Boron

Boron stands in the third generation of the chieftains of the First House of the Edain, the folk called after Bëor, who led them over the mountains into Beleriand. The published narrative names him as a grandson of Bëor the Old, and it is essentially in that capacity that he appears at all: as the joint in a line of descent rather than as an actor in it. No birth, no dwelling of his own, and no deed is recorded for him, and the Elvish chronicles that preserve so much of his kindred pass over his life without comment. What the texts do preserve through him is continuity, for the descent of the house runs from the first Man to enter the guarded realm of the Noldor through Boron to the later lords of his people, and onward to Barahir and to Beren.

The name itself is left unexplained. This is notable only because the same chapter does gloss the name of his grandfather: that lord was born Balan, and Bëor was a byname in the speech of his own people, signifying one who serves, taken up after he entered the household of Finrod. For Boron no such translation is offered, nor any epithet; he is identified in the text only by his relation to the son who came after him. What can be observed is a family habit rather than an etymology, since the names of this house cluster tightly in sound and shape — Baran, Boron, Boromir, Bregor, Bregolas, Barahir, Beren — a run of short forms opening with the same letter, which marks the line as clearly as any title would.

His origin lies with a people newly settled and still unsettled. The folk of Bëor had come out of the east, had lingered for a season in the open lands south of Nan Elmoth, and were afterwards granted by the kings of the Noldor the north-eastern country of Dorthonion, the region named Ladros, where the house took root and held its lordship. Whether Boron himself lived in the earlier camps or in the highland fief is not said, and the narrative names him at the moment when the keeping of that land passes to the next generation. He belongs, then, to the interval in which a wandering kindred became a landed one.

Boron's life falls entirely within the long middle stretch of the First Age, in the years when Angband lay under siege and the northern marches of Beleriand were held quiet by the strength of the Noldor. The Edain had entered those lands during that peace, and the three generations that follow Bëor the Old belong wholly to it: none of them saw the breaking of the Siege, and none of them is recorded fighting in the great battles that frame the age at either end. The chronicles set Boron in that interval without fixing a year for his birth or death, and the published narrative attaches no date to any moment of his life. What can be said of his time is therefore said of his people and his kindred, and only through them of him.

The generation before his own had seen the resettlement of the First House. After the death of Bëor in the service of Finrod, the leadership of the folk passed to his son Baran, whom the genealogies place directly between Bëor and Boron, and it was under that lordship that the greater part of the kindred moved north out of the lands where the Edain had first been quartered and took up the highland country granted them in Dorthonion. Boron thus grew up, so far as the record allows the inference, among a people that had only lately ceased to move, in a fief held on the sufferance and friendship of Elvish kings rather than by any right of their own. He is not named in the account of that migration, nor among those who debated whether to go north at all.

The one event in which his name appears is not, strictly, an act of his: it is the conferral of the lordship of Bëor's people together with the land of Ladros upon his son, who is identified by patronymic in that same sentence. The text presents the grant as made to Boromir and names him as the first to hold it; it does not say that Boron himself ruled, nor that he did not. Whether he died before the fief was formally constituted, whether he held the leadership of the folk without the land, or whether the chronicler simply passed over an unremarkable tenure, the surviving passage does not decide. This is the whole of his appearance in the narrative: a name in the ancestry of the man who received Ladros.

What came after him gives the line its weight. From Boromir the lordship passed to Bregor, and from Bregor to his sons Bregolas and Barahir, in whose day the Siege was broken by the sudden fire out of the north. Dorthonion was overrun, Bregolas fell with many of the folk of Bëor, and Ladros was lost to the enemy within a single campaign; Barahir refused to abandon the highlands and was hunted there with a small company until he was betrayed and killed, leaving his son Beren the last of the house in that country. The fief that the record shows entering the family in Boron's generation therefore held for four lordships and no more, and every later bearer of the descent — including the one whose deeds carried the house into the central story of the age — traces back through him.

No death is recorded for him, and no burial, and no age. The contrast with his grandfather is instructive: for Bëor the texts preserve the years he served in Finrod's household, the length of his life, and the grief of the Elves at his dying, because his passing was the first that the Eldar had witnessed among Men and so entered their annals as an event in their own history. Boron touched no Elvish affair that the chroniclers thought worth setting down, and the record accordingly closes over him. He survives as a link and a patronymic — the point at which a lordship, a land, and a lineage were handed on — and the silence around him is a fair measure of how much of the early history of the Edain reached the Elvish annals at all.

Whatever office Boron held was of a kind the texts describe only in general terms, for the lordship of the First House was leadership of a folk rather than rule over a realm. The people of Bëor were a kindred, not a nation, and the land they came to keep in Dorthonion lay inside a march held by the sons of Finarfin, within the wider overlordship of Finrod, to whom the house had bound itself by service in the first generation. A chieftain of such a people led his own men in war, ordered their settlement and husbandry, and answered to the Elvish princes whose gift the country was; he crowned no one, coined nothing, and could be dispossessed by the same authority that had granted him his seat. This is the whole extent of the power that the narrative allows to Boron's position, and it is allowed to the position rather than to him.

No faculty beyond the ordinary human is claimed for him, and none is claimed for his kindred either. The Edain of the First Age worked no enchantments and are nowhere credited with arts of power; what marked them in Elvish reckoning was the swiftness of their generations, their aptitude for the crafts and speech of the Eldar, and in some of them a hardness of will against Morgoth that the Eldar came to honour. Of these things nothing is demonstrated in Boron's case, because no situation is recorded in which he might have demonstrated them: no weapon, no counsel, no journey, no siege duty and no oath is attached to his name. The single thing that can be shown to pass through him is inheritance, a claim to the leading of a people and a title to a highland fief, and the text shows even that arriving in the hands of the next man.

His function in the legendarium is accordingly structural. He occupies a fixed place in the family tables of the Edain that accompany the published narrative, and his name serves to make one descent continuous where the prose gives only isolated grants and lordships. That continuity carries considerable weight later, since the same line runs down to Barahir and to Beren, and through Beren into the union with Lúthien from which the Half-elven and the royal houses of Númenor descend. None of this is a power of Boron's, and it would be false to the record to treat it as an achievement; it is the consequence of a lineage in which he happens to stand. Any assessment of his ability, his temper or his competence would be inference drawn backwards from his descendants, and the passages that name him give no ground for it.

The record of Boron's connections is strikingly one-directional: it runs up to a father and down to a son, and stops there. He is bound to Baran before him and to Boromir after him, and both bonds are stated as facts of descent rather than as dealings between persons — no counsel given, no quarrel, no succession disputed. Nothing is said of a wife, and the mother of Boromir goes unnamed, which is the ordinary condition of the earliest generations of this house; the women of the kindred enter the narrative only much later, when Emeldir leads the survivors of a broken country out of the highlands and when Morwen and Rían pass by marriage into the House of Hador. Nor is any brother or sister recorded for him, though the wider family of Bëor did branch in his grandfather's generation. The effect is that Boron has ancestors and heirs but, so far as the chronicles allow, no companions.

The one bond that reaches beyond the family is not his own making. His grandfather's attachment to Finrod began as personal service, and by Boron's time it had become the settled relation of a whole people to the princes of Finarfin's line — a friendship converted into a tenancy and an allegiance. What is notable is how that inherited tie was renewed as a personal one further down the same descent: when the northern defence collapsed, Finrod was rescued by Barahir and answered with an oath of help to him and his kin, sealed by a ring that stayed with the house as its token. Boron stands in the middle of that transmission, neither the man who earned the friendship nor the one who redeemed it, but a necessary term between them.

He has no adversary at all. Morgoth is the enemy of his people by inheritance rather than by any encounter of Boron's, and the marriages that later knit his descendants to the other Edain houses — most consequentially the union of Húrin with Morwen, a daughter of that line — belong to a generation four removes from him. Taken together, the pattern says something about how the Elvish annalists saw the Edain: they recorded these Men chiefly as kindreds, and an individual entered the account when a kindred passed through him. Boron is therefore relation without relationship, a name that exists only in the grammar of whose son and whose father he was.

The late material gathered around the dialogue of Finrod and Andreth gives the First House a fuller shape than the published chapter allows, and it enlarges Boron's family without adding anything to Boron. Andreth appears there as a daughter of Boromir, and so as Boron's granddaughter: a woman versed in the lore of Men, sister to Bregor and therefore of the generation above Barahir, and a pupil of Adanel, who belonged to another of the Edain kindreds and had married into the house of Bëor. The genealogical table printed with that text fixes Boron's position in the descent explicitly, where the narrative prose only implies it. The effect is characteristic of the later drafts: the surrounding names acquire biography and speech, while Boron remains a term in a table.

The sentence in which Boron is named at all belongs to a comparatively late layer of composition. The reworked version of the chapter on the coming of Men into the West, printed among the later Quenta material, carries the account of the settlement in Dorthonion and the grant of the north-eastern fief, and the published narrative follows that redaction closely rather than any of the earlier annalistic drafts. In the older phases of the legendarium the attention of the texts falls on Barahir and Beren and hardly reaches behind them, so the deeper Bëorian pedigree in which Boron stands is a product of Tolkien's later interest in the houses of Men rather than a survival from the first shaping of the tale. No discarded name, no alternative parentage and no rejected episode is recorded for him in the drafts; his existence is stable because it was never more than genealogical.