Baran

Baran stands in the annals of the First Age as the elder of the two sons of the man whom the Eldar came to call Bëor the Old; his brother was Belen. No name is preserved for their mother, and nothing is recorded of Baran's birth, which must have fallen in the years before his people made their way west over the mountains. The father's name is itself a matter of record rather than of descent: he was born Balan, and took the name Bëor — a word of his own people's speech, carrying the sense of vassal or servant — when he gave himself into the service of Finrod Felagund. Baran is thus remembered under a patronymic that commemorates an act of allegiance rather than an ancestral title, and the chronicles name him only in relation to that house.

The kindred to which he belonged were Men, the first of their race to cross the Blue Mountains and pass into Beleriand, and afterwards reckoned the first of the three houses of the Edain — Edain being the Sindarin form of the Quenya Atani, the Second People, one among the many names the Elves gave to mortals, who were called also the Followers and the After-born, and, in less friendly mouths, the Sickly and the Self-cursed. Of that house it is said that its people were dark or brown of hair and grey of eye, quick of understanding and deft of hand, and that of the three kindreds they were the nearest to the Noldor in temper. Their speech had long been coloured by the tongues of the Dark Elves east of the mountains, which is why Felagund did not find it wholly strange when he first came upon them.

The name Baran is nowhere glossed in the narrative sources, but it belongs to a pattern plain in the recorded genealogy: the names of that house cluster upon a single initial sound — Belen, Boron, Boromir, Bregor, Barahir among them — an alliterative habit of naming that persists through generation after generation of the line. The kindred as a whole came to be known not by Baran's name but by his father's, as the People or the House of Bëor, so that the Elvish record fixed upon the man who had entered Felagund's service, while the succession of the chieftains ran on through his elder son.

Baran enters the record at the moment his people pass out of obscurity. Somewhat more than three hundred years after the return of the Noldor to Beleriand, Finrod Felagund, hunting east of Sirion with the sons of Fëanor, left his companions and came by night upon the camp of the first Men to have crossed the Blue Mountains. He remained with them, learned what he could of their speech, and afterwards became their guide: the folk of Bëor were led westward over Gelion and settled in the empty lands east of the river Celon, south of Nan Elmoth, in the country that was thereafter called Estolad, the Encampment. Baran, as the elder of the two sons, would have been a grown man among them by then, though the chronicle notices him only when his father's course parts from his people's. When Felagund at last turned back to his own realm he took Bëor with him, and Bëor laid the governance of the folk upon Baran and went south; he served the king of Nargothrond for the rest of his days and never came again to Estolad.

The rule that fell to Baran was therefore the rule of a settled but temporary people, camped in a march-land held by the sons of Fëanor and waiting upon events they did not command. Others followed them out of the east. The Haladin, second of the kindreds to come, crossed the mountains and turned aside into Thargelion in the country of Caranthir, keeping to themselves; but the great host of Marach came down by the road that ran through Nan Elmoth and encamped in the lands lying south and east of the dwellings of Baran and his brother Belen. Between the two peoples there was friendship rather than rivalry, and the record is explicit that they lived as neighbours in goodwill, though they were unlike in temper and speech. It is in this notice — a boundary described by reference to where Baran and Belen lived — that the chronicle preserves the only glimpse of Baran's actual seat.

The years at Estolad were not quiet ones. Word of the newcomers reached Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor, who sent them welcome, and many of the younger men went away to take service with Elven-lords in the north and west, so that the encampments were steadily thinned of their most restless. Among those who stayed there grew a division: some held that the Edain had come west to be free of the Shadow and had gained only another master's war, while others answered that Men had been sought out by the Enemy long before they ever saw an Elf. A council was called in Estolad in which Bereg of the house of Bëor spoke for departure and Amlach, of Marach's kindred, spoke bitterly against remaining, until it came out that the words most fiercely urged had been put into a false likeness of Amlach by a servant of Morgoth. Amlach, shamed, went north into the service of Maedhros; Bereg held to his purpose and led a great company of Bëor's folk away southward, and they pass out of the tales. What part the chieftain of that house took in the debate, or in the loss of so many of his people, is nowhere said.

The other great turn of Baran's lifetime came from Nargothrond. Bëor the Old died there, in the king's household and far from the people he had brought over the mountains, stricken by no wound or grief but by age alone when he had lived more than ninety years, of which the greater part of his last decades had been spent in Finrod's service. The Eldar had never before watched the swift waning of a mortal life run its course, and their sorrow at his death was as much bewilderment as mourning; the passing of Bëor is the point at which the difference of the two kindreds' fates became plain to those who had befriended them. For Baran the death made permanent what had already been true in practice for many years: the lordship of the house of Bëor was his, no longer held in his father's absence but in his father's stead.

Estolad did not remain the home of that people. Finrod granted the folk of Bëor lands in the highland of Dorthonion, north across the wide country, where they held their own under the lordship of their own chieftains and owed allegiance to the king who had first found them; the old encampment kept its name long after the greater part of its dwellers had gone. Whether Baran himself led that removal, or died before it, the sources do not record, and no account survives of his death, his burial, or the length of his years. What is preserved is the line: the genealogies of the house run from Bëor the Old through Baran to Boron, and thence through Boromir and Bregor to Bregolas and Barahir, and so at length to Beren son of Barahir. The chronicles give Baran no deed of arms and no memorable saying, only the succession — which is, in the end, the whole of what the elder son of Bëor was required to do.

Baran's place in the legendarium is institutional rather than heroic: he is the first chieftain of the house of Bëor to hold that office by inheritance, and the point at which leadership of that people ceased to be the personal following of the man who had gathered them and became a thing handed down. His authority rested on nothing the record names beyond his father's grant of it — no election is mentioned, no oath sworn to him, no title conferred by the Eldar. What passed into his keeping was a people, not a realm. The country in which they dwelt was empty land lying within the marches of Elven-lords, held by leave rather than by right; and Thingol, uneasy at the coming of mortals into Beleriand, sent word that Men should settle only in the northern regions and that the princes who took them into service should be answerable for them. Whatever Baran ruled, he ruled at another's sufferance.

Powers of any other kind are not ascribed to him. Nothing of enchantment, foresight, or extended life belongs to his kindred in the annals; what the Edain gained from their nearness to the Noldor was lore and craft learned from a wiser people, and what they gave in return was service in arms. The limits of Baran's office are visible in the events that ran through it rather than in any statement about it. The direction of the war, the terms on which land was granted, the summons that drew away the young and restless of his folk, the deceit that a servant of the Enemy worked in the assembly of his own people — none of these lay within a chieftain's power to command or forbid, and the chronicle does not show him attempting it.

What he did hold was continuity, and this proved the durable part. The bond between his house and the house of Finarfin, contracted by his father and maintained by Baran in his father's absence, outlasted them both: the chieftains of the Bëorians were reckoned lords under the King of Nargothrond, and long afterwards Barahir still held his lands of Finrod, and repaid that lordship by saving the king's life in the northern battle. Baran's function in the narrative is to make that inheritance transmissible, which the sources record without comment and without praise.

The bond that shapes Baran's place in the record is the one with his father, and the sources describe it almost entirely as distance. Bëor's deepest attachment proved to be not to the folk he had led over the mountains but to the Elven-king who had found them; having handed the governance to his elder son he went away south and stayed there, and the chronicles preserve no message, no return, no meeting between father and son thereafter. What Baran received was therefore an office rather than a companionship, and with it an allegiance he had not himself contracted: nothing states that he ever stood before Finrod, or saw Nargothrond, or exchanged any word with the lord to whom his house was reckoned bound. That the loyalty nevertheless held, unrenewed and untested for the length of a mortal lifetime, is the quiet measure of the man.

With his brother the annals are equally sparing and equally suggestive. Belen is named beside him without any hint of rivalry or grievance, and the two appear jointly when the narrative needs to fix where their people had settled — brothers whose dwellings lay together and whose interests the record never separates. Yet only one line runs onward. Belen's descendants fall out of the tale, while Baran's passes to Boron and from him down the generations; no wife of Baran is named, and no daughter. The house remembers him as a son and as a father, and in no other domestic relation at all.

Outward, his one recorded relation is with the newcomers who settled at his borders. The Haladin, arriving earlier, had turned aside and kept apart from other Men; the great following of Marach came down and camped as neighbours, and between them and the Bëorians there was goodwill from the first, notwithstanding differences of tongue and temper. That neighbourly beginning proved the most consequential thing to happen in Baran's lifetime, for it hardened over generations into kinship: women of his line went as wives into the house of Hador, Morwen to Húrin and Rían to Huor, so that the blood of Bëor's elder son ran at last in Túrin and in Tuor. Baran is nowhere credited with having sought this; he is simply the chieftain in whose neighbourhood it became possible.