Notes: The casual tone of the dialogues is intentional, as I am in the opinion that the people in the Silmarillion did not always talk in stiff, stilted, formal tone in every occasion. Here I also follow the account in the Silmarillion which states that Orodreth was the son of Finarfin, not Angrod. I am using the Quenya form of the names in this piece, although I am not sure about Orodreth’s. (I think his Quenya name is wrong, but it is hard to match his Sindarin name with its counterpart in Quenya anyway.) And by the way, when counting up the number of Finwë’s line, I included Faniel, his fourth daughter (after Findis and Irimë) in the process; Tolkien never used Faniel at last, but I heard that she was mentioned somewhere in one of his later muses. This piece was inspired by June 2006’s challenge in the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild (SWG).

List of Names and Quenya Terms:

Aikanáro: Aegnor

Ammë: Mum/Mummy

Angaráto: Angrod

Arafinwë: Finarfin

Artanis: Galadriel

Artaresto: Orodreth

Atto: Dad/Daddy

Finderáto: Finrod

Neri: male Elves (singular: nér)

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“What is the baby going to be, do you think?” Artaresto asked in his typical silent voice. He was huddling with his siblings in the garden, far from the room in which their mother was delivering the newest – and perhaps last – addition to the family. They had been forbidden to stay near the birthing room for whatever reason by both the midwife and their frantic, fearful father.

Finderáto, the eldest of the four sons, grunted noncommittally and shrugged. “Boy or girl will be the same to me. That only means I will have one more trouble maker to tackle,” he said somewhat sullenly. He got a chorus of protests from three different voices for that.

“I hope it’s going to be a boy. A girl is no fun,” Aikanáro spoke up. Angaráto nodded in agreement.

“How if it turns out to be a girl, though?” Artaresto asked ponderously. Angaráto shrugged but Aikanáro looked slightly mutinous. The latter response made Finderáto and Artaresto each arch an eyebrow.

“Will you hate her if so?” Finderáto queried, his face inscrutable. Aikanáro squirmed under his gaze but said nothing. The impassive look on the eldest’s visage became thoughtful.

“You only nodded or shrugged. You didn’t mention any reason.” Artaresto, disinterested with Aikanáro at length (unlike his older brother), turned his attention to Angaráto. He poked his younger brother’s ribs with a finger when the latter did not respond to him.

“Hey! You never told us your opinions too,” the third son growled in his own defense. “You asked people but you didn’t answer your own questions.” He pouted and glared at his older brother, simultaneously inching away from said brother in order to avoid more finger-jabbing.

Artaresto looked hurt. But, before he could fling a sharp retort of his own, Finderáto forestalled him, saying, “Look. That’s Atto coming. The delivery must have been a success. See how he is grinning…”

Angaráto snickered when his eyes found the spot pointed by the eldest. “He looks foolish that way.”

Finderáto, rising from the grass, snorted. “Wait until you have your own child, Anga.” The statement was met by Angaráto’s dubious expression. No one had a chance to comment on it, however, for the eldest had taken off running to the direction of their father, eager for news. Soon the three younger sons were racing after him with the same intention and spirit.

Even from a distance, questions already flew, bombarding Arafinwë.

“How is Ammë, Atto?”

“What is the baby’s gender, Atto? A boy or a girl?”

“How does the baby look like, Atto?”

“May we see them now, Atto?”

“Have you decided on a name, Atto? Has Ammë given out a name too?”

“Are they still in the birthing room?”

“Can I bring the baby out here this evening, Atto?”

“Peace, children,” Arafinwë laughed, still grinning from ear to ear. He held up a hand, both to forestall any other inquiries and to prevent his sons from colliding purposefully with him in order to embrace him – as was sometimes their wont to do. “Come in now, and go to Your ammë’s and my bedroom. But pay heed so that you do not startle either her or your new sibling.”

The four neri did not need telling twice. In short, they had already vanished, sprinting into the house. Arafinwë shook his head, a bit rueful. “I wish I told them also not to run in the house,” he muttered. But then he himself raced after his sons into the moderate-sized-but-elegant-looking abode and the bedroom he shared with his beloved spouse. He reasoned to himself that he was doing that in order to prevent either of his sons from accidentally upsetting Eärwen and her newborn child, yet deep in his heart he knew that he was actually reluctant to part from the latter two for too long.

He froze when he arrived in the room. Aikanáro seemed upset, Artaresto looked mildly interested and joyous, Finderáto was slightly apprehensive but nonetheless happy, but Angaráto was obviously distraught. What had happened?

He asked just that to both his sons and his spouse, yet he got no reply from either parties. Or at least he did, firstly.

Before five counts of fingers, Angaráto hurled himself at him and demanded, “Why didn’t you beget a boy? A girl is so much harder to defend!”

Arafinwë was flabbergasted. “Neither I nor anyone else can possibly decide the gender of our child, Anga. And what do you mean by defending your sister? We need not do that here in Aman; the power of the Valar defends us all.”

Angaráto did not answer. He just wailed softly on and on, tugging at his atto’s robe at times. And in his reedy, squeaky, small voice, Arafinwë caught words like “darkness”, “hardships”, “worthless Ellyn”, and, what made the father of the newborn’s blood run cold, “death”. With Angaráto still clinging to his side, he made a beeline to the bed and peered down to the bundle held in Eärwen’s arms with wide, worried eyes.

He could not fully conceal his consternation. Who would hurt his Artanis? Who could possibly hate his beloved Eärwen’s Nerwendë in the future? And what a dark future overall it was that Angaráto had been rambling about!

His daughter was greedily feeding from her mother’s milk, oblivious to the various reactions of her family or her third brother’s odd reception of her. She had the most beautiful eyes Arafinwë had ever seen, blue like the Vanyar but deeper in shade and gravity. She already possessed a thick tuft of hair: gold but with the slightest touch of silver which only made the strands gleam more brilliantly… He could not bear to lose her, as Angaráto had suggested. But could what his third son had said be only the rambling of a shocked new brother? None of them had ever hoped to have a female in the family other than Eärwen, after all, so the arrival of the tiny girl was quite a surprise for them, and even Arafinwë had not been exempt from it.

He averted his gaze and attention to the sulking Aikanáro, and found that the former last child only complained about having a little sister rather than a little brother. When he asked the other two, Artaresto confessed that he would like to know his little sister more before judging her, and Finderáto opined the same thing. So what was wrong with his Anga?

The poor father never found out, and the matter was forgotten until the War of Wrath. But he had no chance to ask Angaráto about that. His son, along with his other children except Artanis, were already dead by the time he arrived in Middle-Earth.