I own nothing of this story, and I desire no profit of any kind. I offer this short meditation in the hope of honouring Prof. Tolkien’s work and his contributions to my thoughts and emotions on the subjects of life, death, and hope.
 

Strange it may seem, but even in the twilight of our mortality I did not regret the ever-shortening span of years before me.

Many among my people shed bitter tears over my Doom, and some saw fit to speak their own dooms over me, saying I would curse the destiny of Men and rue my rash decision to share their fate of being ripped so soon from Arda. Yet I did not so, and not only for Beren’s sake. Even if the life of the Eldar had been open to us both, I do not think I would have wished it. In the end, we were simply weary. We had won victories unlooked for, trophies of renown, but not without cost. Not without cost.

Beren bore the scars of our trials in his body, bore the shadow of sacrifice where his hand had once been. I too was scarred, though it was long before I truly comprehended it. Indeed it was my husband, who had suffered in defiance of evil long before I knew him, who taught me of my plight.

One night I fell into a fit of anger, driven near distraction by nightmares that I could not grasp, my sleep riven by fears I did not understand. Then Beren drew close to me and took me in his arms, and he looked at me with such deep knowing that I felt suddenly like a child before some elder wisdom.

“Tinúviel,” he whispered as he stroked my hair and soothed me as he might a babe, “think you truly that any child of Arda can defy Morgoth to his face and come away unscathed?” And when I stared at him in consternation and would have denied him, he only shushed me gently.

“Ever it is so that all who strive against the darkness pay a price,” he said, and his solemn words brought me near to tears. “We pay in hurts unseen as surely as in blood, and such wounds are harder far to heal.”

My tears did fall, then, and I wept long and bitterly as at last I knew what I had long thought to deny: that all our trials had brought us to each other, but not, in the end, to peace. And Beren held me through the sobs that wracked my body until I lay quiescent in his arms.

“This too, then, we sacrificed for love,” I said tonelessly, for I knew not what I felt in that moment.

“For love,” Beren agreed. “For love, yet I think not only for the love of which you speak. Long have I pondered the quest your father set before us, and wondered at its strangeness. A Silmaril he asked for—a stone for which he had no need, a stone that seems ill-fated, ever bringing war before it. Yet you have said the light that lives within that stone is holy, as indeed it seemed to me in the brief time I held it. Have you not wondered what might be the fate of such a stone?”

I looked at him in wonder, then, for never had I heard him speak thus. And I shivered at his next words, for never had I heard so clearly the timbre of foretelling in the voice of Man or Elf.

“My heart tells me that all our quest, all our sufferings, served some purpose greater even than our joining—that our deeds will be sung within some greater song, and that all we have sacrificed was in some way beyond our ken given for the sake of both our peoples in some later age.”

Then his voice was his own again, and his next words carried a note of shyness I remembered well from the first spring we spent together, many years before.

“So it seems to me, at least,” he murmured, “though for no reason I can tell.”

For many minutes I was quiet—then I sighed.

“So our Doom is to suffer always for the sake of those who follow us?”

“Nay,” he said, and sounded sure again. “Nay, not always. For did not the Valar say to you that our fate was set before us by the Power beyond the circles of the world?”

I nodded, trembling, knowing that we trod near some great mystery, and I clutched my husband’s hand.

“I know not truly what became of me or where my spirit wandered as you pled our case in Mandos,” he said, speaking very slowly now. “I do not think I left these circles, but perhaps I drew near the edge. And it seemed to me then, and seems now still, that I drew near to power that can only be the Power reverenced even by the Valar. And from that Power I felt love, and the hope of peace, and the promise of healing beyond all that is possible in the world we have known.”

“And this, you think, is what awaits us when our Doom falls full upon us at the last?” I asked, hardly daring to breathe.

He paused for a long moment, thoughtful. Then—

“Yes,” he said, simply, and his face softened into a smile of deep contentment such as I had never seen. And then he spoke no more, but held me close to him, and I felt hope seep from his spirit into mine as the soft sound of his breathing lulled me back to sleep.

That night lived ever in my memory, returning to me in times of sorrow or fear of the Doom that hastened ever closer. And it returned to me too when I looked with melancholy upon the world around me, and wondered why I could not cherish it as I had in the long days of my youth, and when, at the last, weariness overcame the last of my husband’s strength and mine.

This is the memory that fills my thoughts as I lay my head against his silent heart, and let my eyes close, and my breath still, and my spirit slip away, following my beloved along paths unknown to the final end of our quest.