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The Cenotaph by timelessutterances
Fandoms: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
20 Oct 2025
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Summary
“For no war ever ends. Children born tomorrow are shaped by arrows fired yesterday. Celeborn’s daughter was born over a thousand years after the sacking of her father’s birthplace. She will live to the breaking of the world having only ever known a father who once watched his homeland burn and spent the rest of his life counting Doriath’s dead. Like all war-children born to a world that had already ended for their parents, Celebrían had to learn there were rooms within her father she could never enter, whole wings of his fëa razed to the ground.”
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A study of Celeborn, the Second Kinslaying, and his lost Doriath, from the First Age to the Fourth. -
Bookmark Notes:
I can only dream I will ever write this well. Seriously, one of the most underrated characters in the books and he's perfectly depicted in this.
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Bookmark Notes:
The Cenotaph by timelessutterances
“For no war ever ends. Children born tomorrow are shaped by arrows fired yesterday. Celeborn’s daughter was born over a thousand years after the sacking of her father’s birthplace. She will live to the breaking of the world having only ever known a father who once watched his homeland burn and spent the rest of his life counting Doriath’s dead. Like all war-children born to a world that had already ended for their parents, Celebrían had to learn there were rooms within her father she could never enter, whole wings of his fëa razed to the ground.”
—————
A study of Celeborn, the Second Kinslaying, and his lost Doriath, from the First Age to the Fourth.//
Do earthquakes still at nursery doors? Are swords less sharp when the skulls are soft? Does floodwater withdraw when cradles float? Are saplings spared when the forest is set ablaze? Do little fingers thaw when the spring sky weeps? And what of the flowers?//
What truly unnerves him is the mechanism itself, the way Aman has built an entire architecture around the idea that violence can be metabolised if you suffer enough afterwards, that the before can be neutralised by the now.
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The Eldar move from Cuivenen to kinslaying to exile to war to return to the breaking of the world, each age swallowing the previous, but Celeborn remains in a single aperture, a single burning city stretched across three ages like a painting left too long in the sun. He cannot move forward because moving forward would mean leaving Doriath behind, and leaving Doriath behind would mean admitting that the children are dead and have been dead and will remain dead and my god how many cradles, how many cradles, and the horses, the horses, and what of the niphredil and —
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Galadriel is braiding her silver hair, humming something soft and wordless. The horses are screaming, and the children are dead.