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When I first found Celebrían in a footnote, I wrapped up warm and followed, certain she'd lead me to where she truly lived in the text. By that point, it had been a good decade or so since I first read Tolkien – I had been aware that Elrond had a wife, and assumed she was dead or hung up in some other cold meat locker alongside a procession of wives spanning literary history.
It was only years later that I properly came across her, and blinked, realising she was a cursory line which led to a footnote in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, one which referred to her torment in passing, meant to explain why the sons of Elrond and to an extent Elrond himself, were the way they were.
Fridging was one thing, but torment was another entirely, I thought — and so casually! Tea and torment in the Third Age, tra-la-lally traumatised into "losing all joy" in Middle-Earth and leaving the year after, taking ship to Valinor and leaving behind a grieving family. It was simple curiosity, really, until it turned into a cold, familiar grasp: the clear-cut knowledge of exactly what sort of torment it would have been, that drove away the wife of a noble lord living in what was very clearly described as being one of the last great sanctuaries in a ravaged realm.
But to understand why The Footnote stopped me in my tracks, I need to tell you about The Fields.
When I speak of The Fields (which are of course not really fields and neither are they called The Fields anywhere but here), I refer to one of the most beautiful spots in the country. The Fields combined the peaceful pastoral with quaint urban charm, rustic without being remote, safe without being detached. I lived in The Fields for several years, and made a little life for myself that grew into something bigger.
I had been an activist in The Fields — moved from scrappy student to card-carrying revolutionary — and I did it because I loved where I lived very, very much, enough to think I could kiss it better. And I was good, I was! I belonged on the stage in that sense, I was invited to panel after panel, talk after talk, and I stood on little podiums that grew alongside me. I knew how to carry myself, present myself, leveraged my palatability and conventionality in return for rights and bare-minimum environmental reparations.
Such wonders, of course, came with a cost I hadn’t foreseen — an incident, a couple really, that tossed a diagnosis of cPTSD into my lap and turned my lovely home into The Fields. And because I had been so good at presenting myself and clambering on podiums with shiny hair, the incidents became the talk of the town, and I in turn very quickly became a subject, the walking, talking cost of resistance.
A feature of cPTSD, one that sets it apart from PTSD, is the overarching dullness with which the emotional flashbacks grasp you. Not like being plucked off the surface of the earth by a monstrous thing, but rather drowning quietly in sludge you never realised was beneath your feet in the first place. There was never a thing that terrified me about The Fields, it was only ever a quiet, creeping mass taking over everything, and in being so — easy to ignore and disguise.
I love The Fields, I told myself, even after. I loved The Fields, even though life had turned into air and static, and I had turned into an unfeeling thing. I lived in the middle of that little city but felt as though I was in a small hut on no-man's land, or a joint security area, suspended between towers. I couldn't stand the wonderful hills and valleys, so I tried my hardest to cling onto the reasons I loved them, tried to medicate them back into my heart with the forcefulness of a pacemaker. I shoved things down throats and up noses, walked back onto all those stages, turned myself into an electric hearse chasing a long-dead dragon. I would walk around The Fields on some nights, very cold and very young, the bleached bones left behind by something very promising.
I stayed in the Fields for a long time, trying to remedy cPTSD with a writer’s understanding of the phenomenon. As months went by, the Fields became phantasmal and transparent, and I felt as though I were haunting someone else’s graveyard. I continued to self-mythologise, telling myself I was tethered to it by unfinished business, or inextinguishable love. It had been that way for years. I hadn’t existed for years.
Can you see why I stopped still at Appendix A, at Celebrían? I tried to follow her, and see where her story began, and what wonders it would end in, because if Celebrían's story ended in wonder then maybe, there might be a chance, perhaps…..
It would be easy, I thought, I was a writer, a journalist, a researcher - I trained in asking questions and knowing things, even sticky, stunted, back-of-the-throat things that you'd rather not catch sight of in a mirror. The History of Middle Earth book sets were ordered, fresh copies of all the old texts, magnifying glasses held over Unfinished Tales.
I’d been so certain I would find her and save us. That Celebrían would ramble across page after page, legs dangling over the edge and an indolent expression fizzing on her face. She would be stubborn and glorious and righteous in her fervor to change the world. I would find her in the flesh, and then no longer would I stand in The Fields each night, hollow-eyed, self-haunting spectre holding myself thrall to a single series of events in what has been, objectively, a lovely, loving life.
But a full month went by, and all I found was footnote after endnote after cursory mention, almost all of them clothing her in torment, growing stiff and sharp against the tooth of the page: vicious, like a blade angled backwards. For Celebrían and I, the richest text in the world turned into a landscape of loss.
What a wonderful, rich, textured world you have!
All the better to swallow you whole, my dear.
I couldn't find her in the story. I spent weeks and weeks on her, and I couldn't find her in the story and by then I had already fancied myself and Celebrían to be counterparts, like if she laughed, I would laugh too, like if she ran, then I would run too, and if she was lost, then… well. I suppose it shows the power of an enduring text. I had a PhD, at that point I had just gotten my publishing deal through, I'd spoken on all those podiums and done all those real-world, adult things, and still I was not immune to the indulgent tether of a good old self-insert. And then it turned out we were not counterparts but rather more akin to co-morbidities, that The Footnote and its friends were all I would ever know of Celebrían.
It was summer, I remember, but my hands were cold — autopsy-fingers, my partner called them. Archive-fingers, autopsy-fingers, scrabbling around to find nothing, no indication as to how Celebrían's story truly ended and why I was the person I was. The texts shifted uneasily under my hands, like the Professor himself was turning out his pockets and shrugging, reminding me that it was neither Celebrían's nor my story, not really. Pointed me back to The Footnote like it was a pacifier, and still I turned in circles like a dog chasing its tail, looking for other instances of her name. I found nothing.
I began to fear that I had wasted my life.
The Footnote started to blur across weeks, and soon it turned itself into My Footnote. The one I had found, a year or so before the hunt, in a fantastic, recently published book that spoke about activism in The Fields, where I came face to face with myself. But there, I hadn't been standing on a podium or being interviewed or writing pressure pieces or anything I had really, truly done, but I was instead a single footnote — condensed into the things that had happened to me, as opposed to the things I had made happen. As the months went on, I looked for references to myself in new books, newspapers, magazines — and I would find myself, but in the same scrap of footnote, wearing the same costume of torment, tragic poster children of a violent world.
I sat there looking at the thousands and thousands of pages in the legendarium, the stack of books on things I had worked upon, statutes I had pulled down and little laws I had changed. And then at the scraps of Celebrían and I, reduced to scribbles and crossing outs in the margins. It was like we never lived at all. It seems a rather childish reaction, perhaps, to not finding the story you want in a book you bought. Still, that afternoon, when I put down the last page of HoME I had access to, I crawled into bed and stayed there for a very long time, trying very hard to not touch even the bedclothes around me.
But I think that was always what drew me to her, that absence. I didn't find myself in Celebrían, but in the footnote that gestured to her presence. It wasn't that I understood her so much as I knew how to decrypt the desperate scratches left behind by someone who drowned on dry land. That was how she and I were truly alike: people who wanted to change the world, or a little part of it, and did, did something good — and had all of it forgotten, crammed into a footnote read with a tender, pitying fret.
But that's not canonical, is it? Yes, her absence shaped the story of the Ring War in certain regards. But who said Celebrían, Celebrían the Person, not Celebrían the Footnote — had ever changed anything, let alone the world in which she lived?
Simple – I did.
My Celebrían was a complete nutcase. I wrote her as a daughter born to a borderline-squirrel of a wood elf, who herself hated small creatures with a passion. I had her take off her shoe and beat earwigs to death, had her talk the ear off a perpetually grieving mother, irritate a kinslayer into planting a pine forest, and threaten the High King with a shovel. She would shove cotton in her ears to block out her husband's snoring, and put four teaspoons of sugar in her tea. She bribed her sons to dispose of a snake, and demanded magical healing for a little scrape on her forehead.
Perhaps there is no such thing as total healing; perhaps every wound lingers, reshaping itself over time and settling into the body’s deepest folds. Perhaps each blow carves its mark, staining teeth, whitening hair, old refrains threading themselves through marrow.
But what of old giggles? Where do those go now? What about startled, breathless cackling, the kind that empties lungs and leaves ribs aching? Where do we store the loved and lost? Where does Celebrían keep her cackles? I didn’t know the answer but the questions felt healing. These days, I am of the opinion that to be healed isn’t to be cured, but rather to develop the ability to live alongside the most intolerable parts of one’s mind. Recovery is a survival tactic, though less fire-without-flint and more lizard-dropping-tail. Primed for violence, the traumatised mind does this, gives you these frantic, immovable highs and lows. And so my Celebrían is at her baddest on the days darkness spreads thickest. She is at her maddest on the days I walk barefoot across beaches and at her saddest when I sink into myself. She reintroduces me to my own mind.
I cut Cel into familiar shapes: the shape of someone who spent months unable to bear the slightest touch, whose loved one slept on the floor beside the bed, clinging to a listless hand dangled off the side. The shape of a small house in a forest, and the shape of a wonderful ending, in which she truly did change the world in all the ways she could. I don't know, if I'm being honest, whether Celebrían changed me, or if I changed her. Whether change was an instant or a process, whether this version of almost-Celebrían mattered to anyone but myself. I knew one thing though — my Celebrían is a thousand footnotes long, and counting.
I was not a writer in the same way I was an environmentalist. I became an environmentalist for all the reasons one should. I became a writer to come to some sense of ease with myself, to make sense of a mind that had become a stranger to me. But my pursuit of Celebrían blurred those edges and melded the two. In a way, finding and then writing Celebrían felt more like a conservation project than a creative exercise. Like I have said through Maglor, every conservation project is, at its core, an explanation of why someone else should care about something precious to you; a study of what has been lost already, and what that could be lost, what might be worth saving, and why.
Footnotes, like most things in the archive, are of course caging things: keeping unpalatable violence in the past, or at least elsewhere, keeping the here and now good and quiet. It's easier to outsource healing and rediscovery to other places, to archives and museums and books and Valinor. Was being a footnote a punishment? What’s worse, being pickled wrongly or never being pickled at all? Was this yet another installment of the cautionary tale stretching all the way through time and reality from Celebrían to me; footnotes about women who held themselves thrall to the memory of violence, who lived as well as they could, till they couldn’t? Would it have been better if she never existed at all?
I don't know. All I know for certain is this: at some point between finding Celebrían and writing her, I moved out of The Fields and across the country. Can a footnote do that? Blow open all the shutters in your brain, hold you thrall to possibility?
It had been a long time coming. But for years, I had thought I would weather living in The Fields because even after the Torment, the Footnote, the Diagnosis, I never felt a disconnect from the place, because I was still extroverted and irritating and fizzing with the desire to stay in the Fields and love it, as I had always done. And then suddenly, I wanted to run.
It wasn't as if Celebrían burned The Fields down, leaving me there to watch flames eating its flat, starless sky. But what she did was this: carefully take off my rose-tinted glasses, and say run —- this earth has swallowed you whole.
I had assumed it was my fault, my attachment to The Fields, that I was looking at things wrong, that I was maintaining unhealthy attachments to sites of trauma, prioritising the wrong perspectives, the body keeps an atlas and all that. But Celebrían did not call me crazy. Celebrían was not the kind of person who would ever call you crazy. She was the kind of person who would lay in a wide-open field beside you and ask you what you were looking at.
And when you say "oh, just up at the big sky", she wouldn't probe. She would know exactly what you mean when you didn't say "-- because there is nothing ahead of me", and she wouldn't say a word about how the ground around you was soft with decay, reeking like a corpse, that you were caught in the straggling grass of its hair.
She would instead shrug, wink, and point you towards Gollum, because of course she would. She would tell you that Tolkien, ever the Catholic, had drawn out a perfect depiction of what might have happened if Lazarus was left in that cave. And then she would say, run, for god's sake, girl, run, and you would.
How stubbornly we all cling to the idea of being fixed, to the idea of a ready-made Valinor to sail to if we do well enough at life! How faithfully we believe that if you spend enough time being a very, very good cracked vessel, maybe one day you might feel the quiet triumph of bearing water again. Celebrían, not the Celebrían of The Footnote but the manic pixie freakshow of Imladris, said shut the fuck up and run. That it was no use hungering for the impossible and thumbing listlessly though footnotes, and to instead run, and run, and start digging a garden at the ground you come to a stop at because it is only in new soil that something gentle could unfold unbidden. That as time passes, you will belong less and less to the ground you left behind and more and more to the ground you walk upon, to the new trees and new hills around you, to those who love you still.
Run, she said. How alive you looked, hunting for me. How badly you craved my story. See? There are still stories you crave. You are still human enough to crave. Run! Tear up the old maps! Let in madness and badness! Run riot!
I think many of us who love this brief, inexorable footnote of a Celebrían, whether we read her or write her, are bound by a similar truth: that in her we caught sight of something within ourselves. All around the world, these tiny, unflinching mirrors in Appendix A and the rest, tie together and create a hundred different Celebríans, all part of the same thread, each version carrying its own burden, though rarely do we ever acknowledge it in each other. It's a quiet nod, an unspoken connection, a reminder that we are all more alike and less alone than a cursory footnote might imply.
To find Celebrían, I had to write her. And in turn, she wrote me in her image. I look at her now, as she is in my head, and there Celebrían is neither alive nor dead. No, what is most clear in my mind is a girl in a dusty wing mirror, a life packed into boxes, sunglasses sliding down her nose. One hand sandwiched in an ordnance map, prying the pages open, hurtling at a perfectly legal speed down an M-road. The Fields are gone. No, not gone, not truly, but invisible to the naked eye, unless you know exactly where to look. A grain of sand in a bucket of water, a single, sad fish half-buried on a tropical beach. A finger to the past, a wave from a window, an entry in a bibliography. The Fields growing smaller, and smaller, and smaller in the rearview mirror until it is outright miniscule. A single footnote long.
Midway through the drive, the sun began to set across my windscreen. Sentimental and starry-eyed, I felt like between us, Celebrían and I stitched together that peachy dusk. All I left behind and all that was taken from me, Celebrían and I would paint back into the sky. I had laughed-cried in the way one does at miracles, at my second chance to take my life in hand and do something wonderful with it. It was an ordinary sunset, if I’m being honest, crept up like all the others and probably didn’t deserve the pressure of my conviction that it had meant something. But such commonplace permanence was exactly what I had been after, on the day I began to search for the fate of Elrond Peredhel’s wife. That such a sky had always been waiting there, watching for Celebrían and I to drive out of the fog, was precisely what made it all the more marvellous.