Afterwards, they went back. No tale contains this part: no one set it down. Few set out: Oropher, his tall, gangly son, and a handful of others. A small cluster of green shoots. Spring was returning to the forest, and it smelled sweet, like unfurling leaves and old rot melting. They were very careful. They moved and slept in the trees, wishing their foliage fuller and missing Melian’s temperate cradle. But at the rushing Esgalduin, before Menegroth’s bashed-in mouth, there were no boughs to make the going safer.
“Finrod’s brother,” one said, weeping, “wished his mortal’s beauty to live on unmarred in his memory.”
Oropher looked searchingly at his son. Should we not have come back? the look asked. Should I not have brought you back?
Thranduil shook his head. He was serious-faced, with an edge of temper and a merry wit that darted free at times like a bird startled from a branch. No humor glinted in his gaze now. He was named for the spring, but perhaps it had been this kind of spring. “We had to,” he said simply. “Pass me a lantern:” and he crossed the stone bridge and went inside.
Ringing silence, orchestral silence, the tremor of the air from breath and speech shimmering up the vaulted halls roofed by gleaming roots, through the wide proud galleries with their pillars fashioned like beech-trees. No robbers or kinslayers had made lair of this place. Still they trod softly, reverently, until in the garden with its fountain gone quiet—not the throne room—Medlithor sang out clarion a love-song of Daeron’s, and briefly illuminated the dark like lightning.
Three of Nimloth’s gowns for the little princess. Torn tapestries—gleaming silver. A great book of heraldry, and another of sketches, plans for uncarved statuary. Daeron’s prized notes nowhere to be found. A chest of Oropher’s things, still fastened shut, guiltily perfect. A zither broken and unsinging. The dark space where the bodies had been heaped and burnt atop the frozen ground by their enemies. White bones of a few they had missed. The tree-roots embracing them, the new moss blanketing them. Circles ever widening outward, months late seeking children who would never be found.
Somber return, days in the making. Thranduil sat on a pier and watched the silt swirl and mingle with the clear salt of the ocean. Something tugged in his young breast: he could not name it. It was not sea-longing.
“It was very fine. The floor was fashioned like a vast ocean, sweeping out—oh!—with bright fishes, and strange sea-weeds like purple flowers, and amongst them, stars.” Evranin’s hands fluttered like birds, even when she was not at her stitching. “You used to hop from one spotted ray to the next.”
Elwing nodded dubiously.
“You remember it, don’t you, my girl? I know you do.”
“I think so,” Elwing said.
“Your great-grandfather planned it. He was the first to make the journey across the Sea, and he returned with a beautiful light in his eyes: they glowed in the endless dusk under the starlight.”
Elwing flinched.
“Not thus, sweet,” Evranin said, “like auntie Idril’s. ‘Twas a shine like the dawn, though of course, we knew no dawn then.”
Elwing looked confused, then squinted her eyes like two clenched fists, as though trying to work out a time before sunlight. Evranin thought this very Bëorian of her. At last, satisfied, she gave a little nod of approval.
“He loved the Sea: your great-grandfather. He and his brother meant to cross and live by the shore on the other side—where the fish leapt in the colorful shallows, and the stars’ reflection could yet be seen.”
“But he did not,” Elwing interrupted, frowning. She knew this part, and meant not to be appeased.
“He loved your great-grandmother more, and the woods’ green smell underfoot in the summer. But his brother—your great-great-uncle—did cross over, and he built a fair city for our people by the water. When you look west, my dear, think of all your family waiting to meet you. We live on the shore now, just as they do.”
“I don’t remember the floor of that gallery,” Elwing said quietly. “But I remember the music of the fountains through the room, and Naneth dancing with Ada. There were nightingales in his hair.”
If you looked carefully, as Bilbo was wont to do, you could see the places where the tapestry in Elrond’s library had been repaired. It nearly covered one complete wall of the hexagonal room, confidently draping languid and liquid across space where more books and scrolls could have been squirreled away. Its colors seemed to shift, unearthly, and the weave was finer than any Bilbo had seen—which made the repairs, neat as they were, quite obvious. The image was one of a shadow-crowded forest of brambles and feathery boughs, and in the foreground dark, shimmering water. Shapes were awakening beneath the stars in the twilight by the water’s edge, stretching up glistening bodies and dancing and drawing one another in to embrace. At one corner the winding border had been singed and the damage had not been mended. Still, it was very beautiful. Nearby, upon a varnished wooden stand, a book sat partly open, with thin, cracked pages of birch-paper. It was full of sigils, but Bilbo, despite making a study of Elf-lore, recognized none of them.
“Nor do I know most of them,” Elrond said, when asked. “It is far older than I, and a gift from Oropher from long ago, ere he left eastwards. See, though. Here is Beleg’s seal, and Mablung’s: the marchwardens from Túrin’s unhappy tale.” Bilbo exclaimed over these a while, and then asked: “What about the tapestry?”
“Melian the Maia wove it in the Elder Days.” He did not need to add: I thought it should be admired.
They had argued bitterly on the day the gift was made. It was vanishingly rare to see Elrond angry, but Oropher had managed it.
“Name me not king. I have chosen my king, and I am his herald. Leave it, I have begged of you. I won't ask again."
“And in what world am I to be named lord, while Elwing’s son bears no title? While our prince—”
“You might stay!” Elrond said rather wildly.
“And you might come with us—to oak and elm, the deep forest, people of our own ways—”
“I have made my choice.”
Silence fell between them, a silence of set jaws and brittle gazes. It was from an excess of care that they crossed wills.
“You are so like Lúthien,” Oropher said at last. Pride was soft in his voice. “Nay, your mother in her lordship. You are so like all of them.”
Elrond did not know what he meant.
“Accept these at least. They are your own inheritance. How I wish we had been able to offer you more.” Oropher said nothing else, but Elrond heard in his inmost heart all he meant, and opening his own heart he offered him forgiveness for the harsh words freshly spoken and for the old aches, the beaded necklace of orphans upon orphans, the bruise-tender childhood, the sunken continent, the houseless shades of the dead that crowded like moths: all the wounds still bleeding, and in which Oropher was faultless.
When Amon Lanc grew too dangerous, Thranduil knew what had to be done. Harried and unmerry was the Wood-elves’ journey northwards through the forest’s tree-paths. They took from the hill only what they could carry. Those of Thranduil’s people whom he met on the way—for many lived simply in the trees throughout Greenwood with their companions and children, and had joined themselves to no great settlement—spoke with him in troubled voices, though on the nights his following gathered around their small talans wine flowed and songs were sung.
“We need to make fast a stronghold,” he said. “Underground: a place of stone.”
“Better to go through the trees quickly! to travel lightly!”
“And if there is nowhere left that the Shadow has not touched?”
These Elves shook their heads and he read their thinking: we have always dwelt in this forest. But Thranduil’s heart misgave him, insisting the direst hour was still to come, and that he ready all his scattered people a sanctuary in advance of that hour.
Kingship did not rest easily on this son of Oropher. He had not been born to it, and he had meant never to find it. He preferred swimming the forest’s rivers and downing the sweet nectar of more summery lands to difficult counsels and deference, however warmly they were offered him. Very often since his father’s death, the way did not seem clear.
It was clear in this moment. He felt Elu Thingol’s hand cool upon his shoulder, as surely as if the king sojourned with him in the dappled wood and spoke as he had at the height of his wisdom. He saw in his mind’s eye the bridge that would cross the running water, the enchanted door, the roots that would be sung into high ceilings, the beech-carved pillars, the golden lamplight.
__________
From The Silmarillion: "But the Elves also had part in that labour, and Elves and Dwarves together, each with their own skill, there wrought out the visions of Melian, images of the wonder and beauty of Valinor beyond the Sea. The pillars of Menegroth were hewn in the likeness of the beeches of Oromë, stock, bough, and leaf, and they were lit with lanterns of gold. The nightingales sang there as in the gardens of Lórien; and there were fountains of silver, and basins of marble, and floors of many-colored stones. Carven figures of beasts and birds there ran upon the walls, or climbed upon the pillars, or peered among the branches entwined with many flowers. And as the years passed Melian and her maidens filled the halls with woven hangings wherein could be read the deeds of the Valar, and many things that had befallen in Arda since its beginning, and shadows of things that were yet to be. That was the fairest dwelling of any king that has ever been east of the Sea."
