Motherwood

It was a Drûg wood on a time, and the Folk lived well there. In long years past they had come out of the East, fleeing the Shadow and the Shadow's creatures and the ill usage of other Men, and that was when they first found the forest and made it their home. Other Drughu continued west, and what became of them the Folk did not know.

In those days the near-mountains were uninhabited, but Drughu have never loved the high places, though they are, and were, skilled knappers and shapers of stone. Rather did they love the low country: the grassland that afforded scope for forage and hunt; the forest that gave the same and also gave them shelter. There the Folk lived for many begettings of children. They knew all of the plants that grew there and were good as food or curative or poison. At that time they had little need of poison, for they did not use it to the hurt of any animal, but neither did they forget old needfulness. The lives of the Folk are short, but their memories are long.

It happened that one came to the forest who was not an enemy, and she was not of any people known to the Folk. Nonetheless they did her reverence, and called her Mother, and the reasons were twofold: first that she was with child, but also, that she became like a mother to the forest, and walked among the trees and spoke to them, and the trees quivered and grew taller in her wake. She tried in some part to mother the Folk and give instruction to them, but there she had less success, for the ways of the Drughu are their own. When she spoke of tilled earth and the sowing of choice seed they listened in silence and did as ever they had, and the Mother sighed but did not try to rule them.

She was long with child, for her kind do nothing with haste. She walked with her long hands wrapped over her belly, and the Folk would hear her singing as she went: glad songs of rain and sun on bright green leaves; sad songs of sisters scattered and gardens gone. Glad songs brought happiness and the laughter that comes with it, but sad songs made them think of the East and the troubles they had fled. There were none left among them who had lived through those times. Nonetheless they remembered.

When her labor came the mothers among them went to ask her what she needed. There were no midwives among her kind; she wanted only to lie up in the dark at the center of the wood, where the trees were closest, and there do her work in silence. The women of the Folk nodded and let her be. There were those among them also who preferred to go apart when giving birth, and come back after with their newborns at their teats; this was not strange to them. So the Mother gave birth in the heart of the forest, and the Folk shared her joy and were glad.

It was a girl child, and this also gave joy to the Mother, for she missed her sisters. Also she was minded of the child's father, who lived over and away to the West, across the great river that ran there, in the woods beyond. Once they had walked together, but later they had walked apart, and though the Mother did not yearn for him, she missed him and thought of him fondly.

"I will take you to see him when you are older, and larger, and stronger, and know true things: when you have seen a seed split a stone, and found the star in the heart of an apple, and know the naming and nature of all that dwell beneath the sun and the moon. Listen! I will begin to teach them to you now, for you may not speak yet but nonetheless you will hear me:

"Badger the biter; cow, cud-chewer;
Crow that calls constantly, cricket that creaks;
Fish flit in water, bittern booms over it:
So much to know, Small-one-green-of-my-making…"

Years passed and Small One grew slowly. The Folk begat their own children who overtook the young Enting, each in their turn, and grew into their fruitfulness, and had children themselves. But the Small One of the Mother grew older and larger and stronger, and began to know many true things, and the heart of the Mother was glad.

Then trouble came from the East. The Shadow was abroad in the land, and with it the old enemy of the Drughu: the pets of the Shadow, the beasts on two legs, the raveners, pitch-burners, drinkers of black draughts, whose teeth and claws are not enough but they must bear blades as well. They came to prey on the Folk, but the Mother fought them, and she was tall as a tree is tall, and her arms scythed through the gorgûn and swept them back till they faltered and fled.

Then the Folk honored the Mother, but also gave thanks to the Maker, who gave them the knowledge of plants and poisons. Now they knew the time had come to draw on these again. And the Mother bade the trees of the forest to give them lithe wood for bows and shafts and the making of blowpipes and darts, and the Folk laid up weapons in readiness.

But when next the gorgûn came it was not to harry Drughu but to hunt out the Mother, and take her if they could. Thick ropes they brought, and heavy chains, and axes with double blades, and there were Trolls with them also, great Olog-hai as they are called in the Evil Tongue. These Trolls were not as tall as the Mother, but they were broadly built and powerful, and they carried great bolas with heavy stone weights that they swung overhead, and shattered the limbs of living trees. For it was the trees themselves now that rose up at the cry of the Mother to do battle with the Trolls and crush the gorgûn.

And the Folk fought also, with their darts and arrows and their knives of flint, and they slew many gorgûn. They took less hurt in their turn because the forest was theirs and they knew it, and the trees were on their side.

But then a cry came up that the heart of the wood was burning, and the Mother let out a terrible howl, for she had hid the Small One there.

To the heart of the wood she fought, she sped till she came to the place where the fire was burning. Into the blaze she plunged, and was lost to sight, and there perished, to the grief of the Drughu, who had loved her, and the dismay of the gorgûn also. They had been ordered to take her alive that she might slave for the Shadow, like her sisters.

But the spirit of the Mother raged, and hers was the wrath of the Tree-folk, slow to kindle but fierce in its loosing, and hers was the madness of the mother robbed of her child, and hers was the frenzy of the final flames, and these mingled to make a new thing that burned and did not die. It filled up the wood so that even those trees that had not risen uprooted themselves and stood, and the Trolls were wholly overborne, and the cruel laughter of the gorgûn was turned to screams and to shrieking and to final silence. Most were slain, and of those few that escaped, they fled and brought word to their Master of a forest filled with hate, of a fierce spirit that animated the trees against them, of a green-girded hole into which the bodies of Orcs and Trolls might be flung unto the Final Day without ever being filled.

He called off his creatures then, for the Mother was lost to him. Wild Men held small value as slaves, and other ventures promised richer reward than the subjugation of one offensive forest. Leave it to the Wild Men, and their angry guardian.

In the burnt and blackened heart of the forest the Folk brought stone from the near-mountains and they made a cairn, and they covered it with flowers and sigils for love and remembrance of the Small One. But the Small One was not there. They did this for themselves, and to placate the spirit of the Mother, whose body had been consumed entirely. And they mourned.

Then it might be thought that the spirit of the Mother should find rest, and depart as the Small One had departed. But it was not so. In her dying she had given herself over wholly to anger, and she was consumed by it, and she fed on it in turn. She did not hurt the Folk, but she breathed through the forest like an ill wind and there was no peace for any that dwelt there. And as time passed her grief and anger did not fade, and the trees were restive, and the Folk, who had mourned both Mother and Child, came at last to tire of it. Men and women alike, they met with their chieftain to decide what should be done.

They brought more stone from the mountains that they carved and shaped to make watch stones, standing stones of seated figures, each carved after the form of its maker, and they stood them up in a circle at the center of the forest, gazing inward toward the cairn of the Small One. And the last stone was the figure of the headman, and this they did not raise; they called the Mother first, and they spoke to her after this fashion:

"We anger for your anger. We grieve for your grieving. But you are too angry and you mourn too long. Our children go through their days sad and angry both, and they don't know why. The days of the Folk are few, and we can no longer endure your sorrow.

"Mourn if you must, but pen your rage here. Your daughter waits for you."

Then the spirit of the Mother said nothing, but they felt her enter the circle, and they put up the last of the watch stones, and there was she housed fast, in the heart of the forest by the cairn of the Small One. But the Small One was not there.

And so the Mother was contained, and the forest was cut off from its heart. But leaves and seeds are no respecters of boundary stones. Roots reach deep and spread. And though the angry spirit of the Mother was contained, her anger found and filled the larger forest so the trees would not rest, and were angry, and knew not why.

So at last the Folk ceded the wood, and left the trees to mutter among themselves and stir and shift as they would. Later came another unlovely folk who also loved stone, and might have loved the standing stones of the Drûg-folk, had they seen them. But they never came that far into the forest.

-.-.-.-

Disclaimer: Tolkien's works, characters and concepts are copyright J.R.R. Tolkien.

"Motherwood" and the characters introduced within are copyright The Lauderdale (cartoon6 at hotmail dot com). "Motherwood" was published April 25, 2019.

This is a wholly invented incident in a wholly invented forest, sometime in the Second Age or even the early Third. But the Drughu are drawn from canon, as are the Entwives. See "The Ride of the Rohirrim" in The Return of the King or "The Drúedain" in Unfinished Tales.

This story is a departure for me. Let me know what you think.