Eärendil

Eärendil was born in Gondolin, the hidden city of King Turgon in the encircled plain of Tumladen, and he was the only child of Tuor son of Huor and of Idril Celebrindal, Turgon's daughter. Through his father he belonged to the House of Hador, the third and greatest of the houses of the Edain, and through his mother to the Noldor of the royal line of Fingolfin, who had crossed the Grinding Ice out of Aman. His parents' marriage was only the second union of Elves and Men, the first being that of Beren and Lúthien a generation earlier, and the Gondolindrim regarded it with a mixture of honour and unease. He passed his childhood within the walls of the hidden city, in the years before its concealment failed.

His name is Quenya in form and contains the element eär, 'sea', which the appended glossary of name-elements gives in that sense; the sea-longing that the name marks was inherited from Tuor, who had dwelt by the shores of Nevrast before he came to Gondolin. Later ages knew him by the by-name of the Mariner, a title earned by his voyages rather than given at his birth. He is also called Half-elven, Peredhel in Sindarin, a designation applied to him because both kindreds met in his blood; the same word attached afterwards to his wife Elwing and to their sons, and it survived in Sindarin usage long after the persons it first described. Tolkien's spelling of the name with a diaeresis over the first e is an orthographic aid rather than an Elvish letter, indicating that the vowel is sounded on its own instead of forming a diphthong with the a that follows.

In the writings published in Tolkien's lifetime, Eärendil appears almost entirely as an inherited memory. He is named there as the father of Elrond and of Elros, and the descent of the Númenórean kings is reckoned from him in the genealogical matter of the Appendices, so that the royal houses of Gondor and Arnor traced their claim back to a man of Gondolin. At Rivendell, Bilbo Baggins recited before the household a long verse composition of his own about the mariner and his ship, an act treated in the narrative as a mild impertinence, given whose father the subject was. The scattered references assume a fuller tale that the reader of that book is never shown, and the outline of that tale belonged, at the time, only to the unpublished matter of the Elder Days.

Eärendil's childhood ended with the sack of Gondolin. He was a boy of seven when Morgoth's army came over the Encircling Mountains on the eve of a summer festival, guided by the betrayal of Maeglin, who had been taken captive in the hills and had bought his life with the city's secret. During the burning Maeglin laid hands on the boy and his mother upon the walls and tried to carry them off, and Tuor fought him and cast him down the rock. Against such a day Idril had long since prepared a hidden passage out beneath the plain, and by it a remnant of the people escaped. Their road afterwards lay over the mountains at the high cleft where the eagles nested, and there an ambush was broken at the cost of Glorfindel, who fell with a Balrog into the chasm.

The survivors came down Sirion to its mouths and settled by the sea, where they were joined by the remnant of Doriath, who had fled the ruin of Menegroth bringing with them Elwing, daughter of Dior, and the Silmaril that Beren had cut from Morgoth's crown. Tuor aged in the manner of Men, and when the longing for the sea grew strong in him he built a ship called Eärrámë and passed west with Idril; nothing certain was recorded of them afterwards, though it was said among the Elves that he was numbered at last with the Firstborn. Eärendil became lord of the people of the Havens and wedded Elwing, and their two sons were born there. He found no rest in that lordship, being troubled by thought of his parents, by the fear that Morgoth would discover the settlement, and by a restlessness for the water that no coastal dwelling could satisfy.

Círdan the Shipwright helped him build Vingilot, and in it he made long voyages with three mariners, Falathar, Erellont and Aerandir. He searched for his father and mother, and beyond that hoped to reach the far West and lay the grief of Elves and Men before the Valar; but the Enchanted Isles and the shadows upon the sea turned him back each time. On the last return a foreboding took him and he made for home in haste. In his absence the surviving sons of Fëanor had learned where the Silmaril was kept, and when their demand was refused they fell upon the Havens, and in that third slaughter of kin the folk of Gondolin and Doriath were killed or scattered. Elwing cast herself into the sea with the jewel rather than yield it, but Ulmo bore her up in the shape of a white bird, and so she came to Vingilot out of the night. Their sons were found alive and kept by Maglor, who came to love them.

The new light was seen from Middle-earth and taken for a sign, and Maedhros understood from it that the jewel had passed beyond his reach. The plea itself had been heard: a host went out of the West under Eönwë, with the Vanyar and those Noldor who had never left Aman, and the long assault upon Angband that is called the War of Wrath followed. When Morgoth loosed winged dragons and the attack faltered, Eärendil came down out of the sky in Vingilot with Thorondor and the great birds, and the fighting in the air lasted a day and a night; he killed Ancalagon the Black, whose fall broke the towers of Thangorodrim. Morgoth was bound and thrust out through the Door of Night, Beleriand was drowned in the tumult of that war, and the sons of Eärendil took opposite choices, Elros passing to the fate of Men and the kingship of Númenor, Elrond remaining with the Firstborn.

Eärendil's function in the legendarium is that of an intercessor rather than a conqueror, and the narrative is careful about the terms on which his one great act succeeded. He carried no authority of his own before the Valar: he came as a petitioner who had broken a standing prohibition, and he expected to answer for it. What made the errand possible was not his strength but his ancestry, since he stood as the single figure in whom the two kindreds were joined and could therefore speak for both at once; the account of the Valar's judgement rests the pardon of the Noldor on precisely that double claim. His crossing of the western sea likewise depended on the Silmaril he bore, which parted the shadows and enchantments that had turned back every earlier attempt, including his own. The mission is thus presented as an errand accomplished by lineage and by the jewel, with the mariner himself as the one willing to bear the cost.

Nearly every relationship recorded of Eärendil works as a junction of lines rather than as a friendship. He was Turgon's grandson and, once the hidden city was gone, the last of that king's line among the people who escaped; his marriage to Elwing, who was descended through Dior from Beren and Lúthien and so from Thingol and Melian, brought the survivors of Doriath into the same household. What had been two separate and mutually suspicious realms of the Eldar in Beleriand therefore met in one family, joined there to the house of Hador and carrying, through Melian, a thread of Maiar descent. The texts treat this concentration as the ground of his errand: his standing before the Powers was genealogical before it was personal, and the pardon he obtained followed from what he was as much as from what he asked.

His closest family ties are defined by absence. Tuor and Idril went west while he was still young, and they remain in the narrative less as remembered persons than as an unfinished errand, since the hope of finding them is named as the first cause of his sailing. Elwing is the only relation of equals: both were children of destroyed kingdoms, and each of their decisive acts depended on the other, for her flight with the jewel made his crossing possible and her judgement settled the kindred to which he was assigned. Beside her stand ties of craft and service — Círdan, who supplied the skill of shipbuilding he lacked, and the three mariners who followed him into forbidden water and were left behind on the shore so that one man alone would answer for the trespass. His enemies, by contrast, were rarely personal: the Fëanorians attacked the Havens under the compulsion of their oath rather than from any quarrel with him, and the strangest relation in the whole account is Maglor, who destroyed his people and then kept his two sons and came to love them.

In the material published during Tolkien's lifetime, what descends from Eärendil is less a memory than a condition. The genealogical matter of the Appendices presents the parting of his two sons as the origin of a standing right within the house rather than a single dispensation, and the right was claimed again at the end of the Third Age, when Elrond's daughter Arwen took the mortal part and so ended the presence of the Half-elven line among the Eldar in Middle-earth. Elrond himself appears there as the surviving half of that division, keeping a house in which the mariner's story was still recited. The relationship that matters most in the later narrative is thus not with any living person but with an inheritance that continued to require choosing.

The figure is the oldest element of the whole mythology: a short poem about the voyage of Éarendel, written in 1914, precedes any of the prose tales, and the posthumously published drafts show that its starting point was a line of Old English verse in which the word éarendel is applied to a brightness before the dawn. The form Eärendel, with e in the second syllable, remained standard through the early material and only gave way to the later spelling in Tolkien's last decades. In The Book of Lost Tales the mariner's own story was never brought to finished narrative at all; it survives as verse, notes and competing outlines, and these differ from one another on nearly every point of sequence. In that earliest scheme his ship is Wingilot, he sails without any jewel bound upon him, and his errand miscarries: he reaches the city of the Elves in the West to find it deserted, the host having already gone forth, so that his coming brings no aid and no pardon. Some of the outlines have him return too late to the havens at Sirion, with Elwing already changed into a seabird and lost, and send him back to the sea in search of her rather than into the sky beside her.

The version familiar from the published Silmarillion took shape in the prose summaries of the late 1920s and 1930s, where the Silmaril is attached to the voyage, the plea is granted, and the mariner is set in the heavens. Even there the family differs: Eärendel has a single son, Elrond, who is taken prisoner in the sack of the havens and treated kindly by his captor, and Elros appears only later, when the Númenórean material was drafted and a first king was needed for the island. These drafts also close with a prophecy, afterwards set aside, in which Eärendel comes down from the sky to take part in the last battle at the end of the world; nothing of it stands in the edited text.