Work Text:
So much has been written about the sons of Finwë. Their quarrels reshaped the history of Arda. On both sides of the Sea they are the subjects of intense scholarly interest and lengthy monographs, of long and salt-stained ballads, of swelling opera, of history paintings that run from floor to lofty ceiling.
What I offer you instead is a pair of miniatures painted on ivory, hinged together and closed like a book. Lift the latch and look inside.
The one on the left is the lady Findis, the first daughter of the House of Finwë. The image of her mother, they always said, and she decided when she was young that she wouldn’t fight against that framing. She refuses the finely worked jewels and adornments the Noldor love so well; the embroidered silks, the panelled and slashed velvets. She wears no rings, no earrings, no necklaces, but she combs gold dust through her yellow hair. Silver sheens along her cheekbones and glows on her eyelids. She’s dressed in unbleached linen like her mother as a girl in Ingwë’s house. Only the fineness and transparency of the layers speaks to her station. The skill of the miniaturist is such that you know that you could pull everything she wears through a ring with ease.
Speaking of rings: that’s the only condescension to adornment she makes. You can see that on her left hand she wears her father’s sigil set within a circle of silver leaves.
She has made herself a creature of gold and silver, white and yellow, a fusion of the Light. Vanya, they always say of her amber hair, and they ignore her cool Noldorin eyes, the same grey as her brothers’.
Findis does not play Tirion’s games. She’s not Nolofinwë, to study the board and plan his moves five paces in advance, nor Fëanáro, to overturn it. Nor Arafinwë, to clean up the mess and return the pieces to their places.
She sets her mind young to the higher things, to the study of the mysteries, and makes of her voice itself a weapon. It does not cleave gold, but numinous beings attend on it. She likes the austerity of Valimar, the city at the foot of the Mountain, and the sound of its golden bells, and the clarity of the thin air inthe high places. The noise and anger of Tirion do not follow her there. The woman in the miniature is certain, centered.
She is the eldest daughter of the house of Finwë. When the Trees die, she will put on a silk overcoat and bind up her hair. She will leave behind her quiet white house where the gods sometimes walk, and her oratory high in the cracked rock of the Mountain, and in the courts of Tirion she who is not a courtier will do both business and justice, because the king is dead, and the queen is fled back to the house of her childhood. The princes her quarreling brothers will have gone bloody-handed and -footed into darkness. The brother Findis still left will be alone, a constellation of fractured pieces. The Noldor who did not leave will not yet be reconciled to him, who walked something of the road into darkness before he turned back. His wife will still be returning his letters.
Tirion has always needed a queen as much as it needs a king. The Trees are two, and so are the delicate clockwork functions of government, a mingled harmony of gold and silver.
The woman in the painting was very young when she decided to turn her back on such a doom, but it will find her nonetheless.
-
The second portrait stares out of its circle still enamel-bright all these centuries later. The woman in it is long dead, but she has kept her high colour.
Írimë Lalwendë is every inch a princess of Finwë’s house. Her blue-black hair falls past her knees. She wears it sometimes in a net of gold, other times in a rolling wave of jet. Here it has been woven into a wreath around her head, another part teased into ringlets over her ears, the rest bound back in a heavy braid twisted with yellow pearls. A circlet cuts across her high forehead. In its centre is a milky grey star sapphire. Her father’s eyes are that colour, her brothers’, her sister’s. Irímë’s are bluer, and this painter has not chosen to tactfully bleach their unfashionable colour away. They are the colour of the sky not long after the sun has left it, though at the time she was painted no one had ever seen the sun before. There is laughter in her eyes, and the rosy mouth is curled in mirth, caught forever for a moment. Her hands are spread, and starred with jewels.
This is the lady Írimë some years before the Unchaining, before the coming of the Shadow. In her youth she was an athlete; at the time of the portrait, she is a courtier. She is very good at this game. She does not play alone, and her faction at the court of Tirion is not inconsequential. She attracts those who find Fëanáro too wild, Nolofinwë too punctilious, Arafinwë too effacing.
People who only knew her later as Lalwen of Hithlum would find it hard to recognise her. She will become a very different woman, all her laughter broken off by the Flight or perhaps by the Ice. She will cut her blue-black vanity to her shoulders and go about in clothes chosen for their economy in cloth and ease of movement. The sharp bones of her face will become sharper. She will espouse trousers.
The Noldor are endlessly profligate creators, but they are reluctant to tear down what is well-made. Hithlum will become the seat of the High King of the Exiled Noldor in far-away Beleriand, and it will still need a queen. Nolofinwë-called-Fingolfin's wife did not limp with bloody feet over the Ice. Lalwen will become the lady of Hithlum, and very good at it. She will no longer coquette, but she will be a little too indulgent of her nephews now and then.
After the Flame, after the long and lonely ride of Fingolfin into death, she will still be the lady of Hithlum. Her nephew will be king now, and what will matter is the court, the city, the kingdom, the fragile net of alliances: not the merely personal. Still she will wish she could have ridden out like her brother, with him or after him, through the blasted lands that are now the Anfauglith. Ride with a sword in her hand and tears on her face and righteous hate in her heart, and die at least facing her enemy, having called him out and drawn blood.
When the Nirnaeth nears, her nephew will ask her to hold Hithlum for him, tell her that she is still needed. A future will open for a moment, one in which she is the female power at the court of yet another male relative, filling the empty seat of a missing queen for yet another High King, this time the child so recently sent into the safety of the Falas. Lalwen will refuse that path. Everything is to be either lost or won with this great alliance: there is no point to such half-stays against disaster. She will allow herself the luxury of action.
At the Nirnaeth, that great battle in which so many will die that the deaths themselves will be called unnumbered, she will watch her nephew die.
She will die herself, facing a Balrog. She will think, Fëanáro, without understanding why, before she does.
Hithlum will die with them, and the great alliances, and hope. Her sworn swordsmen and women will die around her; Elves who still remember merry Írimë and her irrepressible giggles, Hadorian men and women who have only ever known her as the solemn lady Lalwen of Hithlum, held by her and blessed as babes.
There should be songs about her last stand, but no one who saw it will live to speak of it.
The singers all die, too.
-
They always say of the sons of Finwë how terribly different they were; and then they go on to find terrible likenesses, to add light to dark and dark to bright until they become, in paintings and laments and scholarly tomes, men of dimension, more than flat images, a tragedy of subtle shadings. I have here only this hinged diptych of the daughters of Finwë to show you, so bright and young and certain in their difference. I will leave it to you to find the similarities.
Would you like to hold it for a while? It was made to fit into the palms. See where the gilding on the ivory case has worn away. Touch it yourself. Take it over there to the window and look at it in the light.