#beleriand

Long he circled in hope; yet all his labor came to little. At last he withdrew beneath Glingal, and there, finding the world not wholly ordered according to his desires, he sang a low lament.

The daughter of Turgon beheld these things, and because her heart was compassionate and wise, she began to imagine reasons for the bird’s sorrow more profound than any that had entered his own mind.

“Poor forlorn creature,” she said, “wherefore have you wings, and not wisdom to use them? Cruel indeed are the fetters of your desire.”

Whether the bird understood her speech is not recorded.

Idril cast another morsel of bread. There followed much frantic cooing and flapping.

If the Eldar possessed wings, she thought, Aredhel would not have been so unhappy.

Before she was lost, Aredhel often stood long at the white walls of Gondolin, gazing eastward. Though her sight could not pierce the Echoriath, her thought passed beyond them into the boundless wilds beyond them, and to the sons of Fëanor, her kin, who once rode with her beneath the Trees.

In those days Idril could no more imagine Aredhel as a mother than she could imagine herself one. Her aunt seemed scarcely able to remain seated through a game of Chancery, much less endure a wailing child clinging to her skirts.

Perhaps Maeglin had been an unusually quiet child.

Of her own mother, Idril remembered little.

Elenwë had perished in the crossing of the Helcaraxë before Idril had learned to speak, and thereafter she knew of Elenwë only ever as an empty place where once a woman once stood.

Sometimes dreams came to her, of bitter cold and black water; of a gentle embrace slipping away, replaced by her father’s strong arms carrying her to safety.

Elenwë had been of the Vanyar. To Idril she had passed on her golden hair, her face, her voice, a cloth pouch containing a set of of Chancery pieces…

And, so it seemed, little else.

Yet Gondolin itself was filled with her memory.

There was golden Glingal, and the hawthorn blossom that Elenwë had so loved, and the white walls that had been raised so high because once she had not been saved.

It happened by chance that Idril began to suspect her mother had left something more.

One evening, while polishing her Chancery pieces, she discovered that one had gone missing. She searched her chamber from end to end, and at last, in desperation, turned the little cloth pouch inside out.

There, sewn into one of its seams, she found a narrow woven band unlike anything she had ever seen.

Idril could not guess at its purpose. For a long while she turned it over in her hands, half persuaded that longing had made her invent a meaning where none existed.

The band was woven in two colors. The darker thread appeared to have a pattern much like a script, though not Gondolinic rune, nor Tengwar, nor any other letters of Arda known to Idril.

In the end the missing Chancery piece was found beneath a chair, and the woven band was laid aside and forgotten. Yet now it returned to her thoughts, and she knew not why.

Just then another hen alighted in the shade nearby.

Immediately the cockbird abandoned his lament. He hopped forth from beneath Glingal, swelled his breast anew, and recommenced all the ancient arts of bowing and strutting.

Plainly his former grief, though deep, had not proved enduring.

Idril was astonished.

Then whether by chance or some ordering of the Valar, the cock discovered another morsel of bread lying nigh. He seized it and presented it to the hen, who accepted readily.

This delighted him exceedingly.

Idril, much scandalized, cried, “she desires your bread and not your person. And is your first love is utterly forgotten? Have you neither constancy nor pride?”

But pride was not among the concerns of doves.

The hen wandered on in search of further crumbs, and the cock walked joyfully beside her. Being a dove, he cleaved not to sorrow when sorrow profited him nothing, and so was spared many errors that beset wiser creatures.

@tolkiengenweek day 2: animals

‘My sister and I don’t always agree,’ Mother had said during their hasty farewells. ‘Be polite! You’re their guest. I hope this will be only temporary.’ She was trying to be on her best behaviour, but the longer she was stuck here, the more she hated Menegroth. Aunt and Uncle were kind enough not to say things to her face, but not everyone was so careful. Plenty of muttering in the corridors: ‘...married a Noldo…father missing…the North burned entirely to the ground…’ She hid among the undergrowth outside. A ladybird alighted on her lifted finger; she watched it fly away

The song could meaningfully be sung at any time of war (there is a bit of disagreement about which war was meant, historically), but the text particularly fits the Battle of Sudden Flame in the First Age, which destroyed large parts of northern Beleriand by fire, as the song mentions burning on a large scale. The song often does not have a second stanza; here the second stanza is adapted from an alternative expanded version. The most common form of the song is addressed to the maybug (Melolontha melolontha, the common cockchafer), although German versions addressed to the ladybird (or ladybug) also exist. Sadly, there is a link between the maybug version and some rather cruel games that children used to play with maybugs, back when these were extremely common and sometimes even regarded as a pest.

There is a similar traditional nursery rhyme "Ladybird, ladybird" in English, which does not, however, mention a war, although it mentions fire.

A related 19th-century drawing:

Drawing by  Emil Schmidt, captioned : „Maikäfer, flieg!“, originally in the journal Die Gartenlaube (1879), from Wikimedia Commons.

The song with English subtitles on YouTube:

Translation of my adapted version:

Maybug, fly! Father is away at war. Mother is in Beleriand. Beleriand has burned to the ground. Maybug, fly!