Elros

Elros was born in the last century of the First Age to Eärendil the Mariner and Elwing, in the settlement at the Mouths of Sirion where the survivors of Doriath and Gondolin had gathered. Through his father he descended from Tuor of the House of Hador and from Idril, daughter of Turgon of Gondolin; through his mother from Dior, and so from Beren and Lúthien, whose union had already joined the kindreds of Men and Elves and, in Lúthien herself, the line of the Maia Melian. Elros and his twin brother Elrond therefore carried in themselves nearly every strand of the Elder Days: Edain, Eldar, and a share of the deathless race of the Ainur. Because no precedent covered such a lineage, the Valar afterwards permitted the two brothers to determine for themselves to which kindred they would belong, a judgement without parallel in the histories.

The name Elros belongs to Sindarin and is usually rendered as star-foam or the glitter of spray, joining the element for star with that for foam or spindrift — a compound fitting for a child of the mariner who bore the Silmaril into the sky. It stands in deliberate parallel to the name of his brother, both built upon the same first element, so that the pair were marked as kin by their names alone. Tolkien's guidance on pronunciation in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings applies here as elsewhere: the vowel is the short e of English bet, and the stress falls upon the first syllable. The designation Peredhil, the Half-elven, was applied to both brothers and to their father before them, and functions less as a personal name than as a description of a condition that the histories treat as unique to their house.

In the annals of the Second Age Elros appears under a second name, Tar-Minyatur, taken in the high tongue Quenya when he assumed rule; it identifies him plainly as the first of a line, and set the pattern by which his successors bore Quenya names in the style Tar-. The genealogical account preserved among the Unfinished Tales is titled for him and traces his descendants through the whole span of the island realm, so that the phrase the Line of Elros became a standing term for the royal house rather than merely a reference to the man. He is thus known in the texts under three registers at once — a Sindarin birth-name, a Quenya regnal name, and the shared epithet of his kindred.

The first event of Elros's life that the histories record in any detail is the assault upon the havens at the Mouths of Sirion, when the sons of Fëanor came to demand the Silmaril that Elwing held. In the ruin of that attack the twins were taken, and the account preserved in the published Silmarillion states that Maedhros afterwards took pity upon them and cared for them, so that a friendship of a strange kind grew between captors and captives. Their mother did not die in the sack: she cast herself into the sea with the jewel and was borne up in the shape of a bird to her husband's ship. Elros therefore passed the remainder of the First Age separated from both parents, in the keeping of the very house whose oath had destroyed his mother's kin at Doriath a generation earlier.

When the host of the West came out of Aman and Morgoth was overthrown at the end of the Great Battle, the Valar sent Eönwë as their herald to summon those who remained in Beleriand. It was then that judgement was passed upon the Half-elven. Because their father had pleaded before the Powers on behalf of both kindreds, the brothers were not compelled to a single lot but were each given leave to choose, and their choices diverged: Elrond remained with the Firstborn, while Elros elected to be numbered among Men and to accept the mortality that belongs to them. The Silmarillion is explicit that this was not a diminishment but a grant, and that a long span of years was given to Elros beyond the measure of ordinary Men in recompense.

The reward of the Edain who had fought against Morgoth was a land raised out of the sea within sight of the Undying Realm, and the guidance of the Valar drew them westward to it. Elros went at their head, and the Akallabêth names him as the lord who led the faithful houses of Men over the water to Elenna and there became their first king. The reckoning of the Second Age is dated from that settlement: Elros took the sceptre in the thirty-second year of the age, and reigned under the regnal name Tar-Minyatur. The dating and the succession of the kings are set out most fully in the genealogical matter of the Unfinished Tales, which serves as the chronological spine for the whole island realm.

The role the histories assign to Elros is an office rather than an art. He is the first holder of a kingship that had no existence before him: the Edain who had stood against Morgoth were granted a land and a lordship, and Elros held the headship of them by his descent from Eärendil, in whom their houses and the Eldar were joined. With the land came gifts — years far beyond the measure of other Men, wisdom, and a greater capacity in craft and seamanship than their kindred east of the sea retained. The Silmarillion is careful about the boundary of these grants. The Valar could lengthen the lives of Men and enrich them, but they had no authority to revoke the doom appointed to that kind by Ilúvatar, and said so plainly to the Númenóreans in later generations. Whatever Elros received was an extension of mortal life, never an alteration of its nature.

The constraints upon his rule were laid down with the realm itself. Elenna was set within sight of the shores of the Blessed Realm, so that its eastern kindred could look west and see what they might not reach, but the Valar forbade the Númenóreans to sail beyond sight of their own coasts or to seek landfall in the deathless lands. Elros therefore governed a people whose principal advantage — their mastery of the sea — was bounded by a prohibition they had no means of testing without transgression. Nor did his authority extend across the water in his lifetime: the sources place the first Númenórean ships off the coasts of Middle-earth generations after his death, so the reign of the first king was confined to the island and its own waters. His power was granted, delimited, and revocable, and the histories treat it as held on terms rather than possessed outright.

His bonds with his parents are marked by absence. Eärendil had departed on the errand from which he did not return before the brothers were grown, and Elwing passed out of their reach at the sack of the Havens; neither is recorded as having any dealing with Elros afterwards, though it was his father's plea that secured the choice offered to them. Set against this stands the strangest of his attachments, that to Maedhros, who had come as an enemy and became a guardian. The published Silmarillion is unusually plain that affection arose there, and the episode complicates any simple reading of the sons of Fëanor at the end of their oath. Elros is thus a figure whose formative company consisted of the destroyer of his mother's people.

Elros entered the mythology comparatively late. The earliest connected accounts of the Elder Days, the Sketch of the Mythology and the Quenta Noldorinwa written in the earlier 1930s, give Eärendel and Elwing a single child, Elrond, and know nothing of a twin; there it is Maedhros who takes pity on the boy after the sack of the Havens, where the later Annals tradition transfers that act to Maglor. Elros emerges with the Númenórean material of the later 1930s, when the tale of the drowned island and of Elendil's descent required a mortal ancestor standing at the head of the king-list, and the doubling of the Half-elven supplied one. The choice of fates, present in outline before that, was accordingly recast: what had been the ambiguous standing of one figure became two brothers whose divergent decisions carried the kindreds apart, and the mortal half of the legendarium acquired a founder it had previously lacked.

The other substantial draft matter touching Elros is linguistic and belongs to Tolkien's last years. In a short essay printed among the late writings in The Peoples of Middle-earth under the title The Problem of Ros, he questioned whether the second element of the name could be Sindarin at all, and worked toward an explanation deriving it instead from the speech of the House of Bëor, with a sense of foam or spray, so that the name of the first king of Númenor would have been in part a mannish word. Christopher Tolkien records that the attempt was left unfinished and set aside, and it has no standing beside the etymology given in the published texts. The same volume preserves late genealogical and chronological writing bearing on the Second Age, in which particulars of the line descending from Elros were still under adjustment; none of it displaced the reckoning already fixed in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings.