Elurín

Elurín belonged to the last generation of the ruling house of Doriath. He was a son of Dior, called Eluchíl because he stood as heir to Elu Thingol, and of Nimloth, an Elven-woman of Doriath who was kin to Celeborn of Menegroth. Through his father he inherited a descent unlike any other in Beleriand: Dior was the child of Beren of the House of Bëor and of Lúthien, daughter of Thingol and of Melian the Maia, so that the strains of Men, of the Eldar and of the Ainur met in Elurín and in his brother. That brother was Eluréd, with whom he is always named; of the two boys Elurín is reckoned the younger. A sister, Elwing, completed the household.

The name is Sindarin and transparent in its first element: Elu is the Sindarin form borne by Thingol himself, and both brothers carry it at the head of their names. Elurín is interpreted as holding Elu in memory, while Eluréd names the heirship of Elu; taken together the two names form a matched pair, one commemorating the old king and the other declaring the line's claim. The same habit of naming had already shaped their father, whose epessë Eluchíl announced his standing as Thingol's successor rather than describing anything of his person. In Elurín's case the commemorative sense is the whole of what is recorded about him under his name; no by-name, no Quenya equivalent and no later style are preserved.

The setting of his origin was twofold. Dior and Nimloth kept their house at Lanthir Lamath in Ossiriand, in the land east of Gelion where Beren and Lúthien passed their second life, and it was there that Elwing was born beneath the waterfall from which she was named; afterwards Dior took his wife and children north to Menegroth to take up the lordship of Doriath. Elurín thus grew up between a green country of the Laiquendi and the ancient halls beneath Neldoreth. Beyond his parentage, his people and his name, the tradition preserves nothing of his character or of any deed proper to him alone, and he is never spoken of apart from his brother.

The published narrative attaches no year-count to any event in which Elurín appears; his history can be placed only in relation to the deaths around it, and it is short. It begins in the aftermath of a catastrophe he had no part in. Thingol had been killed in Menegroth by the Dwarves of Nogrod in the quarrel over the Nauglamír, Melian had forsaken Middle-earth in her grief, and the Girdle that had held Doriath apart from the war was gone; the halls had been plundered and the kingdom scattered. Into that emptiness came Dior with his household, and Elurín, a small child, entered the ancient seat of his mother's kin as the son of its new lord. For a while Doriath was gathered again and Menegroth had a second and briefer flowering, though it stood now open to the north and to whatever should come.

The turning point of the household came at night in autumn, when messengers out of Ossiriand brought Dior a casket. In it lay the Nauglamír with the Silmaril set in it, and by that token Dior understood that Beren and Lúthien had gone at last out of the world. From that time he wore the necklace, and the beauty of Elves, Men and Maiar was said to be gathered together in him as he did so. For Elurín this meant that his childhood was spent in a house that held the most contested object in Beleriand, and every event that follows in his story proceeds from it rather than from anything he or his brother did.

Word of the jewel's reappearance reached the sons of Fëanor, who were bound by the oath sworn in Tirion, and they sent to Dior to claim it. He returned them no answer at all. Celegorm then urged his brothers to arms, and they came south unheralded in the depth of winter and fell upon Menegroth. So was fought the second slaying of Elves by Elves, and it cost both houses heavily: Celegorm, Curufin and Caranthir were killed, Celegorm by Dior's own hand, while Dior himself and Nimloth were slain in the halls. Elurín and Eluréd, still boys, survived the battle in which their parents died.

What happened next is the one event recorded of Elurín himself, and it was done to him. Servants of the dead Celegorm laid hands on the two brothers, carried them away from Menegroth and abandoned them in the forest to starve. The narrative marks the act as a cruelty beyond even the sack, and it is not attributed to any command of the surviving sons of Fëanor. Nothing distinguishes the younger brother from the elder in the telling; they are taken together, left together, and thereafter spoken of only as a pair. From that point the tradition loses them.

Maedhros, when he learned of the deed, repented of it and searched the woods of Doriath for the boys over a long time, but he found no trace of either. This is the last action of the story that concerns Elurín, and it is a failure: no meeting, no rescue and no report of a death. The account states plainly that no tale preserves what became of the two, so that Elurín has, strictly, no recorded end at all but a disappearance into the winter forest. A generation later the same house of Fëanor took two other children of this lineage, Elrond and Elros, at the havens of Sirion, and Maglor took pity on them and kept them; the contrast is drawn in the narrative itself, and it measures what was not done in Doriath.

The consequences of the sack ran on without him. Elwing was carried out of Menegroth by those of the people who escaped, and with her went the Nauglamír and the Silmaril to the mouths of Sirion, where the remnant of Doriath joined the survivors of Gondolin; through her alone the line of Thingol, Lúthien and Beren continued into the Second Age and beyond. Doriath itself was never restored, and Menegroth was left desolate. Elurín's whole part in the history of Beleriand therefore lies between two events he did not cause: the arrival of a jewel at his father's house, and the raid that answered it. He is remembered as one of the losses of that night, and as half of a name that survived when its bearer did not.

Elurín's place in the legendarium is structural rather than active. He stands in the succession of Doriath as an expectancy and never as an office: had the kingdom endured he and Eluréd would have followed their father in a lordship reaching back to Elwë, but no rule, regency or title is ever given to either of them, and the narrative records no act of governance, counsel or war on their part. With their removal the male line of Thingol's house comes to an end, and Doriath ceases in the tale to be a ruling house at all; what continued of the lineage continued sideways, through their sister, and not through the sons in whom the claim had been vested. The published account therefore uses Elurín less as an agent than as a hinge, the point at which one royal line closes.

No power of any kind is attributed to him. The extraordinary capacities in his ancestry are described in detail elsewhere in the same work — the enchantment that held the Girdle about Neldoreth, and the singing by which Lúthien overthrew a fortress and stood before the Enemy in his own halls — and not one of them is said to have passed to the sons of Dior. Elurín bears no weapon, works no craft and is credited with no speech; not a single word is placed in his mouth, and every action in which he figures is one performed upon him. His only recorded capability is that he was young enough to be taken and not old enough to resist.

One limit deserves stating plainly, because it is often filled in by inference. The judgement that allowed the Half-elven to choose to which kindred they should belong is pronounced upon Eärendil, Elwing and their sons, a generation after Doriath fell; it is not extended backwards in the texts to Dior's children. Whether Elurín was reckoned mortal or of the Elven kind, and what consequence his end therefore carried, is nowhere resolved. Since he also has no recorded death, only a disappearance, the tradition leaves both his nature and his fate open, and any statement about either is reconstruction rather than report.

The one bond the texts actually depict is the one between the two brothers, and it is depicted by grammar rather than by scene. Elurín is never given a sentence to himself: he is named in a pair, taken in a pair, sought in a pair, and mourned in a pair, so that the relationship precedes and absorbs the person. Even the distinction of age, which would ordinarily separate two siblings, does no work in the narrative; it establishes an order between them and nothing else, since neither is credited with a word, a choice or a reaction that the other does not equally share. What the pairing tells us is less about affection than about how the tradition remembers: where a figure has no recorded acts, a matched name and a matched fate are all that hold him in the record at all.

His vertical relations are equally one-sided. He is defined by descent from people the narrative never shows him with: no exchange between him and his father or mother is reported, and the texts place no meeting between him and the grandparents in the east whose second life ended without any word passing to their grandsons. The kinsman whose name he carries had already been killed before the household came north, so the commemoration built into his naming attaches to a man he cannot have known. Against these silent bonds stands his sister, the only member of the house whose relation to him outlasts the sack — and even there the connection is asymmetrical, since she is remembered for what she carried away and he for what was done to him.

With the house of Fëanor he has no relationship in any personal sense, and that is the point of it. Their claim was pressed against his father and against a jewel; the boys were incidental to a quarrel neither had entered, and the men who disposed of them acted out of a dead lord's household rather than out of any grievance against children. The remorse that follows is likewise directed at nobody who can receive it: a search through empty woods is a relation to an absence. Elurín's connections thus run entirely inward to his family and outward only as the object of others' oaths, which is why the tradition can preserve his kin, his name and his loss while preserving nothing of him.

The pair of brothers acquired their present names late. In the earliest phase of the mythology the destruction of Dior's house is told without them: the tale of the Nauglafring brings the necklace to Dior, sets the sons of Fëanor against him and carries the story onward through his daughter alone, so that the motif of two abandoned boys has no place in it. In the Quenta of the early nineteen-thirties the sons appear, but bearing the names Elboron and Elbereth, formed on elements quite unlike those they would later carry. A further stage is preserved in the Later Annals of Beleriand, where they are Eldún and Elrún, a matched pair in sound but still without any reference to Thingol in their meaning. Only in the late annalistic material do the forms Eluréd and Elurín emerge, both built on Elu, and glossed there as the heirship and the remembrance of the old king; the commemorative sense familiar from the published book is thus the last layer rather than the original one.

The textual position behind these variants matters for how much weight the episode can bear. Tolkien never brought the ruin of Doriath to a finished late narrative; the account printed in the published Silmarillion was assembled editorially from older and unrevised strata, and Christopher Tolkien set out that difficulty when he came to the material in the later volumes. What survives of the brothers' end is accordingly compressed and annalistic rather than fully told: the abandonment in the forest and Maedhros's fruitless search stand as brief entries whose wording shifted between drafts, and the statement that no tale records their fate functions in the manuscripts partly as an admission that none was ever written. The successive renamings point the same way. A figure whose name is replaced twice, and whose meaning is supplied only at the last stage, was still being defined when the work on Beleriand ceased.