Fëanor

Fëanor belonged to the Noldor, the second of the three kindreds of the Eldar to pass out of the East and come at last to Aman, and a people whose bent was towards knowledge, towards the working of metal and stone, and above all towards the making and cutting of gems. He was born among them in Tirion upon the green hill of Túna in the Years of the Trees, and the whole of his youth was passed in that city under the mingled light of Telperion and Laurelin, in the long peace before Melkor was loosed from his bonds. The accounts describe his person with unusual particularity: tall, dark-haired, with eyes of a piercing brightness, and a bearing that commanded rather than persuaded. What they insist upon most is temper. He was swift in thought and swifter in speech, and the fire attributed to him is presented not as a figure of speech but as the governing quality of his nature, at once the source of his skill and the flaw in it.

By the custom of the Noldor he bore two names, one given by his father and one by his mother. The father-name was Curufinwë, formed from the element curu, 'skill', joined to the name of Finwë himself, and it declared at his begetting what his hands were expected to become; he afterwards passed it on to the fifth of his sons, the one whose craft came nearest to his own. The mother-name was Fëanáro, given him by Míriel Serindë, and it is glossed as spirit of fire; its elements are fëa, 'spirit', and the root nár, 'flame', which recurs in other names of the Eldar. Mother-names among that people were held to carry insight into what the child would prove to be, and this one was remembered as having been justified. It is by the mother-name, in its later and shortened shape, that he is called throughout the histories of the Noldor, the father-name surviving chiefly in genealogy and in his son.

His is one of the very few names out of the Elder Days to appear in the published account of the Third Age, where it stands attached to the letters as that of Fëanor of the Noldor. The spelling preserved there is itself instructive: the diaeresis is set over the e to show that the vowel is sounded separately and not swallowed into the consonant before it, so that the name has three syllables and not two. The same convention governs how it should be stressed, the accent falling on the first syllable of the three.

Fëanor's recorded life falls almost entirely within the Years of the Trees, and the earlier part of it is a chronicle of workmanship rather than of events. Growing to full stature in Tirion while his father Finwë still ruled the Noldor there, he became the most skilled of that people in hand and mind alike, and his restless labour produced work that outlasted him by ages. He devised the letters that bear his name, refining and largely replacing the older system attributed to Rúmil, and these spread through Middle-earth and were still in use at the end of the Third Age. To this period the tradition also assigns the making of the palantíri, the seeing-stones later borne east by Elendil's people. In these years he wedded Nerdanel, daughter of the smith Mahtan, and seven sons were born to them; her counsel restrained him for a time, but the two grew estranged as his temper hardened.

His greatest labour was the making of the three jewels in which he enclosed the mingled light of Telperion and Laurelin; Varda hallowed them so that no unclean flesh could touch them unburned, and Mandos foretold that the fate of Arda was bound up in them. Melkor, released from his long captivity and feigning reform, coveted them, and worked instead upon the Noldor with rumours: that the Valar had brought the Elves to Aman to keep them from inheriting Middle-earth, and that Fingolfin and his brother schemed against Fëanor's inheritance. The lies took hold. The Noldor began to forge weapons in secret, and at last Fëanor drew a sword upon Fingolfin on the stairs of Finwë's house. For that act the Valar summoned him to judgement and banished him from Tirion for twelve years; he withdrew north to the stronghold of Formenos, and Finwë went with him, so that the kingship in Tirion passed for a time to Fingolfin. Melkor came to Formenos seeking alliance, and Fëanor, seeing his hunger for the jewels, shut the doors against him.

The twelve years had not run out when Manwë called a festival upon Taniquetil, and Fëanor came at his bidding, though without the jewels, which remained locked at Formenos; there he and Fingolfin spoke words of reconciliation. While the feast was held, Melkor and Ungoliant destroyed the Two Trees, and Valinor fell into darkness. In the Ring of Doom Yavanna asked Fëanor to break the jewels open, since their light alone could rekindle what had been lost; he refused, saying such a breaking would be his own death. Before his answer could be pressed, riders brought word that Formenos had been stormed, that Finwë had been slain before its doors, and that the jewels and the other treasures of the house were gone. Fëanor cursed the intruder and gave him the name Morgoth, by which he was thereafter known, and fled the assembly into the dark.

Returning unbidden to Tirion, he addressed the Noldor by torchlight and urged them to abandon Aman, pursue the thief into Middle-earth, and rule there as free lords. With his seven sons — Maedhros, Maglor, Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin, Amrod and Amras — he swore an oath binding them to pursue with hatred anyone, of any kindred, who should withhold a Silmaril from them. Most of the Noldor were persuaded, though Fingolfin's host followed chiefly out of loyalty to their own kin rather than to Fëanor. When the Teleri of Alqualondë refused to lend their ships, Fëanor's people took them by force, and Elves slew Elves for the first time. On the northern shore a herald of the Valar spoke the Doom of Mandos over the marchers, foretelling treachery among them and the failure of all their oaths; some turned back, but Fëanor pressed on.

In the structure of the legendarium Fëanor functions less as a ruler than as a maker, and the texts describe his gifts consistently as skill of hand and mind rather than as any authority over the substance of the world. He was a loremaster as much as a smith, and much of what he knew he had from Aulë, whom he loved and under whom he studied. To him is credited the discovery of how to make gems brighter and harder than any found in the earth, and lesser works of the same art recur in later narratives: the crystal lamps of his devising, which gave light steadily in wind and water, were still carried by travellers in Turgon's day. His gift of speech belonged to the same order of ability. It could move a whole people at once, but it produced no institution, no settled office, and no following that held together after him.

One of his works passed wholly out of his control and prospered by doing so. The alphabet he devised was taken up by peoples he never met and fitted to languages he never spoke, arranged into modes that gave his letters values he had not assigned them; Sindarin, the Common Speech and even the tongue of Mordor were written with it. The account preserved in the Appendices treats the system as an inheritance to be adapted rather than a fixed scheme, and keeps his name attached to it chiefly as an attribution of origin. That his most durable achievement should be a tool used freely by others is a fair measure of what his skill could secure and what it could not.

The decisive relationships of Fëanor's life were formed inside his father's house. He was the only child of Finwë and Míriel, and Míriel's spirit forsook her body soon after his birth and would not return to it, so that his mother was to him a loss rather than a presence. Finwë's second marriage, to Indis of the Vanyar, gave him two half-brothers, Fingolfin and Finarfin, and he never granted them kinship in more than name; the love between father and son stayed strong, but it was exclusive, and he begrudged the household that had grown up around it. The bond ran both ways, for Finwë held him dearest of his sons and would not be parted from him in disgrace. It is this fault line, present long before Melkor took an interest in it, that made the later slanders so easy to plant.

His marriage bound him to a family of his own trade. Nerdanel was the daughter of Mahtan, a smith who had been among Aulë's pupils, and it was by that connection that Fëanor came to the Vala whose teaching he valued above all other. She was of steadier temper than her husband, worked in stone and clay where he worked in metal and gem, and was said to be able to hold him in check by patience rather than by argument. Of their seven sons the skill descended unevenly, and Curufin came nearest to his father in craft. Through that son the line of making continued into the Second Age: Celebrimbor, who repudiated his father's dealings at Nargothrond, became the greatest of the smiths of Eregion. The art outlasted the house, but only where it was carried by those who had disowned its politics.

Outside his kindred he kept few settled friendships. Morgoth is the sharpest case: no one in Aman named him more exactly or shut a door against him more plainly, and no one was more thoroughly turned to his purposes. With Olwë of Alqualondë the breach cut through an old alliance, for Finwë and Olwë had led their peoples west together, and Finarfin's marriage to Olwë's daughter had made the two houses one by blood — which is part of why the taking of the ships was never forgiven. Smaller refusals tell as much as the great quarrels: Galadriel, his half-brother's daughter, denied him three times a strand of her hair that he had asked leave to study, and there was no goodwill between them thereafter. He could carry a whole people with him in a night, and hold the affection of very few for long.

The late writings turned instead to matters the early ones had left unexamined. In the material gathered in Morgoth's Ring the death of Míriel becomes a question of law and doctrine, with the Valar debating at length whether Finwë might take a second wife while his first endured in Mandos; the ruling eventually given, and the conditions it laid on both of them, supplies a formal cause for the division in the house that the narrative had previously only asserted. A late essay in The Peoples of Middle-earth attaches a linguistic quarrel to the same source: the Noldor had shifted an older þ to s, and Fëanor set himself against the change, taking it as an injury that his mother's name Þerindë should be altered, so that a point of pronunciation hardened into a mark of faction. The same essay carries a note in which one of the twin sons, asleep aboard the fleet, is consumed at Losgar with the ships — a variant that never reached the published text, though it would have made the burning a far heavier act than the one recorded.