The Beginnings of Things
Where should a tale begin? At the beginning is the obvious answer. Yet is that truly where the tale begins? I have often pondered over this dilemma. With some people you can look at their beginning and see the person they will become in their young self, yet that is not true of all people. And there is also this to consider, looking to the origin of people may provide insight, however perhaps it also has the effect of making us hubris? We see the path between then and now laid out so clearly, and we think that with that as our guide we can make some sense of what lies ahead. However even the very wise seldom see more than a thick mist and a maze of paths leading into it when they try to determine the outcomes of things. Whether or not those paths will cross with others, where they will lead to and how are so often lost in the shadows. Thus the giving of counsel, even from the wise to the wise, is a dangerous thing for all paths can equally turn to ill. Yet to walk blindly into the future without giving thought to the past is perhaps equally perilous. Such are the thoughts that wander through my mind in the deep hours of the night, as they have done for years beyond count. And yet we are no closer to answering the question at hand. Where should a tale begin?
If we decide to begin with the beginning then we must also decide which beginning? Everyone has a family, you are the son or the daughter of someone who was the son or daughter of someone else so on and so forth, and in the end you are but one part of that larger tale. For the elves that tale begins beside the waters of Cuiviénen. One could thus make a convincing argument then that my own tale also begins there. Yet even here we have no proper beginnings, Cuiviénen lies so far back in the mists of distant history even as the Eldar recon it. We could begin with my father who was born not long before the Noldor left Valinor. As those deeds are elsewhere recorded there is no need to recount them in full again here. Suffice it to say he left with Fingolfin when a part of the Noldor returned to Middle-Earth, there great and terrible deeds were done in the wars against Morgoth. In the years after the War of Wrath he and his wife settled in Lindon. Of those events I, of course, had no part so perhaps then we should begin with my own beginning? That is simple enough, in Lindon in the first years of the Second Age I came into the world.
My father gave me the name Aratelpëon, which is noble silver in Quenya.. In my later dealings with the mortal races I would come to use the name Celebaeron. As is the custom my mother also chose a name. Isiliswë, which is moon wise. And, as is often the case, such names contain more than a hint of foresight. But we have not come to that part of the tale yet. I can into the world during a time of peace. Gil-galad ruled in Lindon, the Edain who had helped in the overthrow of Morgoth had sailed for Númenor only a few years after I was born, though we still had contact with them at times. Other contacts we had in the north of Middle-Earth and so I travelled at times. My father had dealings with the elves of Eregion after the founding of that realm and through them with Durin’s Folk in Khazad-dûm. Most of those early years however I spent at home.
In the beginning of the Second Age when Gil-galad founded his kingdom in Lindon my father built his house some miles south of Forlond along the coast of Belegaer, the Great Sea. It sits on a high cliff and from nearly every room in the house you can hear the sea waves breaking themselves on the cliffs far below. It is a sprawling house and, so I am told, a confusing one for those not use to the elvish manner of building. Yet if the house is confusing then the tunnels underneath it are more so. They are not, however, truly tunnels; dark, cold and wet but rather more akin to the passages of Menegroth before its fall. Tall they are and filled with light, or at least they were in the days of my youth. They ran down to the sea and little harbor where ships might moor asing the quays protected against the winds. Great storehouses for wheat, wine and other things, for the lands attached to the house were wide and fertile. Our vineyards were well known in those days and many other crops we grew as well. The Eldar may not have a lust for coin as other races do, indeed I have had little use for it in my long life, yet still there are times when it can prove a boon. And so we traded.
We made ale and beer from wheat and barley, these we traded with the dwarves of the Ered Luin. In return they gave us gold and other ores, iron and silver, as well as gems. We would carry these south to trade with Eregion and Khazad-dûm, along with more ale for Durin’s Folk. And so steadily over the years our treasury grew. I helped to keep the records, tracking what went where and how much was going, when I was not busy with the parchments there were other things to occupy me. There is little else to say of my early years. I was born and I grew, quickly in mind but slowly in body as is the way of the Eldar. So while this may have been my beginning I would not start the tale off here. Rather I would say it began some two thousand years later. But to understand events then we should rather begin in the year 1697 of the Second Age.
If I was born in a time of peace then my life has been dominated by war. It is a strange thing but though I have fought in many battles, too many to name and most I wish I could forget though I remember each and every one as if it had only happened a short while ago, I do not consider myself a warrior nor ever have. I have some skill with a bow and perhaps more with a sword; yet simply because a person carries a weapon does not mean they are a warrior even if they have great skill with that weapon. In the early years of my life I was a scholar, I loved the histories of the Eldar and our works in Beleriand. And since those early years I have remained a scholar. A scholar knows that a weapon is useless against Shadow. Have you ever tried to repeal the dark with a sword? The idea is ludicrous of course. Light is what you use to dispel the shadows. Just as hope, estel not amdir, will fight despair. Light and estel then have ever been my weapons of choice and I might add song to that list as well, was not Eä created with music? I was a scholar in those days then, so much had been lost at the end of the First Age so I spent my time trying to preserve those things that could preserved. Yet things can, and often do, change very quickly. The reasons for the first war, my first war at least, I will not tell here. First because I do not know all of it myself, and second because it is not the time to speak of even what knowledge I do have. It is enough to know that Sauron attacked Eregion and destroyed it. I was not in Eregion when it happened but at home in Lindon yet I remember the messenger coming and I remember my father’s silence at the news.
I have never seen the great cities of the First Age though my father often talked of them. He spoke most often of Gondolin before its fall; how it reminded him of Tirion upon Túna in the West. There had been such destruction at the end of the First Age yet he had hoped that here in Lindon under the rule of Gil-galad there would be peace at last. But then war came. Over the course of the last four years Sauron’s armies had been waging war against us, Eregion’s fall was but the latest in his victories. To have endured so much in the First Age and now to see it happening, or so it seemed, all over again was too much. Farsighted I said my mother was? Wise as well. She perceived, though perhaps not with full comprehension, that though Morgoth was destroyed there could be no long enduring peace for the Eldar in Middle-Earth. In time our works would fade and be swept away by the changing world, just as they had in Beleriand. In the West only would the Eldar find lasting peace while the world endured. This pleased my father not at all, though he saw the wisdom of her words. They came too close to the Doom of Mandos, which he remembered but of which he would never speak openly.
After the coming of war that Doom seemed to hang over us once more. But still we fought on. I was not so involved in the early years of that war, though my time would come. On occasion I would bring messages to Eregion where we were trying to shore up our defenses. I would however ride afield with the scouts, there was always a need for swift riders to seek out the Enemy’s positions, and I remember the killing of my first orc. We were south of Eregion on the borders of Enedwaith, the dawn was coming and we were turning to return to our own lines when they ambushed us. It was a blur of activity but I remember each moment. An arrow passed within a hand’s breadth of me and the horse under me was wheeling round my sword already in my hand, its edges shimmering with a soft light in the predawn. The orc was lifting its bow but my sword was through its throat before the arrow could be loosed and there was a spray of dark, foul smelling blood that defiled the beauty of that morning. I remember hearing a horn and turning I saw the orcs fleeing back into the cover of the woodland. They outnumbered us, easily, but I do not think they expected to meet an many foes as they did. Nor could they face us now in our fury. Alas, we have diminished since those days, there are few of us left on this Eastern shore of the Great Sea. Even in these later days however the wrath of the Eldar is a thing few can withstand.
I have never liked killing. In battle there is little choice, you must kill to defend yourself and those around you. But what of when there is no battle? Mortal Men have a capacity for change that is beyond the understanding of the Wise and even the Wise cannot always tell where paths will lead. So how can we be sure that a person will not change at some later date, and changing that they may not play some vital part yet? If light, estel and song have ever been my weapons of choice then I have always tried to let my actions be governed by pity and mercy. I remember that Agamaran once chided me for my dealings with brigands and I was tempted to reply “When your hands are as stained with blood as mine are then, and only then, may you counsel me on whether my actions are amiss” but I held my temper. There is a reason I could not be there on the day Thorvall killed Kaenwynn… those events, however, still lay some five thousand years in the future. If I am slow to take the life of a mortal then I show no hesitation in the killing of orcs. They are, so far as I can tell, wholly evil and unlike Mortal Men have not a capacity for change. And on that morning as the sun rose in the east behind the Hithaeglir, the Misty Mountains as men name them, we rode after them. Some of our riders were already on their flanks to keep them together and others were out in front. We knew the land and we had already stained enough of it with their foul blood and stink so we waited, driving them southward. The trees slowly parted and the land rolled down to form the banks of a river, the Glanduin that formed the southern border between Eregion and Enedwaith. We waited while the orcs began the crossing and when they were in the middle where the current was strongest the signal was given and we rode them down, joined by our riders who had crossed the river to prevent any escape. The Glanduin ran dark for a time afterwards as it swept the orcs away so that none of their filth would taint the land again that day.
As the years passed I spent less time away from Lindon. My father had no desire to fight another war, or even to have any part in it, so I began to take his place at court. Those first years of war had served as a tutor, which was good having been born in a time of peace I knew little of battle, but I learned quickly. Not just the use of the bow and sword but the strategies involved, where an army should move and how, how to choose the place to attack an enemy so that you exploit its weakness and how to choose the place to defend so that your own was lessened. Knowing those things is one thing, however the use of that knowledge is another entirely and the time had not yet come for me to put that learning to use. When summoned to council in those years therefore I listened mostly and seldom spoke, instead I weighed the counsels of others in my own mind. Why did I not speak? The answer is a simple one and twofold. First because I was not there in my own right. The place at council was my father’s and it was his place to speak not mine. Gil-galad and I had met many times over the years, I had often made use of his libraries, and we knew each other well so that I think he would have known that it was my own thoughts that I was giving voice too not some message from another. But there were other lords there that I did not known well. And the second reason is that I was still learning the way of things and making up my own mind concerning those matters. It is a mark of grave folly to speak when you know not what you are saying. And perhaps there was a third reason as well.
I saw it coming. I do not mean that I had some glimpse of the future but rather given what had already been happening and the facts as they stood the outcome was in some ways inevitable, as I have said my father had no wish to fight another war. A day or two after news came of the fall of Eregion another messenger arrived bearing a summons from Gil-galad, the King’s council was gathering in Forlond. As the sun sank behind the seas into the West and Gil-Estel, the star of high hope, came forth in all its brilliance we rode down the path to join the main road of Lindon. We rode not for Forlond but for Mithlond and not a few of us went riding but the whole of the household.. Middle-Earth is home. It is here that we awoke, here where many of our greatest deeds were done and yet Middle Earth is also the land of our fading. No lasting peace can we find here but only in the West. Why then did I remain? I was young the weight of memory was not on me nor was the sea longing yet in me. The Eldar were yet young as well. The First Age may have been our Spring but the Second was still our Summer. Power we still had and wisdom learned through the sorrows of our past was added to it. The rising of Gil-Estel as we set out I also took as a sign. There were things yet for me to do here.
Isiliswë… here at last is where the name comes from, or the meaning of it at least. The words spoken there on the shores of Mithlond I will not repeat here. They are a private thing and indeed few apart from Elrond and Cirdan know them. Yet perhaps some essence of them can still be conveyed? Paths I would tread some full of light and great deeds, others for of shadow and sorrow. Yet great though the shadow may at times seem still the stars and the moon shine above them undefiled. Ciridan and I stood watching as the great ship moved slowly out into the Gulf, until far away it hoisted its great sail and taking the wind on its beam rode the waves into the West.
