White Lady, With Lamp

[altariel]

It was she they wanted, Lady Wraithbane.

White Lady, With Lamp

Ithilien, in the Fourth Age

In the years after, so many of them came that a house was built in a tranquil valley where Elves now dwelt. Young men no more, the horror of that past still shaped their desolate present. Elf-song soothed them – but it was she they wanted, Lady Wraithbane, whose deed felled a dread king.

And Éowyn welcomed each of them, and fought for them, and ordered a fair house for them. But their devotion baffled her. She never quite grasped what her husband always knew – that pity was hers too, and the healing love can be strong as well as gentle.

Comments

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

And still they come! These lovely, lovely drabbles.

It may not have been trench warfare, but it would still lead to the desolation of the present, and yes, it would take someone of Éowyn's strength to understand that and pour out a healing measure.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Thank you. No trench warfare, although the Nazgul attacks during the siege of Minas Tirith must surely be Tolkien's narrativising of heavy bombardment. That must have took some coming back from.

As for some of the other men in this story, I was thinking of this bit in The Return of the King, as the Army of the West marches on the Black Gate:

So time and the hopeless journey wore away. Upon the fourth day from the Cross-roads and the sixth from Minas Tirith they came at last to the end of the living lands, and began to pass into the desolation that lay before the gates of the Pass of Cirith Gorgor; and they could descry the marshes and the desert that stretched north and west to the Emyn Muil. So desolate were those places and so deep the horror that lay on them that some of the host were unmanned, and they could neither walk nor ride further north.
Aragorn looked at them, and there was pity in his eyes rather than wrath; for these were young men from Rohan, from Westfold far away, or husbandmen from Lossarnach, and to them Mordor had been from childhood a name of evil, and yet unreal, a legend that had no part in their simple life; and now they walked like men in a hideous dream made true, and they understood not this war nor why fate should lead them to such a pass."

Aragorn sends some of them off to retake another outpost, and some of them are rallied by what he says to them and carry on to the Black Gate. It's such an incredibly poignant moment: Tolkien must have had very young men like this under his command.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

now they walked like men in a hideous dream made true, and they understood not this war nor why fate should lead them to such a pass.

Goodness, yes, that must surely hark back Tolkien's wartime experience.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. So much of the book does.