Elwing

The name Elwing belongs to the Sindarin tongue of Beleriand and is glossed as "star-spray." Its first element is the widespread stem for "star," the same that stands at the head of her sons' names and in many another name of the Grey-elves; its second is a rarer word for foam or spray, recorded in only one other place among the great names of the First Age, the vessel that Eärendil afterwards built. The tradition preserved with the name explains it by the circumstances of her birth: she came into the world on a night of stars, and their light was caught in the flying water of the falls beside her father's house, so that the two images were joined in the word given to her. In pronunciation every letter is sounded, and the w keeps its English value rather than the German one, so that the name runs as three plain syllables without a silent letter.

Her descent gathers into one line the three kindreds that the histories of the Elder Days otherwise keep apart. Her father was Dior, called Thingol's Heir, the son of Beren of the House of Bëor and of Lúthien; her mother was Nimloth, a kinswoman of Celeborn. Through Lúthien she stood in the fourth generation from Thingol, king of the Sindar, and from Melian, who was of the Maiar; through Beren she carried the blood of mortal Men. She was not the only child of that house: two brothers, Eluréd and Elurín, were born before her, and both names keep the Sindarin form of their great-grandfather's name.

By speech, rearing and reckoning she belonged to the Elves of Doriath, and it was to that realm that her father brought his household when he took up the kingship after Thingol. In the later reckoning of the Half-elven she is counted with her father as one of the few in whom Elvish and mortal lines were mingled, though the tales give her no separate title of her own beyond her parentage. The one possession that came to her by inheritance rather than by deed was the jewel that Beren and Lúthien had won, which passed from Lúthien to Dior and from Dior to his daughter, and which was reckoned hers from the time she was old enough to bear it.

Her childhood ended in the second ruin of her father's realm. Doriath had already been broken once, when Thingol was killed in his own halls by the Dwarves of Nogrod and Menegroth was stripped of its treasure; Dior came out of Ossiriand with his household to take up the sceptre and gather what was left of the Grey-elves. One night in autumn messengers set a casket before him containing the dwarf-wrought necklace with the Silmaril in it, and by that token he understood that Beren and Lúthien had died at last. Word of the jewel spread through Beleriand, and the sons of Fëanor, whose oath had lain quiet for many years, sent to Dior and claimed it; he sent back no answer at all. In the winter that followed they came on Doriath unlooked for, and in the fighting within Menegroth Dior and Nimloth were killed, and with them Celegorm, Curufin and Caranthir.

In that assault her two brothers were seized by servants of Celegorm and left in the forest to die of hunger, and although Maedhros repented of the deed and searched for them, nothing certain was ever learned of their end. Elwing was carried out of the sacked halls by some of the people of Doriath, still a child, and the Silmaril went with her. The fugitives made their way south to the mouths of Sirion, where the river spread into marshland before reaching the sea, and settled there without walls or fortress. Not many years later the survivors of Gondolin came down the same road under Tuor and Idril, bringing with them their son Eärendil, and the two homeless peoples became one folk; Círdan and the remnant of the Falas joined them, and the haven grew into a shipbuilding town whose strength lay wholly in the sea.

When Tuor and Idril had passed away into the West, Eärendil became lord of the people of Sirion, and he and Elwing were wedded there; their sons Elrond and Elros were born at the Havens. The Silmaril stayed in her keeping, and while it remained among them the land was healed and blessed for a time, and the ships that went out from Sirion were not molested. Eärendil, however, was not content to remain: he built the ship Vingilot and sailed again and again into the western waters, partly to seek his parents and partly in hope of finding the road to Valinor, so that he might ask the Valar for pardon and for help against Morgoth. He did not find that road in those years, and Elwing stayed behind at the Havens with their children while he was at sea.

Report of where the jewel now lay came in time to Maedhros, and for a while he held his hand and let the matter rest. But the oath would not sleep for long, and at last the surviving brothers sent to the Havens words that were courteous in form and hard in substance, demanding that the Silmaril be given up. Elwing refused, the more firmly because Eärendil was away and the jewel had brought healing to her people. The sons of Fëanor then attacked the settlement, in the last and worst of the kinslayings among the Eldar: some of the people of Sirion fought their own kindred, some stood aside, and a few turned against the lords they had followed. Elros and Elrond were taken in the sack, and Maglor afterwards spared them and kept them, and in time there was affection between the captor and the boys. Elwing, seeing the town overrun, threw herself from the cliff into the sea with the jewel.

In the shape of the histories Elwing's part is custodial rather than active. She holds no office at the Havens — the lordship there was Eärendil's — and no host, embassy or work of craft stands to her account. What the sources give her instead is a thing to keep and a decision about it: her refusal to surrender the jewel when it was demanded of her, and her choice to take it into the water rather than let it be seized. Both are acts of denial, and both are decisive: the first brings on the attack, the second carries the Silmaril to the one ship that could bear it west.

Beyond this her weight in the legendarium is genealogical. She and Eärendil are the point at which the Elvish and mortal lines converge and then part again in their sons, so that both the kings of Númenor and the house of Rivendell reckon back through her, and the choice granted to the Half-elven governs much of the later history of the two kindreds. In the works published in Tolkien's lifetime she survives chiefly by reference: the song sung at Rivendell names her as the one who came to Eärendil bearing the jewel, and the genealogies of the appendices set her as the mother of Elrond and Elros. The light of the star, and the light kept in the glass that Galadriel gave to Frodo, descend from the stone she carried.

The match made at Sirion was, in the reckoning of the sources, a joining of two remnants rather than of two persons only: the exiles who had carried her out of Doriath and the exiles who had come down from Gondolin behind Eärendil found in the marriage of their two heirs a single house to belong to. Of the marriage itself little is set down beyond its rhythm. Eärendil is described as drawn outward by his errand and drawn back again by thought of his wife, and the years of their life together are measured in departures; she is the fixed point of that account, holding the settlement and the disputed jewel while he was on the water. His acceptance of the Elvish fate against his own leaning is the one recorded instance in which the balance tilted the other way.

Her enmity with the sons of Fëanor is never presented as personal. The claim laid upon her came from an oath sworn before her grandparents were born, and the brothers who pressed it are shown acting under compulsion rather than malice: Maedhros had already repented of the treatment of her brothers and searched for them, and after the sack of the Havens it was Maglor who kept her captured sons alive and grew fond of them. The one power who intervenes on her behalf is Ulmo, the same Vala whose care had followed her husband's father; nothing in the texts suggests she asked for it. Her sons pass out of her keeping at the Havens, and no later meeting between them is recorded.

In the works Tolkien published himself, these bonds survive as claims of descent. When Elrond speaks of his parentage before the Council in Rivendell, he names his mother not by anything she did but by her line, setting her as Dior's daughter and so tracing himself back to Doriath; the genealogical tables of the appendices do the same work for the kings of Númenor and their heirs in exile. The relationship that carries most weight in the later history is thus the one she never chose, but inherited and passed on.

Elwing entered the mythology early, but the writings in which she figures are unusually broken. In the Lost Tales the only finished text that concerns her is the story of the dwarf-necklace, which ends with the ruin of her father's house; there she is given a brother, Auredhir, likened to Beren and dead before the sack, who has no counterpart under that name in the later tradition. The tale of Eärendel that would have carried her on to the sea-mouths, the marriage and the leap was never written at all, and survives only as notes and competing synopses, some of them little more than strings of headings, so that no continuous account of her later part can be assembled from them. In this early phase the thing she saves from the sack is the dwarf-made necklace itself rather than the jewel considered apart from its setting.

The later drafts brought her by stages toward the published form. The reading of her name as star-spray belongs to the etymological word-list of the later 1930s, where both of its elements are entered under their stems. In the summary versions of the mythology that precede the Silmarillion she and Eärendel have one son only, Elrond; Elros comes in with the Númenórean material, and the double choice of the Half-elven, which the published text treats as settled, is a development of that same period rather than a feature of the original story. The late annals of the First Age supply a chronology the published account omits, placing the birth of the twins and the assault on the Havens within the closing years of the age. Latest of all is an unfinished essay on the element ros, in which Tolkien attempted to derive the names of her sons from a mortal word for foam and to refer them to their mother; he did not carry the argument through, and nothing of it stands in the finished narrative.