Coat of Skins

But I will back up and provide some background before we go down that road.

Over the last several days, I've been looking a bit more into Glorfindel, since I've identified him as potentially one of the Stone Couriers a couple weeks ago.

He appears, I believe, in these May/June words that I have been looking into since I got them again just last week under the code name Leonidas Golden Flower.  The Golden Flower reference is the primary giveaway that this is who is meant, in my opinion, because Glorfindel was the chief of the House of the Golden Flower at Gondolin.  This fact also strongly ties to El-Anor, or the Sun Star.  Elanor, as has been pointed out before, besides referencing the Liahona-Palantir, is also the name for a golden flower found in Middle-earth (after which Samwise named one of his daughters).  Remember, also for example, the woman who came to my door asking for a Sun Flower.  

In other words, the House of the Golden Flower may have additional levels of meaning, and might be one of the reasons why Glorfindel had played a role, multiple times it seems, in possessing that Stone and gifting it to others for their use.  In my story, it would have been him (along with Gildor) that delivered it to Lehi and his family in their escape from Jerusalem-Tirion and journey to Eressea.  And it was these same two who brought it with them in search of Joseph, it seems (if we have that story right).

Anyway, all that is to say, that I had been looking into some ties between Glorfindel, the Golden Flower, and El-Anor these past few days.

The House of the Golden Flower had an emblem that was described as simply a rayed sun set on their shields - I don't believe there is much more of a description of it than that.  Here is an artist's rendition of what this might have looked like that Tolkien Gateway, one of the more popular Tolkien sites, uses on their webpage:

I started writing a post on Glorfindel, and it is this image I was going to use to tie him and his house to El-Anor.  In looking at the time stamp, I began writing it this week on Monday, July 1st, but a bunch of other stuff came up that day and I threw in the towel on completing it.  By the next day, Tuesday, I was thoroughly distracted by William Tychonievich's Shoe Cubbies, and I spent some time also just relaying a couple dreams related to footwear.

It was on this same Tuesday evening, so the day after I started my Glorfindel post but didn't finish it, that I found myself driving to go get this pizza.  Which was curious, because it is not something I would have usually done on a weekday, nor something the kids would have put such a full-court press on to have.  But here I was.

I pulled off on the exit where the pizza place was, and found myself waiting at the stoplight behind a truck.  It was raining pretty strongly, but I looked at the tailgate of this truck and I saw an image of a red star that seemed to me to be an exact copy of the Glorfindel / House of the Golden Flower star I had been looking at the previous day.  I didn't have the Glorfindel flower in front of me, but as you can see it is a fairly unique interpretation of a 'rayed sun' and so something that is more noticeable or memorable than just a standard star.  

As I looked at this image, and thought that this appeared to be exactly like this other star image, but just red, the strangest thought/ question came into my mind, which was "I wonder if the Sawtooth Stone is red?", but it was almost like a rhetorical question, in that I now thought the Stone was Red.   I had never had this thought before, but looking at this truck star decal or painting made me think that perhaps this is so.

I ended up taking a picture before the light turned green.  Unfortunately, the driver of the truck noticed that I took a picture.  As we pulled onto the overpass and then stopped at the next light, he pulled over to get beside me and rolled down his window.  I pulled up, and rolled down mine.  The pizza place is in kind of sketch area of town, and if I could have kept driving I would have, but this next stoplight was red.

He was upset and asked if I took a picture of his truck.  Assessing the situation and the mood of this guy, I straight up lied and said I didn't take a picture.  I guess I didn't think that this was the time or place to tell him I was just interested in his star decal because it reminded me of the Elven Lord Glorfindel's shield emblem.   My gut told me this wasn't going to be the right play.

In hindsight, I believe his plates were expired and he was worried I was turning him in or something.  Anyway, I felt bad about lying, so after I pulled into the pizza place, I deleted the picture so that I was retroactively truthful in my statement, I guess, in not having a picture of his truck.

When I got home, I looked up the emblem on Tolkien Gateway again, and I was almost positive this was an exact copy of what I had just seen, though I now didn't have the picture I had taken.

I recovered the picture, by the way, fast forwarding to that part of this narrative.  This morning, due to some other things I will get to, it was still on my mind.  It turns out iPhone has a photo recovery feature where all deleted photos go into an album and are held there for 30 days, before being permanently deleted.  I didn't know this.  So I said screw it, I'm going to restore it.  Here it is zoomed in (so we don't get a shot of my friend's expired plates):

It was raining, so the image is a little blurry through my windshield, but you can see that it is the exact same star design.  The only two differences are that this one is red, and a red circle in the middle where the Golden Flower image has a flower in the center that replaces the circle.  Other than that, the design and proportions are identical.  Here they are side by side:

So why was I so interested in resurrecting this 16-pointed Red Star and including it in this post?  

Yesterday, William relayed a dream or vision he had in which he saw a cup with a Ruby placed in it.  A box turtle approached the cup, got on its hindlegs in an effort to look at the Ruby, and as a result fruit started to overflow from the cup as soon as it had done so.

I left a comment there because there were a few interesting things that stood out to me, in addition to what William had mentioned.  

First, the color of the Ruby itself, being a Red gem, reminded me of this Red Star on the back of the truck.  

Second, Rubies are the birthstone for the month of July - our current month - and the notion of a birthstone also brought to mind some of the symbolism I have noticed and referenced in prior posts related to the numbers associated with my own July birthday (see here for an example).

Third, William referenced my short story about Herbie the Hamster who was able to scale a wall using a seed, which grew into a plant and allowed Herbie to climb over the wall.  I have, for some time now, viewed this story and specifically the seed as symbolic of the Sawtooth Stone.  William saw in the turtle a similar character to Herbie, and the Ruby as a similar object to Herbie's seed (the Sawtooth Stone).

And lastly, some elements of the dream, perhaps it was the element of fruit overflowing a cup, brought to mind a dream I had back in 2022 and briefly relayed in my Part 1 post about my January and February 2022 words:

Along with that dream, came the following words:  Gorash minu istuli Kementari.  I've interpreted that phrase to mean something like "to counself first peak he to come Yavanna".  The reference of Yavanna seems to tie in very well with the basket of fruit, as she is known as the Queen of the Earth and is responsible for all growing things.  In fact, her name translates as "Giver of Fruits", and is literally "Fruit gift".

All this being said, I connected the Ruby of William's dream with the Sawtooth Stone, and consequently, the appearance of this 16-point Red Star.

In effect, it gave me the impression that perhaps my random thought of the Sawtooth Stone's color being red when I saw this image on the back of the truck wasn't so random, and that there was something to it.

It also made sense of the dream I related in my post "C'est Moi", in which someone simply identifying themselves as "C'est Moi" sent a message to "Ali", saying it had "been awhile".  I interpreted that dream as perhaps alluding to the future connection between the Sawtooth Stone and the Ithil Stone.  In the dream, I saw a tree flashing with a red-pink color, which brought to my mind the flashes one sees when data transmissions are being sent and received over ethernet, as I thought through the various symbolism afterward.

I didn't have a good reason for why the tree would have been flashing red, though (vs. some other color - red seemed unnatural or not typical in this setting) so I didn't have much to say about that.  However, given all of this, my strong guess is that that it was red because the transmissions were sent from the the Stone, and it is in fact Red.  Seems straightforward.

I guess it doesn't matter what color the Stone is, per se, but I cite these various observations to just log that they may suggest we are on the right path with some of this thinking.  Further, the fact that I saw the Red Star on the back of the truck in the exact same design as Glorfindel's House emblem suggests to me that my guess that it is he who was the courier of, and perhaps ultimately the current steward for, this Red Sawtooth Stone may also be accurate.  I mean pick-up trucks are meant to transport things in their beds, and here on a truck tailgate was an image that potentially represents the Sawtooth Stone.

The 16-point star is also often used as a compass rose.  My story has Glorfindel and Gildor as knowing the way - the direction and location - of where the Sawtooth Stone is currently housed, so that might be another element for the use of this symbol.