#dirhaval

“I have remembered something,” she added, inconsequentially. “My aunt’s husband was Guilin’s steward. Everyone in my family hated him because he always making up to us with stories about the great princes. He said that Gwindor and Finduilas fought much over the Adanedhel’s love for her.”

I… I love this OC. She’s not even a box of rocks, she’s like, a box with one rock in it. Selectively dense; elsewhere, airheaded.

Dírhaval considered the fish with great interest. He had been told triumph lent him a fierce expression. He had no wish to scare his friend off now.

I can’t remember if @crocordile​ and I had a conversation before or after I wrote this about Dirhavel being like, not necessarily a big but an energetic guy who’s frequently seen around the camps doing SUPER WEIRD athletic shit to see if some of the feats he attributes to Turin were physically possible—anyway, whatever the timing, that concept was what I was psychically tuned into when I wrote this description. He has a beard and it bristles despite his best efforts to keep it trimmed.

“Raised voices—he overheard—Gwindor said, ‘Why does he seek you out, and sit long with you, and come ever more glad away?’ And that was true, I remember; they sat together in all kinds of places, on the terraces, in the treasury, and even by the earthworks for the bridge. No doubt he told her much you would be glad to know. But as for me, I think Gwindor a fool; few men would have loved her for listening. It reminds them what they hold dear in themselves.”

It was really hard for me to strike what seemed like a reasonable balance between hearsay and direct observation, but I leaned on the idea that Nargothrond, though huge, was not like, “modern city space” huge, more “sprawling overdeveloped apartment complex and you need a permit to go above ground”—so in five years and with perfect memory, everyone has a decent chance of stumbling on everyone else’s attempts at fresh air.

“That’s true,” he said. The first time he had interviewed her, she had spoken for an hour about the cavern of assembly, like an egg on its side—but so vast!—and with stalactites Finrod himself had sung down into pillars, or was it that he had worn holes in the walls parting small caves, she couldn’t decide; and the window on the river, whence a grey light came, like a shadow thrown on the gliding light of a thousand lamps and torches.

I think this description of the great hall is kind of cute but I have to acknowledge it was influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by the great hall in the Rats of Nimh.

And now when she spoke it was matter-of-fact and with hardly a jibe at her uncle. She was Túrin to him in that moment with her straight-sloping neck, the flushed skin of her neck and jaw with her face as fair as fair could stay at sunset, the cupful of shadow under her chin. He had burned the roof of his mouth. The fish was tender, almost flavorless, flaking between his teeth like a cake of river-flesh; a little muddy, even, as all water here was. He ate the crisped-black skin for a whiff of charcoal, which coated his mouth. “Don’t you love me, your loyal hearer?”

She gave him a startled wink; and smiled, and smiled.

Okay, so yes. I do love this moment, I hope it does a lot of things at once; basically I want 1) Dirhavel to be ironic in a nice way about his elf friend attempting to invent the term “emotional labor,” which reflects both a male impatience with this attempt to generalize everything to men talking women’s ears off, but also some vague species-based edginess about him trying to construct this human story out of testimony from elves, and like, navigating elves’ possessiveness of Turin but also the way they patronize him in the same breath, Adanedhel. And at the same time having to confront the fact that people are people and the elf-human boundary has gotten increasingly blurry with the end times, however much he might want to retain a sense of lofty apartness, whether as a human among elves, a writer among subjects, a man among women, whatever—that tension between observer distance and involuntary empathy is another big theme of this fic. And 2) I want the cook to catch it but not quite get it—like, she knows he’s making fun of her but she doesn’t necessarily interpret it in the same way he does, what she gets is that he’s talking about the limits of different kinds of love, that you can love someone and it can still go just so far: that’s why it triggers her next thought about Finduilas –> Turin.

“I do not think Finduilas loved the Mormegil either. Or, that is, I believe they loved one another as sister and brother.”

I said this in my commentary on an otherwise VERY different LOGH fic but I love when characters are wrong. Every time. Also, I love childish oversimplifications that have good reason for existing—that is, I like when you can really see why a character would with all their heart want to believe x, because the alternative is both messy and depressing.

Trying to lick his fingers clean just spread around the soot. Among the things she had told Dírhaval was that she was an only child. But he was inclined to believe her, almost. To Finduilas Túrin should have been a child. She must have wanted to love him like a brother—it would have been best, by far clearer and finer, to love him as a brother, even when her death walked near. The death he handed her down to; but if they were kin, it would have been her right to love him, blaming him.

“Do you not agree?”

Dirhavel takes this basically as like, confirmation for his thesis that all real love is irrational and unconditional (see also Gwindor wanting Finduilas and Túrin to be happy at his own expense, a few lines down) but only familial love has the “excuse” to be so. So the distinction is not, “would I love him whatever he did to me,” but rather, “do I feel fucked up and guilty about that fact or not.” In a vague way, this is supposed to set up the extremely bleak lines he gives Nienor after she gets her memory back: twice beloved.

“I can’t say.” Up again to pace. She followed him, basket on her arm, and settled onto her haunches when she saw he had no journey in mind. He stood when he performed, which was not hard, but it made him more restless when alone.

See above remarks about Dirhavel’s acrobatics, and also maaybe his ADHD

“I think—by the time—no, Túrin did not love her, and as for Finduilas, well, surely she cared for Gwindor? If they argued. Let’s see. And Túrin pursued her at last and fell in a swoon on her grave, we know that. And he loved Gwindor; how not, when Gwindor was with him at Ivrin? But Gwindor—I suppose—Gwindor must have hated him. No. He must have hoped Túrin loved Finduilas, and that was why he couldn’t be persuaded of the truth. For he would have wanted her to be happy, in the end.”

“Oh, no!”

His mood tipped down at once. “Oh no,” he agreed, and took his sandals off and stepped into the stream.

Again, I just think this interaction is fun. I mean I like the placement of his realization about Gwindor, but I LOVE the cook being like “oh no!! that’s so sad!” I hope other people enjoy “stories about the process of idiotic sadstuck brainstorming” as much as I do.

His mother had said once that both he and his father were happier than other men, but that they had no ballast, to keep steady the craft. If he took on an ounce of grief he’d sink, and yet he felt the flood almost as freedom. It made him more the master than had his dry, feckless race, his high-riding. As long as he struggled he had yet to succumb; that was the rule for a wasted night. He ought to go beg a bowl of sour milk from Linnor, or go and sing a service for the king. He could see as far as a night of stars.

I wanted to communicate a particular kind of mood downturn here where you can still clearly remember being happy, and the rising tide of discontent isn’t overwhelming on its own, it’s just depressing because you know where it leads—but for the same reason it’s also a relief, in that you know where it leads. Whereas joy is weird and easy to get lost in and you never know when the plug will be pulled. But I’m not sure the boat metaphor really works.

But it was day, it was red evening. It was his companion’s grief, filling his mind from above. She crouched and watched the far bank huge-eyed, not a tear in evidence, eyes opened but sealed, as it seemed, against sadness that strove for entry, not escape; she sat with wide mouth cracked, nostrils flared, sucking in great absent sniffs of sea-wind. She was besieged as an afterthought, safe and calm except besieged.

I also wanted to include some telepathy! As always! Dirhaval I imagine to be something of a natural, who probably has had some experience with elf mind-speech at this point—enough to recognize it but not really to manage it. I like this description of the cook in pain, I think it works well with her established personality and also evokes Nargothrond itself, which is of course the thing she’s actually grieving for. I mean, and she identifies it with Gwindor, reasonably enough, and takes unhappy pride in him as a lord of Nargothrond, and in this moment is kind of shot through herself not just with the fact of his defeat but the like, honorable necessity of his defeat, knowing that on some level he accepted it.   

(Gwindor surely wished Finduilas joy. Finduilas, dying, remembered Túrin, and told him where his quest should end. The feathered tops of the reeds glowed on dark stems, like a fire in a field of reeds—there before nightfall he planted for ever the standards of the Noldor and their unsheathed swords, kindling in the dawn.)

I’m so proud of this stupid line lol, it’s just the reverse of Tolkien’s—“The light of the drawing of the swords of the Noldor was like a fire in a field of reeds”—but I LOVE THAT LINE, it’s so perfect for Dirhaval as an author and Sirion as a place of memory/last battlefront/first battlefront for this long war. And its conclusion, still to come.

He washed his hands and greasy beard in the river. “Your fish will be cold,” he advised. He had abandoned hope of dinner until she brought it, but that was no reason to encourage bad habits in her.

Dumb friends. Dumb friends are great because they are attuned to the hazards of stupidity, and can help each other.

Then he had to pick some scales out of his teeth, and couldn’t elaborate, but he heard her uncover the basket, anyway.

He had met her before with a handful of salt, pressing a few grains to her mouth to check their purity. “Dírhaval,” she said wisely, mouth full. “Dírhaval, I have forgotten how to cook.” Meaning she had no spices, witched ovens, and trained assistants—maybe, with her, it really was as though she had forgotten; at least it was something else she had lost.