Rebirth and Reorientation

[rocky41_7]

Thinking about Amarie and Finrod again (and what a microcosm of contemporary Noldor society they are) and how scary his return must be in some ways for her. The Elves who stayed behind and chose not to follow the Exiles have no concept of what life is like in Middle-earth. For those who were born in Aman, they have only relative concepts of suffering, struggle, death, anguish, etc. They aren’t as sheltered as they were before the Darkening, but they are still a great deal more so than those who went ahead to Middle-earth and fought the Long Defeat. Especially as Finrod comes back before the War of Wrath, when the Elves of Aman would have been given a much better idea of the Middle-earth situation.

So for Amarie who remained behind at the behest of her family, to have her beloved come back to her, and yet be different than he was, hints at the kinds of things that happened there. Finrod is back and so much of him is the same person he used to be, but now he has terrible nightmares that keep him up for hours or days. Now he spends long periods staring into the distance, thinking about or remembering things that obviously trouble him, but which he doesn’t want to talk about. Now he’s jumpier, warier than he was; he reaches for weapons he no longer carries. Now there is grief in his face, in his fea, and although he had time to heal in Mandos, it’s not all gone. There is still much left to resolve on his own.

And how frightening for Amarie, who has never seen the things that Finrod saw in Middle-earth, to get these hints of how difficult life was there, of the great evils that live there, and to see how they have changed someone she loves. Finrod would prefer to spare her having to hear them--particularly the way he died--but she’ll get them out of him eventually, and she’ll wonder again and again: if she had been there, would she understand his struggle now better? Would anything have been different?