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YES EXACTLY. also the implications of míriel and finwë's deaths on him specifically. first person in your country to ever die is your mom!!! I'm not totally sure whether he knew it was because making him exhausted her spirit or w/e but if he does that's just even more fucked up. and then your dad remarries and is the first person in your country to ever get remarried. AND THEN YOUR DAD GETS FUCKING MURDERED (first person in your country to ever get murdered btw) and the valar are just like. oops. oh well. like the theft of the silmarils doesn't exist in a vaccuum the theft of the silmarils is implicitly tied to fëanor's father getting killed. you are the spirit of fire. you were raised as a prince with all the baggage and privilege and worldview that entails. and then your mom dies and your dad dies and home has been darkened and you're afraid you're being usurped and that your mother will be written out of the record and the angelic beings that were supposed to prevent all this shit from happening just want you to give them your most precious irreplicable words of art instead of owning up to the fact that they (from your perspective at least) allowed your whole family to be brought to ruin by the evil they failed to stop. your name is fëanor and you are the spirit of fire and it is turning you to ash from the inside every second you hesitate. cosmically compelled to act and make and do and be. and the world has gotten very very dark. what can you do but burn?

“Nothing on earth can make up for the loss of one who has loved you.”

A triple drabble written for SWG’s 7/4/2026 instadrabbe session for (if you squint) the prompt ‘all too quickly the dawn is breaking and I must leave the night behind.’ Also on AO3. Come… take my hand… let’s manufacture deeply painful parallels between Argon and Fingon’s deaths with papa <3

“I could have reached him,” Fingon says, looking down at his hands in his lap. “If I had been just a little bit closer, or if I had moved faster, I could have been there. I could have reached him, Russo. I could have saved him.”

“Or you could have been slain as well.”

Maedhros speaks without thinking, and he realizes a heartbeat too late that it was the wrong thing to say.

Fingon turns on him, eyes flashing. “How would you know? You weren’t there, Maedhros. None of you were. Your brothers were safe, sleeping soundly in their beds here in the east while we all fought and starved and died crossing the Ice to reach you. You weren’t there. I was.” Then, “Arakáno was.”

The bitter taste of guilt on Maedhros’ tongue is all too familiar. “I know,” he says quietly, and squeezes Fingon’s knee in apology. “You’re right.”

“I know I’m right,” Fingon snaps, but he does not push Maedhros away. He lets out a long, shuddering breath, then curses and pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Damn it. You don’t— He just—”

Fingon wipes his eyes furiously with his sleeve. He sets his jaw and fixes his watery gaze on the blood-red horizon. He does not try to speak again for several minutes. In the end, all he says is, “I could have reached him, and I didn’t. Nothing else matters.”

Maedhros’ heart climbs up his throat and claws it to ribbons. “I’m sorry,” he says, knowing it to be despicably inadequate.

Fingon’s breath hitches awfully. When Maedhros dares to offer his hand Fingon takes it and squeezes hard enough to make Maedhros’ knuckles pop. Maedhros squeezes back.

This concept becomes especially complex once you factor in old English and Germanic poetic senses of law, which Tolkien was drawing from. When there’s a legitimate cultural idea of plunder, of wergild, of right by conquest (or in this case, quest), and legal verdicts being reached via duel, it’s not out of the question that Lúthien’s theft is meant to be viewed as a proper transfer of otherwise contested property. Our strict kinship definitions of inheritance didn’t always apply in the era of Beowulf. There are entire scholarly works on so-called “inheritance by deeds” (this abstract even quotes Tolkien) Under the right (appropriately heroic or socially conscienced) circumstances, taking a thing could mean you now owned it.

Lúthien won a Silmaril from Morgoth’s home on Morgoth’s terms, using his own failings against him. That’s basically an ancient Germanic heroic deed. Add in the fact that they were disputed collective property to begin with (the people balked at Fëanor locking them away because they were a reflection of commonly held light— it’s like people getting mad that someone tried to trademark a common concept or tried to sell bottled water from a public spring) plus the whole Kinslaying issue which Fëanor’s kin probably still owed Olwë’s wergild (or the proto-concept similar to it that must have existed for elves because we see later iterations in elf influenced human cultures) for.

No such thing has ever been in question for Celegorm & Curufin, as princes who have always been backed by systemic power or only temporarily disadvantaged yet still construed as within the right in their framework of power; the Exile is a schism, Maedhros' abdication is unprecedented, Nargothrond is seized by rhetoric and populism, Doriath - as later Sirion - are assaulted by means of military power. And what examples has Fëanor given them? That subterfuge and infiltration are the tools of Morgoth (theft; disguise; lie) and the way that Fëanor himself had been wronged (infiltration of the family structure by Indis), not something a king or prince is liable or allowed to use. Fëanor himself utilises rhetoric and takes advantage of the legal framework, and if no other thing will avail, uses military power and force to achieve his objectives, and decries cowardice, where a line can be drawn to assume that direct, open conflict is thus assumed to be the morally correct path to attain what you want. Celegorm and Curufin, the two most likened to Fëanor, exemplify his lack of willingness to treat with anyone considered a traitor to the cause or compromise on their objectives perhaps best of all. To them, guile is both humiliating and morally suspect in this ideological framework; the sons of Fëanor in Beleriand utilise force, organise military operations, send intimidating letters and use political posturing, but nothing akin to guile even such as Fingon uses to rescue Maedhros from Thangorodrim. That brings me to the second reason: guile missions in the Silmarillion require a certain amount of faith and hope in things turning out the right way, and a certain amount of divine providence. Fingon would not have succeeded without prayer just as Lúthien would not have enjoyed the fruits of their success without convincing Mandos. But hope in divine favour is not something that people famously eschewing the authority of the Valar and undertaking a blasphemous oath not once, but twice, would champion; clinging to hope for aid from the same people considered to have betrayed the cause & good of the Eldar is not to be expected. In light of that, relying on goodwill clearly seems like a suicide mission, especially in the aftermath of the Dagor Bragollach which has revealed that all of the military might the Noldor have been amassing is still insufficient to move any closer to their goal. The only possible way forwards is more power, more resources, more bodies. There is no hope to talk of.

Because I do think that the fact that Celegorm and Curufin were for a time in possession of key objects/helper for a possible Silmaril heist is meant to highlight the difference between them and Beren and Luthien, and to point out that there was a world in which they could have tried.

It sort of reminds me in a very nebulous and entirely-based-on-vibes way, of another very famous novel in my country that is built entirely on a Catholic framework and the plot events are directly influenced by divine providence--which the characters can embrace or reject, to various outcomes. And it seems to me that the same is true of the Silm/Lotr, where even beyond the explicit actions of the Valar and later Maiar, we are meant to assume that Eru is overseeing it all and subtly influencing things according to his unknowable plan. Characters who do lean on faith even in the face of overwhelming odds are often rewarded with unexpected help. And so I wonder whether Curufin having Angrist, for example, was a subtle Eru test, a "See I gave you all the tools you needed". Now, I am, er, very critical of this particular worldview and it seems unjust to me that, for example, the SoF should be expected to have faith in a higher power after they were explicitly told by the Valar that no help would be coming, and generally with the notion that blind (by definition) faith is a virtue at all, but the text clearly frames it like that.

A stealth mission like this one requires a surrender of pride, but it also requires the ability to treat yourself as an acceptable loss. If you are captured, nobody will be able to save you, and anything you know is likely to be extracted through torture. This is something the Feanorians have been through once, and I don't think any of them could stomach handing themselves over to the enemy and doing that to their brothers again; and more than that, they are not just princes but ruling princes. They have, in the political setting of the Silmarillion, a responsibility not to die and leave their people without a leader. Curufin and Celegorm rule together, so one might have been able to go; but neither of them would let the other one go alone, and the information loss would still have been devastating.

So could they hypothetically have gone and tried to steal the Silmaril with no real expectation of victory? Yes. They probably wouldn't have succeeded, being under Namo's Doom, but Eru might have let them if they humbled themselves enough and maybe prayed to Oromë.

But that doesn't mean that doing so would have been the right decision.

I’ve always wondered why, from the Halls, Finwë never tried to appeal to the Valar on behalf of his sons and grandchildren.

I’ve also seen people wonder why someone never argued that the Noldor should wait for Finwë’s re-embodiment - the usual argument being that Fëanor’s selfishness and pride would never have allowed it.

However.

It’s not in the published Silmarillion, but when Maedhros recounts the events of Finwë’s death before Manwë, he says that there was so much evil in the darkness that befell them when Ungoliant and Melkor approached Formenos, that he and his brothers “lay upon our faces without strength”

But he also says:

“There we found the king slain at the door. His head was crushed as with a great mace of iron. We found no others: all had fled, and he had stood alone, defiant. That is plain; for his sword lay beside him, twisted and untempered as if by lightning-stroke.”

That alone proves that Finwë truly was Fëanor and Fingolfin’s father. He was powerful and extraordinarily valiant, considering the situation must have been absolutely terrifying (euphemism) even for an Elf born in the Outer Lands.

Nienna

‘But Aragorn answered: “Alas! I cannot foresee it, and how it may come to pass is hidden from me. Yet with your hope I will hope. And the Shadow I utterly reject. But neither, lady, is the Twilight for me; for I am mortal, and if you will cleave to me, Evenstar, then the Twilight you must also renounce.”

‘And she stood then as still as a white tree, looking into the West, and at last she said: “I will cleave to you, Dúnadan, and turn from the Twilight. Yet there lies the land of my people and the long home of all my kin.” She loved her father dearly.

- Appendix A: The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen

Then Eärendil said to Elwing: ‘Choose thou, for now I am weary of the world.’ And Elwing chose to be judged among the Firstborn Children of Ilúvatar, because of Lúthien; and for her sake Eärendil chose alike, though his heart was rather with the kindred of Men and the people of his father.

- Silmarillion: Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath

[Written for Back to Middle-earth Month 2017, for the prompt “Analyze a Chapter or Scene” from the orange/nonfiction path.]

The Deaths of Kings: Historical Bias in the Death Scenes of Fëanor and Fingolfin

For many years now, I have been making the argument–in both my nonfiction writing and my stories–that The Silmarillion was deliberately constructed by Tolkien as a biased historical text, and historiographical considerations should therefore form part of analysis of it. In 2016, I published an article in the Journal of Tolkien Research, Attainable Vistas, that made the case for historical bias in The Silmarillion (and also as a motive for creating fanworks, although that’s not relevant to my point in this essay). The crux of my argument in that article was 1) The Silmarillion is authored mostly by Pengolodh and 2) Pengolodh is an untrustworthy and biased narrator because he spent most of the First Age holed up in Gondolin, a realm that was decidedly biased against the Fëanorians. As a result, The Silmarillion shows an overly simplistic, one-sided view of what happened during the First Age. As the data in the article shows, Tolkien was remarkably consistent in shaping the story according to Pengolodh’s point of view, emphasizing the people and the places that would have mattered the most to him. This leads me to believe that Pengolodh’s PoV–and bias–wasn’t an embellishment but a narrative element of The Silmarillion that was very deliberately constructed and maintained and, therefore, deserves consideration when interpreting the text. I collected other data and evidence that didn’t make the cut into “Attainable Vistas.” One of those data sets looked at death scenes and funerary customs. In particular, I compared two death scenes: Fëanor and Fingolfin. Placed side-by-side, they are remarkably similar in plot structure, but in digging deeper into Tolkien’s choice of language and details, the voice of Pengolodh once again emerges. In these scenes, we have an example of why Pengolodh is biased and untrustworthy, and why it matters. On the surface, the death scenes of Fëanor (which happens in the chapter “Of the Return of the Noldor”) and Fingolfin (“Of the Ruin of Beleriand”) are remarkably similar, following the same basic plot structure. (All quotes come from those chapters unless otherwise cited.) Both are also among the longest death scenes in the book, which for Fëanor’s scene is remarkable because one of the ways Pengolodh’s bias manifests is by simply ignoring the existence of the Fëanorians (and their allies; Fingon in particular gets the short shrift) until they do something nefarious enough to confirm his preexisting low opinion of them. But he spends an unusual amount of time on Fëanor’s death scene, even allowing heroism to creep in. The similarities between the death scenes of Fëanor and Fingolfin make them ripe territory to look at the more subtle ways Pengolodh’s bias manifests.

I will use the plot formula from the illustration above to look at how Pengolodh manipulates language and symbolism to present two very similar acts in two very different lights.