vardasvapors:

The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.

Here was the setting, here the heroes’ journey, here struggle and war that was foreshadowed to build, matched move for move, verse for verse. Home far away was the prologue that stood for the time of old, now marked by sunset, where the tale began — a tale began but once.

There was quarrel, there loss, there darkness, there frozen strait by dark of night, over sea and under sky, each feä on fell ice burning, each star in heaven shivering. Blue flame arced from horizon to horizon high above and far below. And out of the dark sky beyond the sea, the silver light of rising moon spilled down like springmelt bubbling. And out of the dark earth beyond the ice the petals unfurled like banners, and pollen released like trumpet calls, as blossoms sprang up in greeting.

The Cuivienyar had passed down old tales from before the Great Journey, of entering the underworld and passing through to the Light Beyond the Sea. He had imagination enough to turn the story back-to-front – it was a thing fair-wrought still. Through sorrow, to finding. His brother’s tongue had crafted words like he crafted jewels, as lasting and as true.

Now here fire poured out like blood, and tree and hill were torn to ash by the flames’ red hot teeth. Here field was felled and forest razed in the onslaught, with the crackling and roaring and rushing and whistling of an army, of a torrent of spears and swords, of cruel molten steel still glowing and flowing and formless in the forge-heat. The sun fell to earth and swallowed it amid dawnless night of black smoke. And in the darkness it flickered fierce gold, like the light of betrayal across the sea.

When Hador had been a youth he had written down for Fingolfin a long and winding lay of the eastern lands of herding and wandering, and an errant chief who craved a fountain of undeath. He wrote it in a book separated by pages, so that if a handful were torn from any part of it, it no longer made sense, and the rest of the tale changed to horror by nothing but its very raggedness. We already have that problem in life, my lord, he said when Fingolfin asked, for we forget, and must by ourselves spin and stitch a meaning across the gap, to remake it whole. Hador had not remembered how that lay ended and so, in his old age, he guessed the chief may have came back to his sheep and cattle and people in wisdom and in sorrowing. But now Fingolfin noted that in that tale the chief’s herd was not devoured in fire, and there was no enemy to challenge behind the veil of flames. That might have given that tale a new meaning and a different shape — by nothing but its very ending.