortal world still clinging to the travellers like the smell of open sea. The ship that bore the sons of Elrond bore more than the usual allowance of that quality. It came in quickly, for one thing, as though it had been somewhat hurried upon its way. And when it docked, the two who stepped from it onto the quay did not look like elves arriving in the Undying Lands for the first time.
They looked, if truth be told, like elves who had just escaped something, and were not entirely decided whether they were relieved or annoyed about it.
"This is it, then," said Elladan. He was looking at Aman with the expression of one who has been told a great deal about a country and is now revising his expectations against the reality of it. The reality, it must be said, considerably exceeded the descriptions — the light alone was enough to make him blink — and yet there remained about his posture something irreducibly sceptical.
"That is it," agreed Elrohir, who stood beside him and wore, as he very often did, an expression closely matching his brother's. They were alike enough in face that strangers not infrequently mistook one for the other, though those who knew them well could find the difference in an instant: Elladan had a way of lifting one eyebrow when he was thinking that Elrohir did not share, and Elrohir was possessed of a small, private smile at the corners of his mouth that appeared when he found something amusing but had not yet decided whether to say so. That smile was there now.
"No orcs," said Elrohir.
"No orcs," Elladan confirmed.
A pause.
"There are no orcs anywhere in Aman," said Elrohir, as though the full weight of this fact was only now descending upon him. "None at all. Not even remnants. Not even stragglers."
"The first Dark Lord is in the Void," said Elladan, "and the second is destroyed, and his servants scattered, and the last of them — "
"— are dealt with," said Elrohir.
"Are dealt with," Elladan agreed. They both looked at their hands for a moment. They were fine hands — strong and quick, long-fingered, bearing the small and almost invisible marks of long swordsmanship. Then they looked up, and across the quay, and up the long green hill that climbed from the haven toward the light.
Two figures were coming down that hill.
Now it would be unfair and unjust to say that Elrond Half-elven ran — for he was of the great and ancient blood, and the great and ancient blood does not run upon quays to greet arriving vessels, any more than mountains run to meet the sea. What may be said with full accuracy is that his usual measured and stately pace was, on this occasion, somewhat more rapid than strict dignity warranted, and that the space between himself and his sons closed in a manner that suggested considerable urgency on all parts, and that what followed was not merely the formal greeting of one elvish lord to his returning kinsmen.
Celebrían was laughing. She had been laughing for a good many centuries, it seemed to those who knew her, with the particular quality of one who has come through grief so deep it swallowed her whole and arrived, on the other side, at a joy clean as fresh water. She gathered both her sons into her arms without ceremony and without the slightest concern for what the elves of the haven thought of it.
Elladan, who had faced the armies of Mordor without flinching and who had once held a mountain pass against a force four times the size of his company for three days and two nights, pressed his face into his mother's shoulder and did not speak for quite some time.
Elrohir was no different. He was, if anything, worse.
Elrond, for his part, stood a little apart and looked at his sons — at their faces that had aged not at all since he had last seen them, for they had chosen the life of the Eldar and so the years had not laid their marks upon them, and yet which wore a quality he had not known in them when they were children in Imladris. Something that might be called, if one were searching for a word, the look of elves who had done what they came to do and no longer knew, quite, what they were for.
He recognised it. He had worn it himself, long ago.
He said nothing. He folded both his sons into his arms alongside their mother, and the four of them stood upon the quay in Avallónë while the harbour went about its quiet business around them, and for a long while, nothing was said at all.
The house that Elrond had built in Aman sat upon a slope above a river, and had about it a quality that those who had known Imladris in its glory found at once familiar and yet more itself — as though the house in the Hidden Valley had always been reaching toward this form, and had now arrived at it. It had high windows that let in the remarkable light of the Undying Lands, which was nothing like sunlight as it was known in Middle-earth: it had no edge to it, no shadows that it threw were harsh, and at evening it did not simply depart but seemed rather to subside, gently, like a tide retreating from a well-known shore.
Into this house Elladan and Elrohir were installed with considerable warmth, and fussed over, and fed — for Celebrían had decided views on the matter of feeding — and shown their rooms, and given clean clothes, and generally attended to in the manner of elves who had been waiting a very long time to attend to someone and were not going to waste the opportunity.
The first three weeks were, by common agreement, thoroughly pleasant.
The trouble began, as trouble in peaceful places often does, not with any great catastrophe but with the small and insidious creep of ordinary time.
Aman was beautiful. It was also, in the way of beautiful places maintained by powers far older and wiser than any who now wandered its paths, thoroughly orderly. Here the light rose and fell with a precision that made the weather of Middle-earth seem like the tantrums of a disordered child. Here no darkness came that was not merely night, and no night brought anything more threatening than the extraordinary density of stars above the Pelóri. Here there were no patrols to ride, because there was nothing in Aman that required patrolling against. Here no messenger arrived breathless at dawn with word of attacks upon undefended settlements, or incursions from the north, or strange movements observed in the hills. Here the hills contained nothing but grass and deer and, occasionally, elves composing songs about the grass and the deer, which was a perfectly agreeable activity but hardly the sort of thing that required an immediate response.
"I am becoming soft," announced Elladan, one morning approximately four months after their arrival, from the depths of an extremely comfortable chair.
Elrohir, lying on his back on the floor beside him — for no discernible reason, as there was a perfectly good second chair available — appeared to consider this. "You cannot become soft," he said at last. "You are immortal. Your body will not go soft."
"I mean in here," said Elladan, tapping his chest.
"That is not how softness works."
"I am bored," said Elladan, with great feeling.
"That is how boredom works," said Elrohir, with no feeling at all.
This was not the first such conversation, nor would it be the last. Indeed, over the following weeks and months, it became a conversation that was had in many variations and at many hours of the day, occasionally without either twin saying anything at all, the boredom expressed entirely through the medium of lounging — for Elladan and Elrohir, who had been among the most active and ranging elves of their age in Middle-earth, had discovered in Aman a capacity for spectacular, creative, and almost architectural inactivity that surprised even themselves.
Elrond observed this with an expression that was entirely composed, and was in no way whatsoever a smile.
"You are letting them sleep past dawn," said Celebrían, one morning, finding him standing in the corridor outside his sons' rooms at a perfectly reasonable hour of the morning while the rooms in question remained, demonstrably, occupied.
"They are tired," said Elrond.
"They are elves," said Celebrían. "They have been elves for several thousand years and have required no more sleep than any other elf. They are not tired. They are lazy."
"They have worked very hard," said Elrond, "for a very long time."
Celebrían looked at her husband with the fond and slightly exasperated patience of an elf who knew him rather well. "You are going to let them do exactly as they please, aren't you," she said. It was not a question.
"For a little while," said Elrond, and this time there was no concealing that it was, quietly, a smile.
For the truth of it was — and this he would not have said aloud, being by disposition of a measured and considered kind — that every morning he woke in Aman and found his sons still in the house and still bickering companionably over the relative merits of breakfast was a morning in which the part of his heart that had not quite healed since the shores of Mithlond seemed, incrementally, to do so. They were safe. They were here. They had chosen the life of the Eldar and would not be lost to the long darkness that had taken Elros; would not pass beyond the Circles of the World to whatever fate awaited mortal men in that place beyond even the sight of Valar. He was too wise a man to expect them to be exactly as they had been in youth, and too wise a father to try to make them so, but their presence — sprawling, contentious, occasionally underfoot, eating all the food that Celebrían had set aside for supper — was so precisely what he had hoped for across those long centuries of waiting that he found himself, more than once, inclined toward an indulgence he was quite aware was not entirely rational.
He let them sleep past dawn. He refilled their cups before they thought to ask. When they arrived late to the evening meal with hair still dishevelled from the afternoon nap that had somehow extended into early evening, he said nothing. He merely moved the dishes closer to their places.
Celebrían shook her head at him. He smiled. She could not, in the end, maintain any great severity on the matter — for she, too, had waited longer than patience is ordinarily expected to stretch, and when Elrohir reached across the table to steal the last of the honey-bread she had been saving since before he could reach across tables at all, she laughed, and that was that.
It could not last forever, of course. Peace has a way of pressing, gently but insistently, upon those who are unaccustomed to it, until even the most determinedly indolent elf must acknowledge that a decision or two might, eventually, be made.
The question of occupation came first. In Aman, every elf was a master of something. This was not merely convention or propriety; it was, in some sense, the nature of the place — for the Blessed Realm was a land of making and of craft, of the long and patient work of those who had all of eternity and intended to use it properly. The great ones had their great crafts: the smiths and the weavers and the singers and the makers of lore. Even the most retiring of elves had, in the long peace of Aman, found the shape of their particular art. It was considered, among those who had always lived there, something rather like breathing. One simply did it.
Elladan and Elrohir had spent several centuries doing things with swords.
"There is no call for that here," said Elladan.
"You could teach," suggested Elrond.
Both sons looked at him. It was the sort of look that conveyed, without any words at all, that they had considered this possibility and found it wanting. Teaching, it appeared, was not the same as doing, and the doing of it was the part they had enjoyed. An elf who had practised a thing for centuries against genuine necessity and genuine opposition is not the same creature as an elf who teaches it in a quiet court where the stakes are theoretical.
"What else are you good at?" asked Celebrían, who had a mother's gift for asking the question that was genuinely useful rather than merely comfortable.
There followed a silence that went on rather longer than strictly necessary.
"Riding," offered Elrohir.
"Scouting," said Elladan.
"Camping," said Elrohir, after further thought.
"Making maps of places that no longer require mapping," said Elladan, gloomily.
"Negotiating with Beornings," said Elrohir. "And with dwarves. And with the Ents, on the understanding that you have brought several days' worth of food and do not mind very long pauses."
"The Beornings are in Middle-earth," Elrond pointed out gently. "As are the dwarves. And the Ents."
Another silence.
"Hunting," said Elladan.
"There is hunting in Aman," said Elrond, "though it is conducted somewhat differently than you may be used to."
"How differently?" asked Elrohir, with the wary expression of one who suspects the answer will be philosophically complex.
"With considerably more — " Elrond paused, selecting the word — "intention."
This did not appear to reassure his sons. Intentional hunting sounded, to their ears, rather like intentional sleeping, or intentional eating: a thing made laborious by the addition of an attribute it did not require.
They were not, it should be noted, entirely unoccupied during this period of consideration. Elladan had taken to rising early — not so much from industry as from the restlessness that would not, apparently, leave him entirely — and riding out across the country, which was fair and open and seemed designed to be ridden across. He came back from these rides in better temper than he had left, though he could not be persuaded to say what exactly he had found on them. Elrohir, for his part, had developed a habit of going down to the harbour at Avallónë in the evenings, where he would sit on the quay and watch the ships for a long while before coming home. What he thought while he watched them, he did not say. His father did not ask. There are questions that an elf with good sense knows better than to press.
They had other occupations too, less deliberate but perhaps more revealing of character. Elrohir spent a morning — an unexpectedly long morning — talking to one of the craftsmen who worked in the archives of Tirion, where the great lore of the Elder Days was kept, and emerged looking simultaneously more thoughtful and more irritated than he had gone in, which in Elrohir was a combination that generally meant something had interested him against his better judgment. Elladan was discovered, on a different day, in a long conversation with a gardener who maintained one of the great gardens of the Teleri, deep in an argument about the relative merits of different growing climates; he, too, emerged from this looking as though he had not intended it to be interesting and had been betrayed by his own curiosity.
Elrond watched all of this. He said very little. He had long since learned that the wisdom of parenthood consisted in large part of the wisdom of knowing when to be quiet.
There remained, too, the matter of marriage.
It had been raised. Of course it had been raised. In Aman, where all the great houses of the Eldar were gathered and where the long peace of the Blessed Realm had, over the centuries, produced an abundance of accomplished and remarkable elves of all descriptions, the question of when a newly arrived elf of good standing and distinguished lineage might begin to look about for a companion was not considered prying; it was considered perfectly natural. Various elves of Celebrían's acquaintance had, with varying degrees of subtlety, found occasion to mention their nieces, their daughters, their cousins-twice-removed who had arrived from the East rather recently and was, by all accounts, a person of notable quality.
Elladan had, upon the first such mention, fixed the well-meaning elf with a look of such complete and total blankness that she had retreated, slightly flustered, and found somewhere else to be.
Elrohir had been more polite, but only marginally. He had listened to a description of the paragon in question, nodded in a way that conveyed respectful attention and absolutely nothing else, and then discovered an urgent need to go and see to his horse.
"You do not have a horse," Elladan reminded him, as he passed.
"I am going to go and look at horses," said Elrohir, with great dignity, and went.
"You cannot avoid it indefinitely," said Celebrían, that evening, in the tone of one who was not entirely displeased by her sons' awkwardness on the subject, however much she thought she ought to be. "In a thousand years or so, you will — "
"A thousand years," said Elladan, with some satisfaction, "is a very long time."
"It is, in fact, relatively short by elvish reckoning," said Celebrían.
"We are only recently arrived," said Elrohir. "We have not yet had time to properly — "
"You have been here eight months," said Celebrían.
"We are still getting accustomed to the light," said Elladan.
Celebrían looked at her sons. Her sons looked back at her. There was, in their expressions, the particular quality of young elves who know perfectly well that they are not being entirely sensible, and have decided, with full awareness and conviction, to continue not being entirely sensible for at least a little while longer.
"You are impossible," said Celebrían, and poured them both more wine, which was, in its way, a surrender.
The truth of it — which neither twin had said aloud, and which perhaps they had not even said to one another, though they had a way of knowing each other's minds that made the saying frequently unnecessary — was this: they had spent a very long time in a world full of partings. The companions of their youth had aged and passed on, one by one and year by year, growing old and slow and finally gone, until the faces they had known as children were photographs in the memory of the world. Their sister was gone: not dead, but gone in the manner of Arwen, who had made a different choice, and from whom they had, in the cowardice of grief, distanced themselves before the end, unable to stand and watch what mortality did to someone they loved. Their father was here now, and their mother, and they were glad — gladder than they could say and more grateful than they had expected to be. But to begin again, to take the risk again, to give their hearts again to something that might, in the long run, be lost — that required a steadiness they were not quite sure they had found yet.
They had come to Aman partly out of love for the world as it had been and partly out of something less noble but entirely honest: fear of what was coming to them if they did not. The fading. They had felt it — that cold creeping thing, like winter coming early, like the dimming of a light that should not dim — and they had chosen. It was not the most heroic of stories. It was not the kind of thing that made for stirring verse.
But they were here. They were whole. And someday — in a thousand years, or perhaps a few centuries, or perhaps after a very long holiday — they would look up from whatever they had at last found to do in the Blessed Realm, and look around, and find, perhaps, that Aman also held things worth the giving of one's heart to.
For now, though, Elladan put his feet up on the very fine furniture and Elrohir lay on his back in the summer garden watching the extraordinary stars, and their father brought them supper without being asked, and their mother shook her head at all three of them, and in the Blessed Realm of Aman, in the Age after the Shadow, this was, for the moment, quite enough.
It was Elrohir who spoke of it, at last, many months later — on a morning when the light of Aman lay gold and unhurried across the river, and both of them were sitting on the bank in the way that required no particular reason, which was a way they had sat in many places across many long years of the world.
"Do you remember," said Elrohir, "the Beorning boy who could turn into a bear?"
"Grimolf," said Elladan. "Yes. He fell at the Pelennor."
"He didn't fall at the Pelennor."
"He fell somewhere else, then.”
"He grew old," said Elrohir. "He got stiff in the joints and gave up turning into a bear because it hurt his knees." A pause. "He died, I think, shortly after we left Middle-earth. He was very old."
Elladan said nothing for a moment. The river moved past them, easy and unhurried, the way rivers in Aman always did.
"He had a good life," said Elladan.
"He did," said Elrohir. "He had children. Grandchildren. He taught them all to turn into bears."
Another silence, comfortable as an old coat.
"I miss them," said Elladan. Not with grief exactly; with something older and quieter than grief, the way one misses a season that has passed, knowing well enough that seasons do not return.
"So do I," said Elrohir.
The river ran on. Somewhere up the hill, smoke was rising from the house where their parents lived, and the faint sound of Celebrían singing drifted down through the clean air. It was a song that Elladan recognised — something she had sung when they were small and the world was different and Imladris had stood between the mountains and the sky. He had not heard it in a very long time.
He leaned back on his hands and listened. Beside him, Elrohir did the same.
They were, when all was said and done, very glad they had come.
Here ends this portion of the account of Elladan and Elrohir in Aman, which was set down before the coming of certain other matters that would, in time, disturb the peace of the Blessed Realm in ways not entirely expected. But that tale belongs to another time, and is not yet ours to tell.