Angrim

Angrim is one of those figures who exist in the legendarium only as a patronymic. He appears in a single clause of the Quenta Silmarillion, where Gorlim, counted among the twelve men who held out with Barahir in Dorthonion after the breaking of the Siege, is identified as his son. Beyond that identification nothing is preserved: no deeds, no dwelling, no lineage upward, not even a statement of whether he outlived the disaster that fell upon his land. The name is the whole of the record. Such brevity is characteristic of the compressed, annal-like manner of the Quenta, in which a father's name frequently serves less to introduce a person than to fix a man's place among his kindred and so vouch for him.

What can be said of his origin follows from that placement rather than from any direct statement. Barahir's companions were drawn from his own people, the Men of the First House of the Edain, the folk of Bëor, who had come west into Beleriand in the days of Finrod Felagund and afterwards settled the highland country of Dorthonion under his lordship. Angrim, as the father of one of these men, belonged to that same people and to the generation preceding, or roughly contemporary with, Barahir himself. He would thus have lived in the long years of the Siege of Angband, when the northern highlands were still held and the Bëorians dwelt there in relative security. This is inference from context, not testimony; the texts say nothing of him directly.

The name itself is transmitted in the Elvish-seeming shape common to the men of that house — Bregor, Bregolas, Barahir, Gorlim — a consequence of the tradition reaching us through Sindarin channels. Tolkien nowhere glosses it. The appendix of name-elements attached to the published Silmarillion records anga as 'iron' and rim as 'great number, host', and both elements would fit the form without strain; but no interpretation of Angrim is attested anywhere in the writings, and a name that never receives an author's gloss should not be given one on the strength of resemblance alone. It is safest to say that the meaning is unrecovered, and that Angrim survives, like several of the marginal names of the Edain, as a sound without a translation.

No event in the legendarium is dated to Angrim, and the published Quenta narrates the fall of the north without a year-count, so his place in time can only be fixed by working backwards from his son. Gorlim was a grown man, married, and a fighter on the northern marches when the highland realm was broken; his father must therefore have belonged to the generation that lived out its life during the long watch on Angband, in the years when the lordship of the Bëorian folk passed from Boromir to Bregor and thence to Bregolas and Barahir. That was the quietest stretch of the age in Dorthonion, and it left almost no personal record of the men who filled it. Angrim is one of the many whose whole known biography consists of having had a son who was remembered.

The quiet ended in the sudden winter assault out of Thangorodrim, when rivers of flame poured down over Ard-galen and the encirclement of Angband was undone. Dorthonion was overrun from the north; Angrod and Aegnor, who had held its slopes, were killed, and Bregolas fell with a great part of the warriors of his house. Barahir survived, and in the fighting at the Fen of Serech he brought a company to the rescue of Finrod Felagund, who gave him his ring in pledge of a debt that would afterwards fall to Barahir's heirs. Whether Angrim was still living when this happened, and whether he was among the dead of that year, the sources do not say. He simply is not mentioned again, which in a compressed narrative of this kind is not evidence of anything.

What follows belongs to his son, and it is only through his son's story that Angrim's name entered the record at all. The land was not abandoned at once: Barahir refused to leave it, and while Emeldir his wife gathered the women and the children and the few remaining boys and led them south out of the ruin, the men who stayed were worn down in a long guerrilla resistance until twelve were left with their lord. They kept themselves in the wild upland about Tarn Aeluin, a lake reckoned hallowed since the days when Melian had blessed its water, and from that refuge they raided and were hunted in turn, until Morgoth set Sauron to the work of destroying them. It is at the point where these twelve are named over that Gorlim is introduced with his patronymic, and Angrim's single appearance in the whole corpus falls there.

Gorlim's calamity had come at the outset of the ruin, when he returned from the fighting on the borders to find his home plundered and empty and his wife Eilinel gone, with nothing to tell him whether she had been killed or carried off. He went to Barahir in that condition and was, of all the outlaws, the one who took the fewest precautions with his own life. But hope was not quite dead in him, and he kept returning in secret to the wasted house; the habit was noticed. On one such night he saw a light there and, looking in, saw what seemed to be Eilinel, worn and grieving. The vision was a snare. He was seized, brought before Sauron, and offered his wife's company and his own freedom in exchange for what he knew. He named the refuge at Tarn Aeluin. Sauron then told him that the woman he had seen was a phantom, that Eilinel had been dead since the sack of the house, and that he would be granted the reunion he had bargained for; and he was put to death.

The betrayal destroyed the company. Beren, Barahir's son, was away on an errand when the attack came, and in sleep he was visited by the wraith of Gorlim, who confessed what he had done and warned him. He reached the tarn too late; the carrion birds were already settled in the alders, and his father and all the rest lay dead. He buried Barahir's bones beneath a cairn, tracked the orc-band to Rivil's Well above the Fen of Serech, and killed their captain to recover the severed hand that still bore Felagund's ring. Nothing suggests that Gorlim left a child, so with him the line descending from Angrim ends, four generations before the Edain of that house came into their inheritance elsewhere.

Set out in this way, the chronology attached to Angrim is entirely borrowed. He himself is undated, unplaced except by the country of his people, and unattested outside a single genitive construction. The events above stand as his history only in the sense that they are the events that gave a reason for his name to be written down: had Gorlim died unremarkably in the first assault, or held out with the others to the end without incident, there would very probably be no record of his father at all. That is the ordinary condition of the minor names in the Quenta, and it is worth stating plainly rather than concealing behind a fuller-sounding narrative.

Angrim's function in the legendarium is grammatical before it is anything else. He exists to qualify a name: the son is introduced with the father attached, and that attachment does the ordinary work such formulas do in the Quenta, marking a man as belonging to a known kindred rather than appearing from nowhere. Angrim himself takes no part in any scene. He speaks no word, performs no act, holds no title, and is not counted among the men who kept the refuge in the highlands; the passage that preserves him is about others. Nothing in the text suggests he was a lord, a captain, or a person of standing beyond whatever standing is implied by having a son who fought on the northern marches. To describe him as a warrior, a follower of Barahir, or a survivor of the assault would be to supply a role the sources withhold.

Of capability there is nothing to record, and the silence here is not merely local. The Quenta attributes no extraordinary faculty to the Men of the Three Houses as such: they are short-lived beside the Eldar, subject to the mortality that is called their gift and their doom, and unaltered in body or craft by anything but the teaching they received in Beleriand. Whatever strength or skill Angrim possessed was the strength of an ordinary man of the Bëorian folk in the years of the Siege, and even that is inference rather than testimony. He has no attested weapon, no attested household, no attested deed. The proper statement of his powers is that none are recorded, and that the framework of the narrative gives no ground for supposing any beyond the human.

What weight the name carries in the story is entirely borrowed from what his son did, and it should not be transferred back to him. The catastrophe that overtook Barahir's outlaws is credited in the text to Gorlim alone, under duress and deception; no responsibility, inheritance, or influence is traced to the father. Angrim is thus a limiting case for the kind of article this is: a person of the legendarium about whom the honest account of role and power consists almost wholly of negatives. That he is nonetheless preserved at all is a consequence of the naming convention rather than of any importance the narrative assigns him.

Every relationship attributable to Angrim runs in one direction, downward to a single person. He is a father, and nothing else: no wife is named for him, no parent, no brother or sister, no second child. This is worth setting beside the way the same chapters handle the women of the Bëorian house, for the Quenta is not generally indifferent to them. Emeldir, who led the households of Dorthonion south when the men stayed behind, is named and given a byname; Eilinel, who is Angrim's daughter-in-law and who never appears alive in the narrative, is named twice over. That a woman married into the family should be remembered while the mother of that family's remembered son is not indicates how little of Angrim's household passed into the tradition at all.

Within the outlaw band the asymmetry is sharper still. When the twelve who held out with Barahir are told over by name, they are given without fathers; Gorlim alone is introduced with his parentage attached, and he is so introduced at exactly the point where the narrative turns aside to follow him. The patronymic thus works as a marker of imminent attention rather than of status, and Angrim's name enters the text on the strength of what is about to happen to his son. There is no indication that he stood in any relation to Barahir himself, whether as sworn man, kinsman, or neighbour; the lordship touches him only through Gorlim.

Nor has he an adversary of his own. Sauron, the deceiver in that episode, deals with the son; the enmity, the bargain, and its price are Gorlim's, and the text traces none of it back a generation. Angrim is likewise outside the lines of descent that the chapters take pains to record, where the lordship of the First House passes from father to son across four or five names and is followed as far as Beren and beyond. He belongs instead to the far larger body of Edain who had kindred but no succession, preserved by accident of narrative rather than by genealogical interest.

The figure belongs to the poetic stratum of the legend rather than to its prose beginnings. In the earliest telling, the Tale of Tinúviel, Beren is a Gnome and the son of Egnor, and there is no outlawed band holding out in a ruined highland country: no Barahir, therefore no Gorlim, and no place at all where a father for him might stand. The whole complex of that episode — the small company in hiding, the plundered house, the betrayal bought with a false promise — first takes shape in the Lay of Leithian, the octosyllabic poem Tolkien was working at from the late 1920s, and it is in that poem that the patronymic first appears. The published chapter's handling of Gorlim follows the verse account rather closely, which is how a name that originated in a passage of narrative poetry came to survive into a prose text that otherwise strips its marginal persons down to nothing.

Afterwards the name held still. The story of the betrayal was retold in much abridged form in the prose Quenta tradition of the 1930s, and reworked again later in annalistic shape, but through those revisions Angrim is neither renamed nor respelled nor given anything further to do; he remains exactly what the poem made him. He is also never explained. The Etymologies, the alphabetical list of Elvish stems Tolkien compiled in the middle 1930s and left unfinished, nowhere accounts for the form, and no marginal note or later paper supplies the omission. What the drafts show, then, is not development but its absence: a name coined once, carried forward unaltered through every stage of rewriting, and never at any point made the occasion for a gloss, a genealogy, or a second sentence.