Círdan

Círdan belongs to that small number of Elves who awoke in the earliest days and were still walking in Middle-earth at the close of the Third Age. He was of Telerin kin, and when the greater part of that people were carried over the Sea, he remained behind on the western shores of Beleriand with those who would not or could not depart. Those who stayed with him became known as the Falathrim, the Elves of the Falas — the long coastline of Beleriand west of the mouths of the Sirion — and he was reckoned their lord. Tolkien nowhere fixes a year for his birth, and the texts describe him only in relative terms: among the oldest, one who had seen more of the world's history than almost any other of his kindred.

The name by which he is universally known is not a birth-name but a title of craft. Círdan is Sindarin for the shipwright or shipbuilder, from the root meaning to cut or shape joined to the element for a worker in wood, and it displaced whatever he had been called before to such a degree that no earlier name is given in the published writings. In the same manner his other appellations are territorial or functional rather than personal: Lord of the Falas in the Elder Days, and afterwards Lord of the Grey Havens, from the harbours he established and maintained at the head of the Gulf of Lhûn. In pronunciation the initial letter is always a hard k, never a sibilant, in accordance with the general rule Tolkien set out for the Elvish tongues.

One detail sets him apart from every other Elf described in the legendarium: he wore a beard, long and grey, which among the Eldar was held to be a mark of great age and appears nowhere else in the narratives. His nature is drawn in the texts as patient rather than restless — a maker and a keeper, whose longing for the Sea was constant but who set the needs of others before his own departure. Foresight is likewise attributed to him, a clearer perception of what was coming than most of his contemporaries possessed, and this quality shapes much of what is later told of his dealings with Men, with Elven-kings, and with the emissaries who came out of the West.

In the Elder Days the strength of Círdan's people lay in two walled harbours on the western shore, Brithombar to the north and Eglarest at the mouth of the river Nenning, and from these the Falathrim lived by the Sea and by the shipping of the coast. In the first battle fought in Beleriand, before ever the Sun and Moon rose, Morgoth's armies came down upon them, broke their array, and shut them within their own walls; the siege was lifted only when the enemy was recalled northward to meet the newly landed host of the Noldor. In the long peace that followed, while Angband was held under watch, Finrod Felagund sent his people to help rebuild the havens in stone, and on the headland west of Eglarest they raised the tower of Barad Nimras to keep watch over the water. No assault ever came from that quarter, and the friendship then made between the Falathrim and the Noldorin princes held for as long as the kingdoms of Beleriand endured.

The ruin came in the year after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, when Morgoth's forces swept down the coast and threw down both harbours. Círdan escaped by sea with a remnant of his people; some he brought to the Isle of Balar, and others settled at the mouths of Sirion, where they built light ships and lived among the reeds, harrying the enemy from the water. To Balar came Gil-galad, and Círdan received him and upheld him, so that the last kingship of the Noldor in Middle-earth had its seat under his protection. At the bidding of Turgon he sent ships west to seek Valinor and carry word of the Elves' need, but none of them returned. It was in these years also that he gave his aid to Eärendil in the building of Vingilot, and that he and Gil-galad came with a fleet to the mouths of Sirion after the last kinslaying, too late to prevent it, and took the survivors away to Balar.

When Beleriand was broken and drowned, Círdan settled with the surviving Elves in Lindon, the land west of the Blue Mountains, and there he established the Grey Havens at the head of the Gulf of Lhûn. Gil-galad was High King, but the harbours and their shipping were Círdan's charge, and they became the chief meeting-place between the Elves of Middle-earth and the mariners of Númenor. Tar-Aldarion, in his long apprenticeship to the Sea, came often to Lindon and found in Círdan both a friend and a source of craft-lore that Númenor did not possess, and much of the Númenórean advance in shipbuilding is traced to that acquaintance. Over the same centuries the Havens served as the western door of Eriador, the place from which news, aid, and eventually refugees passed.

After Sauron's forging of the One and the war that followed in Eriador, the Three Rings were kept hidden and dispersed, and Narya, the Ring of Fire, passed from Gil-galad into Círdan's keeping. He held it through the wars of the later Second Age and made no display of it. When the Last Alliance marched east and Sauron was thrown down before the slopes of Orodruin, Gil-galad was slain, and Círdan stood with Elrond among the few who witnessed what Isildur did with the spoil taken from Sauron's hand. The two of them counselled him to cast the Ring into the fire while the chance remained; he would not, and the counsel was refused. With Gil-galad dead the High Kingship in Middle-earth ended, and Círdan remained at the Havens as lord of what was left of Lindon.

About the year 1000 of the Third Age, when the Valar sent emissaries to contest Sauron's slowly returning power, the first of them came ashore at the Grey Havens, and it was Círdan who received them. He judged that the grey-clad one who called himself Mithrandir was the greatest of the order and had the heaviest labour before him, and he gave Narya into his hands, perceiving whence he had come and whither he would in the end return. The gift was made quietly; Círdan kept his own counsel about it, and for centuries neither Elves nor Men knew where the Ring of Fire had gone. Of the White Council and the long watch on Dol Guldur he took no visible part, but the transfer made at the quayside stands behind much of what Gandalf afterwards accomplished.

In the shape of the legendarium as a whole, Círdan holds an office rather than a throne. His standing among the Elves of Middle-earth rests on three things: his age, his craft, and the fact that the harbours through which the Eldar leave the world are his own work and remain in his hands. He is repeatedly the figure who equips or shelters someone else — a king in exile, a mariner with an errand, an emissary newly landed, a people driven from their homes — and the narratives give him almost no ambitions of his own beyond keeping the way west open. Shipbuilding is the form his power takes, and it is a craft directed toward passage rather than possession: what the Noldor achieved in jewels and towers, the Falathrim achieved in hulls and havens. Even after the death of Gil-galad left him the senior of all Elves remaining east of the Sea, he claimed no wider lordship, and the texts describe no successor to the High Kingship at all.

Two further faculties are attributed to him. The first is foresight, though what the texts describe is closer to discernment than to prophecy: an unusual accuracy in judging what a person was and what a situation would come to, exercised at first meeting and without display. The second is his long keeping of Narya. The account given of that Ring's virtue is modest and specific — it sustained its holder against weariness and rekindled resolve in those grown cold or afraid — and it is characterised as a support for labour rather than an instrument of force. Círdan bore it for the better part of three thousand years without any recorded effect on events attributable to it, and the one act for which it is remembered in his hands is his giving it away.

The oldest of Círdan's attachments is not to a person of his own kindred at all. The Elves who settled the western shores are said to have taken their seamanship from Ossë, the Maia of the waves, who came often to their harbours and taught them the lore and the music of the water, and it was in large part for love of him that they were content to remain by the shore when their kin passed over; Ulmo's favour is described as resting on them in the same period. This gives Círdan's lordship a foundation unlike that of the princes inland: he presided over a people bound to a vocation rather than to a dynasty. No wife, child, brother or house is named for him anywhere in the writings, an omission conspicuous among Elf-lords of comparable standing, and one that leaves his recorded ties entirely lateral — to peoples, to kings not his own, and to strangers arriving by water.

His association with Gil-galad ran from the drowning of Beleriand to the slopes of Orodruin, and in all that span the texts record no friction between them: the king held the sovereignty and Círdan the harbours, and neither is shown encroaching on the other. With Elrond the pattern is similar and outlasted it, the two of them left as the senior figures of Eriador once the kingship had ended, each keeping one of the Three and each pressing counsel that was refused at the decisive moment. Of the three into whose hands the Elven-rings came, Círdan alone parted with his, and did so on a private judgement of another's worth rather than at any council's direction.

Toward Men his dealings are consistently those of a rescuer or supplier rather than an overlord, and toward Sauron his enmity was conducted almost wholly at one remove. He is never shown facing that adversary in person; what he opposed him with were ships, mustered hosts, a sheltered king, and finally a Ring placed in another's keeping. Even at the end he kept a voice in the councils of the West without leaving his post, sending Galdor of the Havens as his representative when Elrond summoned the free peoples to Rivendell. The relationships thus form a single figure: one who is present at the hinges of other people's decisions, and who is remembered for what he handed over.

The fullest information about Círdan's beginnings survives not in the narrative tradition but in a short essay among the latest of Tolkien's writings, printed by Christopher Tolkien in The Peoples of Middle-earth. There the shipwright is given a personal name, Nowë, of Telerin form, which appears nowhere in any narrative text and which the published Silmarillion does not use. The essay makes him a kinsman of Elwë and Olwë and places him on the shore at the time of the great departure: he remained behind out of loyalty while the search for the lost king went on, and afterwards began to build a ship in which to follow. He was prevented from sailing, and the essay attributes this to a warning that came to him in a dream, to the effect that the vessel he was then making would not serve and that his craft had a purpose reserved for a far later age. The same text is the source of the strong statement about his foresight, which it ranks above that of others among his people.

A separate late note, attached to the philological essay on the name of Fëanor's house, supplies the reasoning behind the one physical detail the reader is given. Tolkien there set out that the Eldar did not grow beards at all until the third cycle of their lives, so that a bearded Elf is by definition one of extraordinary age; Círdan is the standing example, and the trait is a deliberate index of antiquity rather than a picturesque flourish. Neither this note nor the account of Nowë was incorporated into the narrative material, and both stand at some distance from the earlier Beleriandic drafts, in which the lord of the two harbours is present but given no ancestry and no history before the wars. The late conception is therefore an addition made after the shape of the published story was long settled, and it sits beside that story rather than within it.