WIP snippet

[roselightfairy]

Ever since I first realized the Legolas/Gimli parallels in the Song of Nimrodel - the song Legolas sings outside Lothlórien - I’ve been absolutely obsessed with it, and since this story probably won’t be finished for like a year if ever (too many projects, too many life needs, too much) I decided I needed to share an excerpt so you can at least have Feelings with me.

(also posted to tumblr)

Without his notice, Legolas’s agitated steps have carried him to the window, open to the night air. He leans out between the shutters, his fingers tightening on the cold stone of the sill, his head tilting up as if to trace the moonbeams – or something else, something more elusive. The fortress of Dol Amroth is built of stone, well-worn with the echoes of the men and even elves who have lived here. Can Amroth’s voice still be heard among the din?

He hums a few bars of the song under his breath – the tale of Nimrodel and Amroth, which captivated him in his youth despite his sister’s grumblings about Amroth himself. In those days, it was the verses about Nimrodel’s fate – about the loss of her bright soul to a choking cloud, the storm that swept over her people and scattered them to cruel winds – that he sang again and again, possessed by some maudlin spirit perhaps born of his own plight. And he knows he was not alone.

But now . . .

Now in later years he has been possessed rather to sing of Amroth’s fate. Of how he was swept from the shore before his love had come to him, how the West seized his ship in its talonlike grip despite his cries. How he watched the shore fade from sight, knowing he would never see his love again – and gave himself to the waves rather than let it happen.

Where is Nimrodel now? Does she wander somewhere in the far-off places of the world, singing too of her love? Or did she learn from this place of his fate and go to join him at last?

I also highly recommend this arrangement of the song by Yolanda Mott, an actual human siren who has done several gorgeous renditions of Tolkien songs.