The wooing

Eldarion

Years ago, when I was first in Ithilien, I heard the Lady Eowyn tell a story to her children.

‘Far, far away from here, in the northern lands whence my people came long ago, there once lived a sorcerer who made a girl out of ice…’

I can’t remember every word of the story as she told it, but I remember the substance of it. The sorcerer made the girl so perfectly beautiful that all men fell in love with her, but any who tried to embrace her froze to death in her arms. At last the Sun himself beheld her and tried to take her – I don’t know why this story thinks of the Sun as being a man, perhaps that’s how they think in the far North – and in his fierce embrace she melted away and was lost, except that we see a faint memory of her beauty in the rainbow, when the Sun tries in vain to re-make his lost love.

It’s a pretty story, and for me, a true one. 

A fool might wonder why I should be so captivated by the beauty of a girl of mere mortal stock, and partly of a lesser race at that, when the women of my own kindred are held supreme in beauty even among the Elves. But if he continued in his wonder after he had set eyes on Fíriel, Faramir’s daughter, he would be not merely a fool but a madman. It is not solely her beauty that I love; if one were foolish enough to set her in a contest against my sisters she might, I suppose, come off worse. It is the whole of her: her quickness of body and mind and temper, her courage, her vehemence, her fierce devotion to everything and everything she loves, the sheer grace of her, the unconquerable freedom of her. There are no words fine and swift enough to capture her; no pen or brush skilled enough to depict her. That’s why there are so many songs about her and so many portraits of her, for none of which she cares a jot. More than all this, perhaps, it is the very frailty of her mortality that makes her so dear to me: the very thing that according to her, should have set us forever apart. 

I first came to know her years ago, when she was still a child, and as a child I loved her, as I loved her whole family. They and Ithilien were my refuge from the weight of kingship and glory and dignity which lay so heavily on my own family. Their household combined the most perfect courtesy with the most perfect ease; a king would not have felt slighted by their welcome, nor the lowliest peasant overawed. Perhaps now, looking back over so many bitter years, I exaggerate that happiness, but whether or no, I never afterwards met any great lord but I compared him unfavourably with Faramir, nor any pretty girl without thinking how inferior she was to little Lady Fíriel. It became a habit of mind, the Ithilien I carried with me.

Of the many penalties of being a king’s only son, one of the worst must be the endless speculations about one’s marriage. We are a long-lived race and are not accustomed to marrying in haste – ask my father, for one – but that did not stop people from discussing suitable matches for me while I was still in my cradle. As I grew up I became accustomed to the endless discussions about ‘purity of descent’, and they always irritated me, especially when men of Gondor and Arnor began one of their endless, useless squabbles about which nation had a larger endowment of Númenorean blood.

From time to time I heard complaints that Faramir –whose own descent was as Númenorean as any haughty northerner’s – had betrayed that tradition by marrying a mere woman of Rohan, and they always infuriated me; but by the time I had drawn breath to silence the complainer, somebody else – often my father – had invariably done the job for me. Faramir was of course aware of these remarks, though I think they were never made to his face, but he cared nothing about them except insofar as they were a slight upon his wife. On the only occasion when the subject was mentioned between us he said that the world had changed since the Great War and Gondor could no longer cling to the old certainties, which had served it badly enough in the past; there were worse evils by far than mingled blood, or even shortness of life – and he smiled rather sadly. For my own part, I was increasingly irritated by the assumption that whoever I married would have to come of the ‘pure’ northern stock –  unless I were to follow my father’s example and seek the hand of some elf-woman, but this I  never aspired to at all: the very notion belonged to a world we had lost. The assumption annoyed me so much that I was disposed to scorn any lady who did come of such parentage; and my favourite among my royal predecessors became Eldacar, who caused such trouble by doing precisely what Faramir had done without causing any trouble at all.  Eldacar, however, was a King, ‘which,’  Faramir said to me once, ‘I daily thank the Powers that I am not.’

In later years, as it happened, though I saw a good deal of Faramir, I saw far less of Ithilien and nothing of Fíriel; she became a distant point of light and warmth in my memory. As she grew to womanhood and the fame of her beauty spread abroad, I was not surprised – the promise of it had been plain in the child I had known – but I was curious. It was certainly one reason why, when Faramir talked to me of his homeward journey after his great embassy, I asked to go with him, but it was not the only reason. I was eager to see if the place where I had once been so happy had changed; eager and half-afraid, as one always is when venturing into one’s own past.

Some things, I found, had not changed at all. The scent of Ithilien, as it wafted towards us across the River, was just the same. ‘If I awoke from the dead,’ Elboron had said to me once, ‘and smelled that scent, even if I had no other sense, I’d know I was home again.’ The well-remembered sweetness of it brought tears to my eyes so that the people awaiting us on the riverbank diminished to a blur, and when I could see clearly again we were almost upon them. Three stood in advance of the crowd. The lanky young giant with the anxious expression must be Elboron. (‘I am the tallest man in Ithilien at present,’ Faramir had told me some years previously, ‘but my elder son seems determined to change that.’) The tall woman beside him, proud and golden-haired still, I recognised at once as the Lady Eowyn: the years had dealt lightly with her.

As for Fíriel … I knew she would have changed, and yet I still looked for a laughing child. I knew that most men thought her beautiful, but nothing I had heard about her prepared me for the reality. I had hoped that she would remember me and welcome me, but the look of joy on her face, as she looked at me, took me captive for ever. I knew my own face mirrored it, and that we were fated to be all in all to each other, for the rest of our lives. I knew that no other woman would mean anything to me, ever.

Then I realised that she was not looking at me at all. She had not even noticed I was there.

All that joy was for her father alone. As a child I knew she had adored him, but somehow I had assumed that she would have grown away from him. It was not so.

Everything became a blur again. I was like a man who has been knocked senseless, and when he revives, has forgotten where he is or how he came there. I must somehow have got through the ceremony of greeting, but I don’t remember it; I don’t even remember bowing to Fíriel. Strangely enough, nobody seemed to have noticed anything unusual, not even Faramir who normally missed nothing; surrounded by a press of his own people, one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter, he could be forgiven for being absorbed, just once, in his own affairs. Only one person had noticed, and that was Elboron. As we mounted for the short ride up to Emyn Arnen his eyes met mine in silent, angry challenge, recognising the destroyer of their peace. Elboron always belittled himself, saying he had inherited none of his father’s shrewdness, but at that moment he was unmistakably his father’s son.

I paid him no attention. By the time we had reached the house the world had come into focus again and I knew, quite simply and clearly, what must happen. Fíriel must be brought to look on me as she had just looked on Faramir. Then she must marry me so that I would have that look all to myself forever. It was so obviously necessary that I expected to win her round to my point of view in a few days.

I was not surprised to find that everything conspired to my design. The household continued strangely unsuspecting. Elboron was anxiously rendering account to his father for the affairs of Ithilien over eighteen months – very long months, I hoped, and a very intricate account – and the Lady Eowyn thought it only proper that Fíriel should be the one to accompany me in my re-discovery of Ithilien. We walked together and rode together – the grace of Fíriel, daughter of Gondor and Rohan, when she rode was marvellous to see – and all the time I sought an opportunity to say all I longed to say to her, and was foiled. Soon I realised that she had her father’s skill at steering a conversation, and used it above all to steer away from the topic of herself. She hated nothing more than compliments, which invariably made her frown and bite her lip; the only thing that was sure to bring a gleam of pleasure to her eyes was praise of her father, the one topic I was anxious to avoid. The faintest hint of criticism of him would bring a look of suppressed fury, reminding me of the ferocity with which she had protected him as a child. I only felt safe when talking of Arnor, and particularly about the hobbits of the Shire, a subject that often made her laugh, the same bubbling laughter she had had as a child, restoring a little of our long-lost ease.

The weeks went by and nothing changed. Every day I dreaded a message from my father summoning me home, and I began to wonder how long it would be before I would have outstayed my welcome in Emyn Arnen. Elboron, I was sure, wished me gone already, and Fíriel was no gladder of my presence than she had been at first, yet I could not leave her. I dreaded Faramir’s shrewdness and could not believe that he was not aware of my feelings, but if he was, he made no sign. Mercifully, he was still busy gathering up the threads of his long absence, and I felt a hypocrite as I brushed aside his apologies for paying me so little attention. I felt I must speak, must bind Fíriel to me, before her father intervened, and yet she gave me no opportunity.

It was the moon-festival that brought matters to a head. Faramir warned me one morning that the peace of Ithilien was likely to be greatly troubled for the next few days while the festival was prepared and celebrated, but expressed a polite hope that I would stay for it. In recent years I had thought little about the moon-festival, for it is scarcely celebrated outside Ithilien, but now I resolved that I would stay for it unless my father had me dragged away by force, for at the moon-festival, as all men knew, Fíriel danced the moon-dance.

Of the Festival itself, which lasts three days and nights and culminates at the nearest full moon to midsummer, I have no clear memory. I only remember the dance. It was not by command or by ancient tradition that Fíriel danced. In the beginning, when she was a child – when I first knew her – everybody danced and Fíriel, absorbed and alone, moved about among us with a grace that even then attracted every eye. As she grew older, the custom had grown of ending the general dance at midnight and leaving her to dance alone under the moon; and now it was expected of her.

How can I describe that dance? There was no music and no formal step, only the moonlight, bright golden moonlight that shines only over Ithilien, so bright that it cast clear sharp shadows, and Fíriel, the moon-daughter, all black and silver, her face remote and absorbed, moving among the shadows so lightly that she seemed no more substantial than they. As she passed near me, the sky suddenly darkened as a cloud came over the moon, and I longed to seize her and hold her fast, lest she vanish away; but she danced on, still graceful in the darkness, until, seeming suddenly to tire, she stopped, took a cloak from a maid standing nearby, and walked away, while all the onlookers sighed and murmured as if awakening from a dream. The darkness grew deeper, and soon we felt the first drops of warm rain. The festival was ended, and with it my patience.

The next morning the rain had passed, and I went out early into the sparkling garden, knowing I should find her. She greeted me with her usual cool courtesy and consented to walk with me; I spoke of the dance, and she smiled a little and said she was glad if it had pleased me.

            ‘It made me think of another dance long ago,’ I said, ‘when Beren came upon Lúthien dancing in the …’

            I could not have said anything worse. Her face darkened and she turned on me angrily. ‘So you say. So all men say, but I am no Lúthien. Her dancing was a great thing and the fate of many hung upon it. My dancing is a little thing and is done for Ithilien only. By comparing us you belittle us both – you of all people should understand that.’

            ‘Fíriel,’ I cried, ‘surely you know that your dancing is no little thing to me. You must know you are no less precious to me than Lúthien was to Beren, and that I love you no less than he did her. You know it, you must know it.’  

            ‘Why do you mock me, Prince Eldarion, half-elven son of Elessar, heir to two kingdoms?’ she blazed. ‘I am as I am, a woman of lesser blood, a daughter of both Gondor and Rohan. Beside you I am of no account. My life is a shadow compared to yours. I can be nothing to you.’

            I grasped both her hands. ‘Mock you, daughter of the noblest house in all Gondor? I am so far from mocking you that I want you to be everything to me – I want you for my wife, and if I cannot wed you I shall not wed at all, and there’s an end to kingship.’

            She stared at me. ‘I think the moonlight must have turned your wits, Eldarion. I have nothing to do with kings and kingship. I want nothing to do with them. Now leave me alone.’ She wrenched herself free and ran from me, leaving me once again as one stunned.