Tag: Queue Sera Sera

aelwihtas:

beruthielthequeen:

“…she was the wife of one of the ship-kings of Pelargir. She loathed the smell of the sea, and fish, and the gulls.” and  “Well, Berúthiel went back to live in the inland city….” (1966 interview with JRRT)

“Berúthiel lived in the King’s House in Osgiliath, hating the sounds and smells of the sea….”  (Unfinished Tales, Part 4, Ch 2, The Istari: Notes, Note 7)

Throughout Tolkien’s works, there are some trends which recur. Physical beauty is associated with goodness, and the loss of that beauty (in Sauron’s case, for example) with corruption. Cats are demonized. (Tevildo, Berúthiel herself, who’s a villainous figure in the canon. And the sea/water is associated with the Valar, the music of creation, and, by implication, moral uprightness or goodness. (Yes, I’m simplifying greatly; no, I’m not providing sources on these points, but they exist. Anyway.)

In the “choosing not to oversimplify the canon” department, I’ve always considered these few quotes about Berúthiel and her hatred of the sea. She’s stated by JRR to return back to “the inland city” and when last sighted, her ship was “flying past Umbar.” The clear implication is that she was from, originally, an inland city of the southern continent of Harad, which is probably roughly analogous in location/ climate to Africa. (Gondor being roughly northern Mediterranean….) In my writing, I’ve chosen to locate her city as inland of the Haven of Umbar, though still within the wider region also known Umbar, and at the edge of a large desert roughly analogous to the Sahara.

So she’s from an entirely different climate, a different ecosystem than that of Gondor. She’s put on a ship and sent to marry a man who is the hereditary enemy of her people; and, to make it better, a man who’s named himself Falastur – translated as shore-lord or Lord of the Coast, the first of the Ship Kings of Gondor. A man who has literally made his very name by the sea.

And have you ever smelled the sea? The docks, or the beaches at low tide? There’s a lot to romanticize in the salty freshness of the air, perhaps, but it also smells heavy and rotten and fishy and unpleasant. Dead fish and crustaceans and strange plants heaped in the sand, baking under the sun. Thick dark mud caked around the pilings in the brackish wash of the river where it empties into the sea. The detritus of ships and of human occupation, wastewater and bilge and tar. It’s not at all a nice smell even if you don’t mind the scent of the sea itself, minus those other elements. 

And even that ‘cleaner’ scent was strange enough to her… and it only pointed out to her how foreign she had now become, how much of an outsider, how very out of place. The foreign queen, the enemy queen, whose clothing and whose art were strange, whose tastes were strange; and strange was all too easily translated into dangerous, menacing, nefarious. They were afraid of her; and they loved the sea. She hated them, and hated her ship-building shore-lord husband (to whom she would not even give an heir), and she hated it. The ocean represented to her not goodness, but the very opposite.