#until/unless they met at the nirnaeth

[ncfan-1]

The Finduilas x Maeglin Essay, or: Me and My Rarepair

Okay, so people actually do want to know why I ship Finduilas and Maeglin, so I guess it’s time for a little shipping quasi-essay. I’ve been thinking about the ship more again lately, since I think I may start writing in the AU-verse of Unintended again soon. To those who wanted to know why I ship it, and to the others that ship this as well (!), this is for you.

It started when I was writing Stands Between for Legendarium Ladies April 2016. Stands Between is one of those feel-good, fluffy fix-it fics that says “I don’t care if it’s implausible; canon’s so depressing that I’m gonna do this anyways.” I hit a bit of a snag when I got Túrin to Gondolin with Tuor and Voronwë, because in order to get Turgon to understand the seriousness of the vision Ulmo imparted on Tuor, first Maeglin had to be made to understand how serious it was, and Maeglin… was not cooperating. I couldn’t understand how to get him to the point of being willing to see the threat posed by Morgoth for what it was.

I had a breakthrough when I realized that Maeglin was to Turgon what Túrin had been to Orodreth. The idea that the two characters played parallel roles clarified Maeglin’s characterization, both in this fic and in general, a lot for me. Then I got to thinking. I ship Finduilas/Túrin, so how about Finduilas/Maeglin?

I looked up the ship on AO3. Nothing. I looked it up on Fanfiction.net. Also nothing.

Things snowballed from there.

I’d be lying if I said I needed much reason to start shipping a crack ship. And Finduilas x Maeglin is nothing if not a crack ship. They never meet in canon; there’s no opportunity for them to meet in canon, unless in Aman after they’ve both been re-embodied. But it occurred to me that Maeglin seems to share more than a few traits with other men Finduilas found attractive.

Gwindor, pre-Nirnaeth, was described as valiant and impetuous, all but fearless in battle, to his cost. A man of action. Túrin shares these traits, and is additionally shown to be hard-working (he’d have to be, to keep at the crafts he learned in Doriath even though Morgoth’s curse kept making his attempts go awry), charismatic though he was not merry, and much more kind-hearted than most give him credit for, for he was always ready to lend an ear to people who claimed to suffer hurts.

Maeglin is described in the Silmarillion as being fairly wary in his counsels, and “yet hardy and valiant at need” (138), unafraid of the dangers of battle. He was hard-working, often going into the Echoriath to mine metal ore, including the iron he used to construct the Gate of Steel. He was said to have in his voice “a power to move those that heard him and to overthrow those that withstood him” (134) when he spoke of matters close to his heart, not a far cry from Túrin’s own charisma. We don’t know if Maeglin was ever a particularly kind person, because the narrative portrays him ambivalently from the start, even before he becomes a villain. But either way, he’s got a lot of the same traits as Gwindor and especially Túrin, and the descriptions of his appearance aren’t too far off from how Túrin is described as looking, either.

It’s harder to say what traits Finduilas has in common with Idril that Maeglin might find attractive, because the text never spells out what Maeglin finds attractive about Idril apart from her looks. Since Pengolodh is an Elf and Elves considered the kind of feelings Maeglin harbored for Idril thoroughly unnatural, and because Maeglin ultimately betrayed Gondolin, nobody’s particularly interested in why he was attracted to Idril in the first place, before attraction turned to obsession.

Since Finduilas x Maeglin is a crack ship, bordering on a crack OTP for me, obviously I believe mutual attraction is possible. An AU that allows the two of them to meet would entail Maeglin never going to Gondolin, so he never meets Idril, never becomes attracted to and obsessed with her, never gets captured by Morgoth, never goes over to Morgoth, never betrays Gondolin. The fic I wrote last year, Unintended (which was intended to be Finduilas x Maeglin, until I realized that given that his parents had just died, Maeglin probably wasn’t going to be in the head space to be attracted to anyone), has Aredhel fleeing to Nargothrond first, with the intention of heading to Gondolin eventually. There isn’t the same obstacle of consanguinity for Finduilas x Maeglin as there is Maeglin x Idril; they’re second cousins rather than first cousins, so it wouldn’t be considered unnatural by Elven standards.

I became very fond of the ship because of what it offers for both characters. For Finduilas, being with someone who, while he still falls under the Doom of the Ñoldor, doesn’t have an additional curse hanging over his head (unless Eöl curses him in this version, too), someone who could return her feelings, someone she could be happy with. For Maeglin, being with someone who wouldn’t consider the very idea of being in a relationship with him as taboo and unnatural, someone who could give him proper emotional support, someone he could be happy with.

Beyond that, it’s the road not traveled aspect for them both—Finduilas potentially surviving (it’s still the Silm, I admit; she could still die), and Maeglin never going down the road to winding up betraying a realm of Elves to Morgoth. They never met in canon, but what if they could? What might they say to each other? Might they commiserate as two children of the House of Finwë who were born in Beleriand, who never knew Aman? How might Maeglin, struggling to adjust to life without his parents and among his other kin, respond to Finduilas’s kind, sympathetic nature? How might Finduilas respond to her new cousin, quiet and intense and determined to prove himself?

Like I said, it’s still the Silm; they could still very easily wind up dying. But if you ship things in the Silm you pretty much have to admit that death is not an obstacle to shipping. Just because people might or will definitely die later does not mean that what they do now is worth nothing. Finduilas x Maeglin could very easily ending in both halves dying. Given that it’s the Silm, it could easily end with both of them dying horribly. But that doesn’t mean that what they did while they were alive, the relationship they could have forged, was worth nothing. To borrow a quote from another book series, “men’s lives have meanings, not their deaths,” and what they could have been to each other, what they could have been together, that’s what matters to me, that’s what appeals to me so much.