Daughter of the Forest

by Fishing4Stars

In an accident, Legolas's young daughter is trapped back in Middle Earth, alone. Legolas, his wife, and Thranduil return to look for her. All four elves face the joys and perils of Middle Earth, as they visit places that are familiar but changed, or wholly new, and meet some descendants of their old friends. Their pasts there may help them or haunt them - and their children.

53. Author's Note

Some Final Thoughts

The nerdy stuff comes first. Then – some alternative endings/scenarios and some things I'd love to get your take on now that you've reached the end, if you care to share.

THANK YOU for reading. Special thanks go to LoopyLoo2610 (on Ao3) and the Phantom Bard, who have been my most enthusiastic readers, commenters, and unofficial beta contributors. You made this so fun to write and your fingerprints are on this work. Loo your timing was inspired by the Valar – thank you very much for beta reading my final chapters when I was writing them at breakneck speed. Finally, thanks are due to the Fellowship of the Fics writers' community server. I adore you all – thanks for help with Elvish, Dwarvish, random plot questions and more.

Spin off fic stuff: And just FYI, I've been convinced to do a spin off that follows Ginnar, Araveth, and likely Yijun during Araveth's reign as the Maiden Queen. Follow me to get notifications when that starts up if you like. I'll also post a 'new chapter' to DotF when that goes up as well with a teaser, so if you're following story you'll also get a notification that way as well.

This next story will take me some time to start posting because this next work is going to have a lot more political fiction than I've ever written before, and will draw greatly from Tudor-era/Ming Dynasty era history so – I am still researching and outlining at this point.

Event information! (cough, shameless self-promotion): Also – the follow up won't start in earnest until after September because I'm taking part in Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang this year! If you like my writing, first of all, thank you, and second – check out that fic when it comes out September 8th! I have two art pieces for which other talented writers wrote stories as well.

p.s. if you're on Ao3 there are some bonus materials for these fics there, as I can upload my illustrations, maps, etc.

(~***~)

Alternative scenarios and endings you may find interesting

For the parting of Angharad and Ginnar before the Elves left Middle Earth, I considered two alternative endings that I ultimately rejected

In one of these, the Elves do decide to go to Aglarond, which they achieve successfully. This not only allows them to see Ginnar safely home, but also to speak with his parents. Legolas also gets to see the Glittering Caves and the painting Gimli made of him, carefully preserved even it's no longer getting much attention. I just couldn't get over how risky it would be to cross Gondor yet again with a looming deadline with such dire consequences: I couldn't get myself to believe they'd be foolish enough to go.

When that felt too rosy, I envisioned the 'dreams intervention' instead being a calling by Irmo and Aule to Ginnar's parents, leading them to the shores of Belfalas where they would get to meet the Elves before all parting ways. I actually wrote this whole ending and I couldn't get it to hit the right note, leading me to the version I finally decided to go with, in which only Angharad and Ginnar are given any special consideration by the Valar, and it is quite limited.

There was a version of this story in which Xiaoqing sacrificed herself and died for the children in the battle against the Emperor's soldiers before they went to Temple Mountain. The children's grief for her would have been the 'teaching moment' for Fahai instead of a valiant moment that Xiaoqing ultimately survived. In this version, I probably would have hinted at Xiaoqing being a potential candidate for the reborn soul that becomes Lossrilleth & Legolas's baby.

For the big fight scene in which the Valar connect Angharad with her parents – I built up to this for months and when I got there, I didn't love it as much as I did in my head. But I would have to rework a ton of things I'd already published at that point to get the Elves to Temple Mountain where they needed to go at that point. What do you think? Would it have been better to do something like – have rumors of an Elf in the Emperor's Garden reach the adults through merchants? Or have Xiaoqing send out a message through all the demons and creatures of the world until it finally reaches the Elves as a garbled hint like the game 'telephone'? I think both of these would have taken a very long time.

(~***~)

What do you think? (Note, if you want to ready the very-nerdy-note below, you might want to do that before answering)

Ginnar's afterlife is left ambiguous, as is the actual afterlife of all mortals. I intended to imply at least two potential outcomes. What do you think?

What do you think Angharad's future holds for her in the Undying Realm?

How do you think the expansion of the Undying Realm and the introduction of other types of immortals to their plane of existence might affect the elves?

What do you think of Legolas and Lossrilleth's choice to have more children? Angharad's hesitance to do so someday?

Lossrilleth's presence and perspective made Eru/Tolkien think about the future and suggest that the Valar can now meddle a touch more in others' affairs. In a world where muskets have arrived and free peoples that are easy to 'other' are being treated inhumanely on that basis, do you think this could make the difference, so this Middle Earth doesn't follow in Lossrilleth's Terra's footsteps?

How do you think the dwarves should deal with the challenges they find themselves facing in this story? What do you think they'll do with the pistol as a model? How might Ginnar's experience help him help his people?

Who were your favorite OCs in this story? In a spin off following the reigns of Araveth and Yijun, who would you want to hear about?

(~***~)

Nerd Alert: An Author's Note

This story was an experiment. Not just an experiment in how an author could contrive a scenario for an Elf to learn Kung Fu (but, guilty as charged, to be fair).

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his private letters with his son and various people who shared in his love of his creation of "Arda" and the peoples and languages that populated it that he believed the world of his creation to be "fundamentally Catholic." As a student of Comparative Religions as a field of scholarly study, this idea has fascinated me for a long time. What does it mean for a world to be fundamentally of a religion, when its inhabitants are not adherents of that religion? There is no Jesus Christ in Arda, after all, to inspire Christianity.

But I am not a Christian scholar. I do have a solid background in Buddhist study from both a scholarly and personal perspective. So, I set out to write a work that depicts an Arda that is 'fundamentally Buddhist.' Buddhism is a good candidate for this project, I think, because it didn't require that I unravel the 'Catholic' underpinning of the world. After all, when asked about whether there is a God or gods and whether a divine being created the world, the Buddha's alleged response was essentially 'it doesn't matter, it doesn't change my teaching.'

The Buddhist teachings as I have come to understand them essentially point to a fact of life: to be sentient is to experience significant, frequent dissatisfaction (dukkha). Dukkha is often translated into English as "suffering" but I think that can often sound more melodramatic than its Sanskrit and Pali counterparts intend. Dukkha is unpleasant. It is also frequently mundane.

Buddhism then teaches that this dissatisfaction can be overcome by cultivating positive states of heart and mind, and by cultivating wisdom, until a person eventually becomes enlightened. This happens over many lifetimes, as Buddhists believe in rebirth. Finally, as fundamental points go, Buddhists believe in karma: that positive actions will give rise to positive results, and negative actions to negative ones. (I'm speaking in very broad strokes, and about pan-Buddhist themes that appear in all Buddhist traditions in some form.)

Here are the ways that I've tried to make this a "fundamentally" Buddhist story and world.

Buddhist canon holds that there are three 'root poisons' that lead to all suffering: attachment (greed, desire, clinging), aversion (hatred, anger, aggression, fear), and ignorance (delusion, self-absorption, foolishness). In this story, I gave each of the adult Elves traveling in Middle Earth a major character arc that stemmed from one of these root poisons. Lossrilleth suffered from ignorance. Thranduil suffered from aversion. Legolas suffered from attachment. They all had reasons to suffer from these things: various positive or traumatic experiences, or lack of experience, led them each to fall into one of these traps. Although it's understandable why they could fall for this, the result was that it caused them pain.

I also tried to have these three characters make progress on their 'root poison' problem by turning to some of the treatments Buddhism prescribes for these issues: developing wisdom through observation and mindfulness, and cultivating positive qualities of heart (patience, goodwill, emotional balance, compassion, and joy in others' successes). Can you see how those play out now that I've pointed them out? What do you think?

Other Buddhist themes I played with were:

Parental love for children, which is taken to be a model for unconditional love and regard (this is usually motherly love in Buddhism but I expanded that to fathers here as well because, you know, equality and such. Good dads are great!).

Legolas's reflection about children belonging to themselves was also inspired by some reflections from an interesting biography of a woman who became a Buddhist nun when she was older, called "I Give You My Life," by Ayya Khema.

Developing compassion and wisdom by reflecting on difficult truths of existence such as sickness, aging, death, and the difficulties of change

I categorized the elves as 'yaksha' within the types of beings that exist in Buddhist folktales, since they are neither humans nor gods (the Ainur/Maiair would both be 'deva' in Sanskrit). Yaksha as a category have a split personality: delightful nature spirits or scary elemental ghosts or demons that haunt the woods. I was interested in blurring those lines a little and looking at how the 'demon' Xiaoqing could develop positive qualities, and how a 'light' being like an elf could, like Thranduil, be a terrifying, angry specter that you absolutely would not want to run into in an abandoned wood.

Guanyin: In Chinese Cha'an Buddhims, Guanyin is a deity of compassion, otherwise known as 'she who hears the cries of the world'. I've always wondered if Tolkien knew about her when he conceived of the Vala Nienna. Mostly Nienna, but at moments Lossrilleth and even Xiaoqing behave in ways meant to emulate this deity.

Finally, in the end I contrasted Angharad with her parents in how they reflected on their experience and made decisions about what to do with the rest of their long lives.

Angharad is essentially a Buddhist Elf when we see her last. She is turning to mindfulness and positive qualities of heart to ease her pain of being in an imperfect world full of dissatisfaction. She is dedicating herself to the study and support of sentient beings. If someone asked if she would take the Bodhisattva's vows, I think she would consider it. Those are (as translated): 'for as long as the world endures, and for as long as sentient beings can be found, so, too, shall I remain, to ease the suffering of all those who live.'

Hers is a 'middle way' and yet an ascetic stance. (Unless you choose to interpret the vague hints I left about how her close female friendship is a potential femslash story.) I chose this for her because I see some interesting parallels between Angharad (later Nenloth) and Siddartha Gautama, who was the prince who later became the Buddha. He also started out life in a very sheltered, privileged position and had a sudden shock and exposure to the harder parts of life. For Siddartha, this triggered the insight that no matter if someone is wealthy and royal – and in Angharad's case immortal and eternally youthful – change will still cause dissatisfaction that cannot be purged without a significant change of orientation. Even the gods favoring Angharad does not protect Angharad from the pain of separation from Ginnar in the end.

In contrast, Legolas and Lossrilleth think it through and decide to 'choose life' and have faith in the gods of their world to care for their sorrows. They are 'all in' in their life of shared romance and dedication to family. So when the call comes to bring more life into the world, they take it seriously, and they still do it. Lossrilleth, especially, is living with a lot more faith than she did when all of this began. After all, she now lives in a world where the divine has interacted with her, listened to her grievances, and addressed them in a tangible way. So I think this couple's way of being is a more Catholic stance. (But again, this isn't my specialty.)