lferion

Title: Guest Appearance
Fandom: Silmarillion
Challenge: Guest
Other prompt: Mini-Wrimo 2023, using the quote-prompts from
Day 3: True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost. ~ Arthur Ashe
And Day 5: Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What's important is the action. You don't have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow. ~ Carrie Fisher
Rating: G
Length: 500
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zhie, for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Celegant is my name for Fingon's horse.
Summary: On his worst days Fingon didn’t feel so much a guest in his own story as a guest, a footnote, an afterthought in the stories of other people.

What is a hero? There are so many definitions. There is the hero who inspires hope, action, resolution by embodying forth those virtues: the storybook hero. There is the hero who stands forth, beyond hope, beyond possibility, beyond reason to do a thing needs doing -- slay the dragon, rescue the prince, steal a Silmaril: a hero of legend, of myth, well beyond mere story. Figures that could be said to belong to their people, not people themselves, not really. There is the unseen hero, told in the margins: those who kept things going, simply (simply!) did the hard and needful things. Guests in their own stories.

(On his own worst days he didn’t even feel so much a guest in his own story as a guest, a footnote, an afterthought in Maedhros’s. His father’s. Even his brother’s -- what with hidden Gondolin, the birth of Earendil, Gothmog's demise at Ecthelion's hands. Aredhel and Maeglin's parts were more distinct and vivid. Without a story of his own. Which was certainly nonsense, exactly the kind of nonsense that made for bad days. On good days he didn't think about Ice or dragons or balrogs or making impossible decisions regarding people's lives. And the good far outnumbered the bad, now.)

What then, did that make Fingon?

He was called a hero, certainly. A figure in any number of songs. Likewise the subject of no few accusations of excessive pride, of self-serving, attention-seeking, failing to follow through -- in hindsight, not pursuing Glaurung and making an end to him was accounted a failure and a mistake on his part by more than one school of thought, though none of the principal proponents had ever been to Beleriand, indeed had not yet been begotten during the First Age -- and generally swollen-headed as well as over-sure of himself.

Why should History be kind to him? He did not think of himself as a hero. He considered he had done that which had needed to be done, not to show off. Not to be seen to have done amazing or valiant or extraordinary things. History was kind (or at any rate full of praise and fine words) about other things he had done -- or was said to have done. He hardly recognized himself in most of those depictions.

He supposed the stories served a purpose: an example, good or bad or merely instructive, an illustration, entertainment if nothing else.

Perhaps 'Hero' was no longer relevant to him. Need not be relevant. Could be foregone for other, happier concepts of self. After all, 'valiant' and 'hero' were not inextricably interwoven, and had never been synonyms, for all people tended to treat them as if they were. He would always have been High King, and he would always own the decisions and actions he had done as king, even the heroics. But he was not king now, for which he was grateful. No need to parse what hero might mean, when instead he could go for a ride with Celegant instead.