thank you ever so much @riding-with-the-wild-hunt for the WIP tag! enjoy the opener to my ‘it is on a visit to the forests of Doriath that young adult elrond and elros make the Peredhel choice’ ie ‘what biases are we replicating in the way we talk about conservation?’ and ‘interrogating the uncritical mythos of Tolkien-the-environmentalist’ mild environmental horror fic… zero pressure tags @queerofthedagger @starshadeemilyart @thescrapwitch @melestasflight @mircallaruthven 🤝
Once you could walk the Esgalduin's banks and count the birch and beech Melian herself had blessed. You could watch the deer move through undergrowth so ancient it bitched and barked in your ear about those who passed through a hundred years before you. That was Doriath, old-Doriath, the Doriath that was sacked, that Doriath who was first built within a clearing and widened it clear. It is uncertain whether Doriath had permitted the forest, or whether the forest permitted Doriath. However, it is certain that the uncertainty persists because Doriath is no more.
For the girdle is gone and the trees are still frantic all these decades later, not knowing yet what to do with the freedom of their limbs and thus warring with each other. Brambles have taken the throne room for their own, snarling up the pillars. There are vast, empty birds’ nests on the roof, enormous and awe-inspiring in their sheer breadth, proof of the ability of little creatures to make lives out of ravaged spaces, their emptiness a testament to the rapid disappearance of such interstitial refuges. It is almost like Sirion has made a home in the heart of old Doriath.
Elms grow where colonnades stood, their roots finding in the foundations of the city a richer soil than the surrounding wood ever offered. Richer, Elrond suspects, for reasons the loremaster within him already cannot stop asking about. There are small traces of a breed of fern that grows only where iron has rusted into the ground, its fronds a green so dark it reads as black in low light, and the old Doriathim had called this fern by a name that translates roughly to grief-tender, though whether it fed on grief or whether the grieving tended to it, no one now living can say. Following the traces would lead you deep into the darkest part of the woods, where it twists around the feet of the forest’s crown, two identically vast, towering firs in the heart of the wild, their tips gilded with sunlight.
Amongst what had survived of Doriath in Sirion, there had been a painting in the dining hall of one of the last of Doriath’s marchwardens. When this picture was painted, the two great firs had not been firs, though they had already been twins. In the painting, the warden is standing at the treeline with instruments that seem near superstitious in their simplicity. In one hand, a rod for testing the depth of leaf-mold, a blade for reading the age of bark by its give. Elwing had told them that this fellow used to claim he could tell from the slump of a fallen trunk whether a tree had died of age or of rot. Skills passed down until there was no one left to receive them. His last documented find had been a burl of wood so perfectly spiraled around a discarded hunting-knife that it was displayed for years in the court at Menegroth before the court itself became the thing displayed, spiraled by nothing but time, pinned to the ground by the same. Elwing, the sticky-fingered toddler, had pilfered it from beside her father’s seat before she was whisked away to Sirion, where stickier-fingered Elros had taken it from her bureau and kept it in his pocket, where it became all of Doriath that would survive Sirion.
Looking at that burl, you might sense the whole forest inside it: the light that fell before the girdle and the light that falls now, the undergrowth's negotiations with stubborn roots. In the burl, growth and decay are the same process enacted across different seasons. It was mesmerising, and why would it not be? To look upon tempered steel is to see your own intention reflected back wrong, bright-eyed and warped. To look upon wood that has reclaimed a blademaster’s work is to watch the world watch you pass by, wrinkling its nose in revulsion.
The regrowth, where Doriath had been left alone, has been immediately strange and beautiful in ways even the old kingdom, for all its careful tending, never was. There are others now, in the emptied realms nearby, attempting similar restraint, letting the ground decide what to remember and what to forget. Even as new grief finds new ground to test itself against, the twin firs of Doriath watch to see which of the old growth shaped for a world with Melian's girdle still around it, might find a way to endure a world without one.
In another life, Elrond and Elros might have found out together.
The youths are embarrassingly lost almost from the moment they step foot in the forest. The Eldar are used to excavating the past, because that is where just cause lies waiting for forensic patience and the light to hit it just right. But in Doriath. In Doriath, the past sits on the surface of the earth. In Doriath, the past is viscerally unavoidable, laying in wait to trip little boys up. In Doriath, Elrond and Elros are not fifty eight years old but eight. Here, they have a sister, and they are wailing in the woods and failing to outrun the rustling of the underbrush. They have been left behind after the sacking of their home, taken to the woods by kindly-cruel men. They are twin sparkles of bones in the snow. They are made of the stories people tell about them. Their deaths are towering firs. They are made of the stories that matter most to those who tell them. They are made of Maedhros and Maglor Fëanorian’s moments of remorse. They are two sets of twins in one, four endless permutations of possibilities made feeble bookends to atrocity.
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well…Doriath is gone. thingol got killed by dwarves. Beren and Dior then killed some dwarves. one singular silmaril has caused death and destruction in its wake. fuckin how is Morgoth still hangin round with two in his flipping crown? Dior is dead, those freakin sons of Fëanor!!!!!!!!
I think that Doriath generally and Menengroth in particular, as the only realms of Beleriand beyond Angband with an Ainur presence, should have more strange phenomena. Indeed, the descriptions of Melian’s ability with song in Morgoth’s Ring hint at a power both lovely and uncanny.
Melian served under Vána and spent time in the gardens of Irmo, master of dreams and visions
Some is intentional like the Girdle. Melian enacts a significant amount of power over her domain, just as she did in Valinor. Though the walls and pillars of Menengroth are engraved with intricate leaves, ivy, and flowers, some of the flora is real, and is the result of Melian’s power. Melian herself is imbued in the architecture and land.
Some is inadvertent. The Ainur are not necessarily meant to be contained to physical forms and where they live and change becomes imbued with their presence and power.
Forest glades forever suspended in twilight, paintings of birds fluttering into life (or an approximation of it), a strange presence in the waters that fall through Menengroth.
Those around Melian change too, find themselves brushing flowers from their hair and find their skin stained with chlorophyll and prints of ivy, find themselves drawn to twilight, wandering deeper and deeper into the forests at times.
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"Весна перстами тронула леса,
И распускается листва,
И открывает сердцу даль.
Весна. И вновь ликуют небеса.
Но не одна любовь жива,
Пришла сестра ее - печаль."
