Disclaimer: I am neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor Eru Ilúvatar, and thus can't claim to have created the universe of Middle-earth. Darn the luck.

This is a very late Valentine's Day-themed story. It is dedicated to JastaElf; may the grace of the Valar go with you, mellon-nín!

Rank Folly, Green Holly

…I have been a tree amid the wood
and many a new thing understood
that was rank folly to my head before.
— Ezra Pound

In the mid-month of Nínui, as the ice melted on the ponds and the pale frost of winter blew from the trees of the Greenwood, so the birds returned from warmer places in the south, and took up residence once more among the boughs. The birds began to build new nests throughout the forest, in the arms of the oak, the canopy of the beech, and the steep shelves of the fir. The air was filled with their wings and their singing. When each had built its home - or at the least, a platform upon which to stand and puff its breast - then the most complex and most beautiful songs began, designed to attract a spouse to the establishment. Cast across the forest, each pattern of notes fell with perfect joy and understanding in the ear of one alone. Or so the birds believed, and as their lord is Manwë Súlimo who knows all things below Ilúvatar, who would dispute with them?

While the love-songs of the birds were heard, it was also a custom among the Elves of the forest to exchange love-tokens of their own, which similarly were a signifier of the changing seasons and the renewal of the earth's life. These were not invariably given with the same single-minded purpose as the birdsong, and in the latter days might simply be a gesture of courtesy among friends, the older traditions of earth-magic forgotten. Sheaves of evergreen boughs and early-blossoming flowers were the usual forms of the gifts, and they were left secretly on doorsills on or about the fourteenth day of Nínui. A pretty conceit was to attach a note signed with a feigned name, which might be witty, enigmatic, or point in lovers' code to the identity of the giver, and a still prettier conceit was for the recipient to affect no knowledge of the same.

Not all in the Greenwood observed this tradition with equal merriment, for among the older Elves were many whose spouses or lovers had died in the Battle upon Dagorlad, flinging their slender, green-clad bodies against the iron spears of Mordor; and there were other tragedies both early and late. For some, the days of the birds' courtship were a time of reflection and the singing of sweet laments. Or, of course, of urging courses of action in the romantic forays of their sons, daughters, siblings, workmates and neighbours. Or of signalling disapproval of overly candid proposals by those persons' undesirable suitors, while smiling at the same if a case required encouragement. Or of providing romantic advice to any younger Elf sufficiently bold, or sufficiently rash, to ask for it.

In a sunny elbow of the hill wherein was the palace stronghold of the Woodland Realm, there was a herb garden that served the kitchen and apothecary. Galion, butler to the House of Thranduil, liked to work there when he did not have more pressing duties to attend to, and as the planting season had begun, he was enjoying dipping his fingers into the earth. It was a bright morning on the fourteenth day of Nínui. The air held the green taste of a thaw. Master Galion spread out packets of seeds saved from last year's crop, dividing them mentally between the near half of the garden, where grew the kitchen herbs, and the farther half, which was used for medicinal plants.

His assistant, a lanky youth, turned over the softened ground with a hoe. Galion had high hopes for this young man, who was quick to recognize his horehound from his hellebore and made good apple wassail into the bargain, but on this day he seemed distracted. The lad broke off to hum desultory snatches of the 'Lay of Nimrodel' while dibbling holes to receive the seed. His eyes cast themselves about the borders of the garden.

Master Galion gave a rueful sigh. He would have preferred those in the king's service to carry out their tasks without thoughts of romance. Turning away from the young man, he opened a packet of thyme seeds and studied the lay of the ground. There would be other plantings in later months, and it would not do for the herbs to encroach on the territory of Mistress Eirien, the apothecary. Not least because the simples she grew might have unlooked-for consequences if used accidentally in a stuffing mixture. The two halves of the garden were divided by a tacit boundary, and he did not doubt but that Mistress Eirien would notice should he attempt to cultivate the ground upon the farther side. She spent much tenderness on the garden.

The assistant, as he slowly worked the soil, wore the tense, expectant expression of an Elfling about to leap from a tall tree in order to test the possibility of flight. His row of dibbled holes had deviated from the pin-straight. His fingers persistently stole into his hair and attempted to rearrange it in some arcane manner. Galion rolled his eyes subtly in the lad's direction to indicate the desirability of focus and control. Those qualities were possessed in legendary profusion among the Eldar. Although the butler had to remind himself that, of course, they were more diffuse among the Silvan Elves who had never seen the light of Aman at even second hand. And in the mid-month of Nínui, they were, seemingly, little apparent at all amongst younger persons. Galion could only be relieved that Mistress Eirien was not present to witness a servant of the king being distracted by stray thoughts of dalliance. She herself was thoroughly efficient and devoted to her work, completing tasks to a precise count of hours and plucking her herbs with the neatest deft movement of forefinger and thumb. He imagined that she would look askance at his assistant's display.

If his assistant were not more careful, Galion thought, he would be dibbling across the tacit boundary and into Mistress Eirien's herb-bed.

Master Galion was preparing to draw the young man aside beneath the discreet shelter of a holly tree, to deliver an eloquent reminder of King Thranduil's disapproval of those who allowed the intoxication of romance to affect their labours, when Mistress Eirien stepped through the hedges that bordered the garden. Galion swept up his packet of thyme and began dropping seeds with quick precision into the cock-eyed cavities. "Good day, mistress," he said, barely looking up from the soil. "I hope this fine day finds you well. It is excellent weather for light work in the garden, what?" To his alarm, he found himself wheezing from his bent-over position, and straightened up so that he could draw a proper breath. "Such a fine day in the midst of Nínui," he carried on, "it is as though Yavanna herself wishes to encourage our labours. My apprentice and I were just exchanging that very observation."

The young man, who appeared to be inscribing someone's name in the earth, blinked at being appealed to. Master Galion construed that he could expect no aid from that quarter. Desperately, he glanced across a row of lavender bushes, where blue-green tips were beginning to emerge from the dead stubble of stems. At the end of the row, he encountered Mistress Eirien's feet. They were bare, and the colour of warm milk; on one of her toes, which dug luxuriously into the thawed earth, was a silver ring. He thought her feet youthful-looking. Drawing his gaze slowly upwards, he thought that Mistress Eirien looked, overall, very much like a young maiden, from her loosely girdled gown to the brown hair that was carelessly gathered into a knot the size of a barley-loaf.

Her eyes, however, revealed her age. They were windows that had been worn to naked transparency, spilling willy-nilly the light of their bearer; the eyes of those who looked into long-year upon long-year of joy and strife, preserved by the treacherously perfect memory of the Elves. Mistress Eirien was no maiden, but a widow. Her husband had been among a hunting party waylaid near Dol Guldur, before the Wood-elves had moved northward. He had been scourged and then beheaded. Galion knew the details through palace gossip, and he had no doubt that Mistress Eirien knew them too, as one of her regular duties was to anoint bodies for burial and she had not shirked even in that case.

"Are you well, Master Galion?" she asked, startling him out of his chain of thought.

"Oh, indeed, yes, I am quite well," he said. He cleared his throat and flicked dirt both real and imaginary off the front of his tunic.

"Are you certain?" she said. "I have the receipt for a tonic that might be able to heal the Black Breath itself. I am loath to let it go untried, but the forest has been quite peaceful of late." She smiled at him.

Master Galion was not certain what to say. He could warm to the idea that Mistress Eirien was concerned about his health, and that she would pour her patent concoctions down his throat as if he were still the warrior he had once been; on the other thumb, he had occasionally seen what went into her tonics. "I am not, fortunately, afflicted by Shadow," he responded finally, "merely somewhat unsettled in my mind. Though I thank you greatly for your care."

"You are troubled by memories?" she said. "This season brings them, I know. This day, most of all."

Master Galion pondered. As usual, he had thought of his wife, who had died long ago in Beleriand, when he had awoken that morning, and Mistress Eirien's question caused him to think of her again, but he was not sure that he had been thinking concentratedly of her between those times. Should he feel guilt over that? He tried to picture his wife pacing unhappily in the Halls of Mandos, but the image persistently warped into that of his wife laughing wryly and shaking her head.

He began to gather the empty seed packets together. "Aye, memories," he said, for the sake of convenience, and then issued a gallant offer to rake Mistress Eirien's garden in her stead.

The palace apothecary lay off the spiralling corridor that also housed the kitchens, buttery and wine cellar. It was a cool room whose round-cornered walls were smoothed with white plaster. A narrow porthole, concealed from without by a screen of ferns, provided fresh air and a thread of light at the proper times of day. Bunches of dried herbs hung on hooks in the walls and dangled from a ceiling rack. Small jars and boxes were jumbled on a stone shelf. In one corner stood a tall barrel of water, and on the work table a pannikin of honey for sweetening unpleasant medicines.

Mistress Eirien stood at the work table, an assemblage of ingredients and a pestle before her. She was preparing a remedy for a boy of Dale who had the falling sickness. It was to be sent with a trade caravan set to depart the following day. As she chopped and pounded root of valerian, her eyes wandered to a rack of ointments used in tending to the slain. The Valar be thanked, there had been relatively little cause to use those ointments - thus far - since the people had moved northward, but they were kept ready and prepared: the sweet betony, the resins, the myrrh and ambergris from strange lands across the Sea of Rhûn. She hoped that it would be several sun-years before those jars were taken down again. Mistress Eirien smiled slowly, hearing the ripples of birdsong through the vent and thinking how impossible it was to live in this season and not think of the dead. She began softly to sing one of the laments for Dagorlad.

Husband, lover, brother, friend,
you are felled like the sapling
sprung in shadow,
blown like the bough before the gale.

She set the valerian to steep, and took down chamomile to add to the medicine. Fleetingly, she wondered whether to ready some of the ingredients she liked to joke comprised a love philtre; one or other of the young people invariably crept into her workroom to request such a thing at this time of year. The potion was really only a sweet and mildly stimulant cordial, but it tasted pleasant enough, and not a few unions probably had been made over a goblet of the stuff.

May your beds be soft,
though ours are empty;
may you be merry in your halls,
and broach wine, and remember us;

She reached for a jar of dried blackcurrants, the ingredient that gave the cordial its colour, but her hand hesitated before taking the jar from the shelf. The song faltered for a moment, and she smiled sadly.

May no noise of armies break your rest,

She thought that perhaps no binding unions would be made this year, and that few would made as long as the Orcs - and more fell things - roamed in the south. To wed in such dangerous times was not something to undertake without long and deep thought; more than that, for some it was something to be forsaken altogether, for fear of the grief that bereavement would bring.

no blade unseat this stone

Unlike their distant cousins of the High Kindred, the Elves of the Greenwood would never cross the sea and be reunited with their loved ones. When the fallen were released from Mandos they were still out of reach, irrevocably.

until our forest is remade
under another sun.

Even among the Silvan Elves, who were well used to sorrow, some could not bear that thought, and so they did not marry. And some that did choose to marry would make an act of renunciation even as they bound themselves, vowing that if they should be slain then their spouse should consider themselves free, so that the bond of the body and the bond of the will should be judged to have been broken at the same instant.

Mistress Eirien's own marriage had been of that latter kind. As she and many before her had discovered, to be spared honourably an eternity of waiting did not make honourable grief any less; nor did it necessarily make one wish to speed the period of solitude. She had not yet come to the point of seriously contemplating marrying again. She would not have been averse to sharing her bed and some affection in a companionate arrangement, and on a few good days had felt intrigued enough by the possibilities to leave off her wedding ring when she walked around the palace; but so far she had only smiled in acknowledgment of the glances she had received, and passed on. Too many Elves, men and women alike, reached out their hands through grief, and she did not want to make love that was eleven parts grief. She preferred to keep love and grief within separate jars. That, she supposed, was why she was in her workroom, singing laments, on the fourteenth day of Nínui.

Shaking herself, she determined to sing something more appropriate to the merriment outside in the trees: a cautionary ballad about a trusting knight and a tempting maiden, learned from the peddlers of Dale. She opened her store of clean bottles and began to write a label for the epilepsy draught. The medicine was brewing nicely. Yavanna be willing, it would help the poor child; if not - and she must remind the trading party to request a report on his progress - there was another recipe that she could try -

"Good day to you, my lady."

She spun around, barely avoiding knocking over her ink. "Sire! I am sorry; you startled me."

Thranduil, lord of the Elves of the Greenwood, stood just inside the door. He was dressed in plain riding clothes, and looked as tall and regal as the carving of his kinsman Thingol in the library. Mistress Eirien and he bowed to one another, and he said: "I should apologize, for creeping in on you unexpectedly."

"You move as discreetly as if you had been born to these woods, Sire," she said. He smiled, taking that as the compliment it was intended to be.

"May I serve you?" she continued.

"No, thank you, my lady," he said. "I am on my way to consult with Master Galion about the keeping of two harts, which we shall have later today, as they have just been sighted in the forest. I simply wished to stop and greet you. Also," he added, "to pass on a message from my son, who - and I do not know the significance of this - has heard that you have been teasing Master Galion, and would like to buy you a puncheon of good wine if it is true."

"What?" she laughed.

"As I say, I do not know the import, mistress. I am just the messenger."

"With respect, Sire, it is a calling that suits you ill!" she said. "I am sure that I have never teased anyone."

"Well, I have heard you exchanging banter may times in the hall," the king replied. "I have been on the receiving end of your wit myself on more than one occasion."

"That is jesting, Sire," she said. "I do not think it is the same as teasing. Teasing is -" She broke off, and reached for a pot of paste to stick the label on to the medicine bottle.

Mistress Eirien could feel the king watching her carefully. "That is unfortunate, then," he said. "I am afraid you must forfeit your wine."

She looked up, smiling rather nervously. "There will be wine with dinner anyway, I hope."

"Of course," he said. "Possibly spiked with love philtre, if we judge by certain past events."

"Now, Sire," she said, "we both know that there is no such thing as a love philtre, and that there is nothing magical in what may have been called one from time to time. Although…" She locked eyes with the king, and smiled. "I could of course prepare such a thing, if you wished, for the amusement of the table."

He chuckled. "I will look forward to that, mistress. And now I must to Galion, and then to my horse."

Her expression turned grave, then. "Take good care in your hunting party, my lord," she said. He nodded, and touched his hand to his heart. With a final bow, to which she responded, he withdrew.

Mistress Eirien looked after him for a moment, absently smoothing the label on the bottle. Her face was drawn in thought. Further along the corridor, she heard the king's greeting, and Master Galion's response. She turned towards her work table, setting the bottle down and looking about in search of some straw or rags in which to pack it. Her eye caught the richly-coloured jar of blackcurrants on the shelf. She laughed softly to herself, remembering what the king had said, and thinking that she could provide some amusement at dinner and perhaps give the young prince some return on his jest into the bargain. Gathering her materials, she bent to work, hardly aware of what she was singing meanwhile, or that her brows occasionally drew together of their own accord.

Probably unnecessary notes

Ní is the equivalent of February in the Elven calendar. That birds start courting in mid-February (in Europe) is one explanation for the origin of exchanging love tokens on Valentine's Day. (There are two other, pretty small and obscure references to the Christian saint(s) Valentine in this chapter.)

Manwë is the highest of the Valar, the demigods/archangels/whatever-you-want-to-call-them of Middle-earth. Yavanna is the Vala concerned with wildlife and husbandry.

The Battle Upon Dagorlad was a disastrous engagement early in the war of the Last Alliance. According to Tolkien's posthumously published writings on the subject (in the Unfinished Tales), the Silvan Elves, who were ill-equipped for fighting pitched battles, lost two-thirds of their army there.

Mistress Eirien is an OFC, needless to say. Her name, according to the Sindarin Dictionary Project, means 'daisy'.

The ideas here about remarriage among Wood-elves are derived from Tolkien's unfinished essay "Laws and Customs of the Eldar" (Morgoth's Ring, History of Middle-earth vol. 10). In that essay on marriage among the High Elves of Valinor, Tolkien (essentially following classic Christian law) wrote that Elven marriage was a twofold bond comprising free consent (which bonded the spirits), and consummation (which bonded the flesh). The physical bond between spouses was severed by bodily death, but as the spirit of the felled Elf did not 'die' but went to the Halls of Mandos to await rebirth, the bond of consent still held.
However, the spiritual bond could be broken by a similar act of will to that which had made it in the first place, if the reborn/awaiting Elf agreed to release their spouse to remarry. "Laws and Customs" assumes that the spouses will be able to communicate and mutually agree on this, but as the Wood-elves, unlike the Elves of Valinor, would be geographically sundered from their reborn/awaiting fellows and thus unable to communicate in the same way, I gave them a pre-emptive 'release clause' in the event of one partner's death.

There is no such thing as a reliable love philtre as far as I know.