"Grey is her raiment; and rest is her gift"

Last summer I made a matching bracelet to my soft grey pendant (it was one of my experiments with the "Freiheit"-pattern). The elements are basically the miniaturised version of the pendant - well, at least the base is proportionally downscaled (the pendant had a 12 mm focal with 8 mm beads, so I used for the bracelet 6 mm focals with 4 mm beads), but the embellishing row is almost the same in both cases.

Back then I had said, how the ready pendant with its soft grey colour reminded me of Este* the Gentle, "healer of hurts and weariness", one of the Valier.
When I was reading The Silmarillion for the first time, I was  a ten-years-old little bookworm, interested in mythologies and legends, so it's only natural that I was totally fascinated by the Valaquenta. It was for me a new, interesting "pantheon" to learn, after all that Greek, Roman, Norse and whatnot myths. And sure enough, I tried to find paralels, like "So, Manwe is the king, is in charge for air and wind, and has eagles. Than he is basically like Zeus/Iuppiter. But Manwe is at least nice, while Zeus was rather an a**hole..." That's how a little schoolgirl, who has never heard about comparative religion studies, interprets it XD
At this stage I found Este rather uninteresting. Grey dress, slumbering in a garden: how boring is it! - so had thought the naive, impatient young child, who preferred great heroes, beautiful maidens and majestic queens. But now the tired, stressed adult revaluates all her former opinions, and admits she was wrong all along... Aren't Este's gifts the most precious, after all? Worthier than gems and jewels, maybe even than power, valour or knowledge...


*No, I stilll don't know how to write those two dots above the letter "e", which should be used in some Elvish names. It's an awkward situation, since normally I'm a terrible combination of a grammar nazi and a book purist, and can be really fussy about orthography and respecting above all the author's intention... But this case is the only exception, sorry ^.^"