Duinhir

Duinhir bears a name of Sindarin shape, like most of the names carried by the lords of Gondor in the last century of the Third Age. Tolkien nowhere glosses it in the published writings, and the elements that appear to compose it — a first syllable resembling the word for a river that stands in Anduin, and a second resembling the common ending for "lord" familiar from names such as Barahir — are suggestive rather than certain, so no rendering can be given here with confidence. The names of his two sons, Duilin and Derufin, are of the same manner and likewise unexplained; the alliteration of the first with the father's name may be family custom, though the narrative does not say so. That such a man of the southern fiefs should bear an Elvish name at all is itself characteristic: the appendix on languages notes that the Dúnedain and the people who lived among them kept the habit of naming in the Grey-elven tongue long after they had ceased to speak it daily.

He is a Man of Gondor, and his country is the high land of Morthond, the long valley that the narrative also calls by its plain Westron name, the Blackroot Vale. The river that gives the vale its name rises beneath the southern wall of the White Mountains, where the mountain road out of the haunted way comes down into open country, and its dark issue from under the stone accounts for the name well enough. The vale lay among the outlying provinces of Gondor whose lords owed service to the Steward in Minas Tirith, and its uplands were a country of bowmen rather than of horsemen or heavy spears.

Of his person the text records almost nothing beyond his height, which is remarked upon where he is first named, and his fatherhood of Duilin and Derufin. No house, ancestry, age or wife is given him, and he is nowhere made to speak. His standing is to be inferred from function alone: he answers for Morthond and leads the men his land can send, which places him among the fief-lords rather than among the great princes of the realm.

Everything the histories record of Duinhir falls within a few weeks of the year 3019 of the Third Age, in the last days before the War of the Ring came to Gondor's capital. When Denethor sent out the summons to the outlying provinces, the lords of the southern fiefs marched their levies up the coast road and over the fords toward Minas Tirith, and Duinhir answered for the Blackroot Vale. He came in with his two sons and five hundred bowmen of the uplands, one company among a string of them that passed the Gate on the ninth day of March: the men of Lossarnach behind Forlong, the hillmen of Lamedon, the fisher-folk of the coasts, the fair-armed company from Pinnath Gelin, and at the last the knights of Dol Amroth under Imrahil. The whole muster, counted together, fell well short of what the City had looked for, and no further companies were expected behind them.

While its lord was on that eastward road, his own country saw a stranger passage. On the eighth of March the Grey Company came out of the mountain door at the head of the vale, having gone under the White Mountains by the road that men shunned, and rode down through Morthond with a shadow at its back. The dwellers of the vale fled from the road and shut their doors, crying that the King of the Dead had come upon them, and the riders passed through without a word spoken to them and went on to the Stone of Erech by midnight. Nothing in the account suggests that Duinhir knew of it; the two movements out of the same valley, his own eastward and Aragorn's southward, ran past each other within a day.

Of the week that followed his arrival the narrative gives him nothing personally. The darkness came up out of the east on the day after the companies entered the City, and under it the outer wall of the Pelennor was lost, the causeway forts taken, and the retreating garrisons driven back within the Gate. The defence was directed by Denethor and, after him, by Gandalf and Imrahil, and the men of the fiefs were absorbed into it without their captains being named again until the fighting on the field itself. Duinhir's archers, a body of five hundred in a garrison that was counted in a few thousands, were a small but not negligible part of what the City had to hold with.

On the fifteenth of March the Rohirrim came out of the north into the Pelennor, the Gate was broken, and the defenders of the City came down to the field. In the fighting on the southern part of the Pelennor the men of Gondor met the host out of Harad and the great beasts that went with it, against which arrows were of little use except at the eyes. Duinhir's sons were killed there. Duilin and Derufin, pressing close enough to shoot at the mûmakil, were trodden down by them, and both fell on the same field on the same day, having been in the war for less than a week.

The two brothers are counted afterwards among the named dead of the fiefs in the verses made for the mounds raised on the field, which set them beside Forlong of Lossarnach and Hirluin of Pinnath Gelin and speak of them as men who would not come home again to the dark waters under the mountains. Their father is not in that reckoning, and this is the whole of what can be said about his own end: he is not listed among the fallen, and he is not brought forward again. When the captains held their council after the battle and led out the host that marched to the Black Gate on the eighteenth of March, the lords named in the account are Aragorn, Gandalf, Éomer, Imrahil and the sons of Elrond, with the fiefs represented only by their remaining men. Duinhir passes out of the story at the point where his sons die, without a death, a return, or a successor being recorded for Morthond, and the later chronicles of the Fourth Age do not take his name up again.

Within the design of the story Duinhir fills a defined and narrow place: he is one of the provincial lords through whom the remaining reach of Gondor is shown at the moment it is called upon. The realm of the Stewards held its outlying lands by an obligation of service, and when that obligation was invoked the answer took the form of contingents brought up in person by the men who held the country they came from. Duinhir's authority is of exactly this kind, territorial and military, exercised over one valley and the people in it, and unattached to any office in the government of the realm. Among the lords who came in he belongs to the second order rather than the first: Imrahil of Dol Amroth is a prince of an old house and is afterwards treated by the account as a captain of the whole defence, whereas Duinhir, like Forlong and Hirluin and Angbor of Lamedon, is a man whose recorded part is discharged when his people are delivered where they were asked for.

He has no power of any other sort. Nothing in the text gives him descent among the Faithful, an heirloom, a title beyond his lordship, foresight, or length of days; his stature is the single quality the narrative troubles to note, and it carries no weight in what follows. Such power as he has is therefore delegated and collective, consisting in the strength his upland country can raise and in his being able to bring it, unbroken and in time, across a hundred leagues of road to a city under threat. That power was also brief in his hands. Once the companies were inside the walls the disposition of them belonged to the Steward, and afterwards to those who took the direction of the defence out of his failing grip; from that point Duinhir commands nothing that the account chooses to record.

The limits of what such a contingent could do are visible in the one thing it is shown attempting. Bowmen bred in mountain country were of real use on a wall and in a formed line, but the fighting that came upon the southern part of the field set them against armoured enemies out of the far south and against the great beasts driven with them, and there the bow reached the edge of what it could accomplish; the attempt made in that quarter is the last act the narrative assigns to Duinhir's house. A second limit is one of scale, and it applies to him as to every other lord who answered: no fief could empty itself, each having its own borders and coasts to keep, so that the strength gathered before the Gate was a fraction of what the lands south and west of the mountains contained. Duinhir is not measured by deeds in this story, but by what he brought and what it cost him; his function is to give the war the dimension of provinces, and the account asks nothing further of him.

The one bond the text draws with any fullness is fatherhood, and it is drawn twice over. Duinhir does not appear as an individual at all but as the head of a household in arms: he is introduced with his sons at his side, and the three are counted as one item in the muster. No wife, mother, brother or kinsman is named for any of them, and no house or lineage stands behind them, so the family is exactly as wide as the three men who ride in it. It is worth setting beside the neighbouring case of Dervorin, who came up to the City in his father's stead while the older man stayed behind; the same institution is visible from its other end, one house keeping its lord at home and sending its heir, the other bringing its whole line into the field together. What that choice cost is not commented on, only recorded.

Horizontally he exists in a list rather than in a relationship. He is named among Forlong, Dervorin, Golasgil, Angbor, Hirluin and Imrahil, and that company is the whole of his society in the story: he speaks to none of them, is answered by none, and is given neither a friend nor a rival among them. Their shared bond is not acquaintance but a common obligation to the Steward, and even that is left unenacted, for no meeting between Duinhir and Denethor is shown, in contrast with Imrahil, who sits in the councils and is spoken to by name. What binds Duinhir to Gondor is service performed, not any personal tie the narrative cares to dramatise.

He has no adversary in the proper sense. The enemy that ruins his house is anonymous — a host out of the far south and the beasts driven with it — and it neither knows nor is known by him, so the loss that defines him arrives without a face attached. Downward, toward his own people, the picture is similarly reticent: the five hundred bowmen follow him and are not individuated, and the dwellers of his valley are shown in flight rather than in arms when Aragorn's company passed through, while the force that afterwards gathered behind Aragorn is named from other lands. Duinhir's relations, taken together, run in one direction only — he gives men and sons upward to a realm that never speaks back to him.