Bregor

Bregor is one of the chieftains of the House of Bëor, the first kindred of the Edain to pass into Beleriand and the one most closely bound to the Noldor. He appears in the Quenta Silmarillion within a compressed dynastic notice, given there as the son of Boromir and set in the direct descent from Bëor the Old, whose heirs held the leadership of that folk. His own place in the account is transitional rather than active: he is identified chiefly as the father of Bregolas and Barahir, and through them as the grandfather of the generation whose deeds the narrative goes on to follow. No byname or title is attached to him, and the text records nothing of his person, his years, or his temper — a reticence typical of the genealogical passages of that chapter, which name many more men of Bëor's line than they describe.

The name itself is not glossed in the published texts, and any sense proposed for it must remain conjecture. What can be observed is formal: the names of this house are strikingly uniform in shape, nearly all beginning with b-, and several sharing a further element with a near kinsman. Bregor and his elder son Bregolas stand together in this pattern, as Barahir stands with Baragund and with the earlier Baran. Whether such repetition marks deliberate naming within the family or merely the habit of the tongue is not stated. The chapter also notes how swiftly the folk of Bëor took up the speech of the Grey-elves, and the names of their lords are preserved in Elvish record; the forms that survive are therefore those of Elvish annals rather than of any Mannish source.

The people to whom Bregor belonged are described as dark or brown of hair, grey-eyed, eager of mind and swift in learning, and in temper nearer to the Noldor than the other kindreds of Men — a likeness that made them welcome to the Elven-kings. After their first dwelling in the open lands east of the Blue Mountains, the men of Bëor's house were granted the region of Ladros, in the north-eastern parts of the highland of Dorthonion, and it is there that the lordship of Bregor's family is to be placed. His generation thus stood in a march-country under the shadow of the northern wastes, holding land by the gift of the Noldorin kings and in service to them.

No dated deed is set against Bregor's name. The Quenta Silmarillion preserves him in a register of fathers and sons, and that register is concerned with descent rather than with event: it gives no year for his birth, no moment for his accession to the lordship of his people, and no account of his death. This silence is not peculiar to him. The same passage passes over most of the chieftains between Bëor and the generation of the Sudden Flame in a single clause apiece, naming them only so that the later names may be placed. Any chronology of his life must therefore be assembled from the positions of the men around him, and held loosely.

The frame within which he must be set is the long quiet that followed the Glorious Battle, when the Noldor held Morgoth shut within Angband and the northern marches were watched but unbroken. It was during this period that the Edain came over the mountains, were received by the Elven-kings, and were granted lands to hold; and it was during its later stretch that the house of Bëor passed through the generations recorded in the chapter. Bregor's life falls somewhere in that closing span, between the settlement of his people in the north-eastern highland and the year in which the Siege was broken. Nothing indicates that he saw war in his own time, and nothing indicates that he did not.

The break came in the winter assault out of Angband, when fire ran down over the northern grasslands and turned them to a waste of ash, and the dragon Glaurung came forth full-grown with Balrogs and orcs behind him. The defences of the north were carried in a single onslaught, and the highland where Bregor's people dwelt was overrun; the Noldorin lords who held that land, the sons of Finarfin who ruled there, were both slain. In that battle Bregolas fell, and with him a great part of the fighting men of the house of Bëor. The lordship of the folk was thus in Bregolas' hands when the war came, which places Bregor's own death, or at least the end of his rule, before that year — an inference from the succession rather than a statement of the text.

What followed fell to Bregor's younger son. Barahir came north with a small company and broke through to the Fen of Serech, where Finrod Felagund was cut off and surrounded, and brought him out of the encirclement; for that Finrod swore an oath of abiding friendship to him and to his kin, and gave him his ring in pledge. Barahir would not leave the highland afterwards, though it was lost. The women and children of the house were led away southward over the mountains by his wife Emeldir, while he held out with twelve companions — among them Baragund and Belegund, the sons of Bregolas — until treachery brought the enemy to their camp at the mountain tarn and all were killed save Beren alone. Within two generations of Bregor, the holding his fathers had received was gone and his line scattered.

The scattering did not end the descent, and this is why the genealogy troubles to record him at all. Baragund's daughter Morwen and Belegund's daughter Rían were among those brought out of the ruined land, and from them came Túrin and Tuor, whose histories occupy much of the later Quenta. From Barahir came Beren, and through Beren the union with Lúthien, from which descended Dior and Elwing and so the line that reaches Eärendil. The notice that names Bregor stands beside that of Eärendil's fathers in the same chapter, and its purpose is to bind the two together: he is a joint in a chain, remembered because of what the chain came to carry rather than for anything he is recorded to have done.

In the structure of the narrative Bregor holds an office rather than a part. The lordship of the folk of Bëor was hereditary, passing from father to son from Bëor the Old onward, and the men who held it were chieftains of a single kindred rather than kings: no crown is attached to it, no realm held in its own right, and no authority beyond their own people. What the Quenta Silmarillion records of that office it records generally and not of him — that the Edain were received into the service and friendship of the Noldorin princes, that they were given lands to hold and till, and that they bore arms in the northern wars under the lords whose marches they guarded. Nothing in the text distinguishes Bregor's tenure of the chieftainship from his father's before him or his elder son's after.

He was a mortal man of the First Age, and no power beyond that is claimed for him or for any of his house. The Edain gained much from the Eldar — craft, lore, and the Elvish tongues — and are said to have grown in skill and understanding by that teaching, but what they gained was knowledge and not art: no faculty of enchantment, no foresight, no working of spells is attributed to the men of Bëor's line anywhere in the account. Their strength is described in ordinary terms — arms, endurance, eagerness of mind, and the loyalty given and received between them and the Elven-kings. The measure of the limit is set in the same chapter by Bëor himself, who died in Finrod's service in his ninety-third year, and in whom the Eldar first saw the swift waning of Men and a death that came without wound or sickness. The chieftains who followed him held their lordships for the short span such lives allowed.

The bounds on that lordship were also political and territorial. The Edain dwelt where the Eldar allotted them and not elsewhere; Doriath remained closed to Men by Thingol's will, and the lands the three houses received in the north lay in open country before the Elven strongholds, so that part of the watch on the marches rested on a people few in number and without walls of their own making. Bregor's family held such a country by grant, and the grant was the ground of their standing: no chieftain of that house could have drawn his people out of the exposed lands without surrendering the very tenure that made him a lord. When the northern defence broke, the holding went with it. Whether Bregor weighed that position, or whether it was simply the condition into which he was born and in which he died, the record does not say; on his exercise of what authority he had it is wholly silent.

The published account allows Bregor no relationship that is not one of kinship, and no kinsman who is not an ancestor or a descendant. No wife is named for him, no brother, sister or daughter, no companion, and no lord to whom he answered by name; he is fixed by a father above him and two sons below, and whatever else his household held has not been kept. What the arrangement does show is a family that brought forth its heirs in pairs and kept those pairs together. Bregolas and Barahir stand as the first such pair in the line, and the next generation repeats the shape: Baragund and Belegund, when the highland was lost, attached themselves to their father's brother rather than seeking any inheritance of their own, and died in his company. Whatever bound that family into one band was already formed in the house Bregor governed.

Beyond his kin, the one bond that certainly reached him was inherited rather than made. The friendship between his folk and the Noldor began with Bëor, who gave himself into Finrod's service and held to it until he died, and it was a matter of persons rather than of treaties: the men of that house called Finrod by a name of their own tongue meaning wisdom, and he is said to have loved them beyond the other kindreds of Men. In Bregor's own generation the tie was feudal as well as personal, since the highland where his people lived was ruled by the sons of Finarfin, and their tenure of Ladros came by that grant. He neither began this allegiance nor brought it to its crisis; he transmitted it. It was sworn afresh as an oath in his younger son's lifetime and discharged in his grandson's.

His enmity is likewise collective and impersonal. Nothing sets Bregor against any named adversary; the hostility of Angband fell upon his people as a whole, and only afterwards narrowed to particular names. Where his descendants do enter that closer quarrel, they enter it by marriage: Baragund's daughter Morwen wedded Húrin of the house of Hador and Belegund's daughter Rían wedded Húrin's brother Huor, so that the malice later directed at one family took hold of Bregor's blood through wives brought out of a ruined country. Beren's marriage carried the line further still, out of the kindreds of Men altogether. Read from the relationships alone, Bregor's significance is that of a joining-point: two branches that stayed together, an allegiance handed down intact, and a stock that married outward into the histories which the chronicle chose to tell at length.

No figure answering to Bregor exists in the earliest stratum of the legend. In the version of Beren and Tinúviel written among the Lost Tales, Beren is not a Man at all but one of the Gnomes, the son of a hunter of the Noldoli, and the story turns on a captivity among cats rather than on any war of Men and Elves; a Mannish pedigree was therefore neither needed nor possible. The change came with the long verse treatment of the tale, where Beren is mortal and the son of Barahir, and with it the outlaw band and the ruin of a northern house. Even then the descent given him reached back only a step or two, attaching him to the name of Bëor without the chain of chieftains that the published account interposes.

The intervening generations, Bregor's among them, belong to the later phase of the work, when Tolkien returned to the matter of Beleriand after The Lord of the Rings and set the coming of the Edain into an annalistic frame with reckoned years. It is from these writings of the 1950s that the compressed genealogical notice of the published chapter was drawn, and the name accordingly enters the tradition already in its final shape: no variant spelling, no discarded alternative, and no episode ever attached to it. In the last essays touching the Edain the house of Bëor is handled chiefly as a problem of kinship and language rather than of narrative, its members set out in tables of descent, and Bregor keeps there the same position he holds in the finished text. He is, in the drafting history, a name created to fill a gap in a pedigree and never afterwards revised.