Sometime during their marriage in Beleriand, Fingon and Meril had a little house built near the Havens, which would later come to be known as the Cottage of Lost Play.
It was a kind of vacation home for the two, a place they went to to get some time away from politics and Fingon's duties as prince and later King. It sat on a hill and was nested in the middle of a grove of elm trees, and looked out towards the sea. It had a beautiful garden, tended to by Meril herself, where flowers unlike any other bloomed. The cottage itself was built of white stone and a thatched roof which was so overgrown with moss and clinging vines it was almost impossible to see the roof and what it was made of.
After Gil galad's birth they would often take their son there, and tell him the great tales of the past; of Valinor, and the Darkening, and the Coming of the Noldor, but also fairy-stories too.
In the years following Fingon's death, refugees flocked in droves to the Havens. The little cottage that was once Fingon and Meril's get-away home was turned into a place for many of the refugee children to live and play in, of which Meril remained as its caretaker. She cared for and loved every child who stayed there, and before bed she would tell them the most wondrous stories and sing the most beautiful songs to them(some of them being the same tales and the same songs Fingon once sang to her) to distract them from their grief, as well as her own over losing her beloved.
Among these children were little Earendil and Elwing themselves, and it was at the little cottage where they first met. The two would spend many long hours together and cherished one another's company, playing in the sand and building fairy houses. And in later days, after the two had married, they brought their two children, Elrond and Elros there, to listen to Meril's stories.
During the War of Wrath however, when Beleriand sank into the sea, so did the Cottage, and it was lost, and from it comes the name that it was given: The Cottage of Lost Play.
