Fingon

Fingon belonged to the Noldor, the second of the three kindreds of the Eldar, and stood in the direct line of their princes. He was the eldest child of Fingolfin, who was in turn the second son of Finwë, the first lord of the Noldor in Aman, by his second wife Indis of the Vanyar. Fingon was thus a grandson of Finwë and a nephew of Fëanor, the eldest of Finwë's sons, and the difference of mother between Fëanor and the children of Indis lay at the root of a division that shaped his whole family. He was born in Valinor, in the years of the Trees, and grew to manhood in Tirion upon Túna, where the Noldor had their city and where their craft and lore reached their height. His brother was Turgon and his sister Aredhel, and among his cousins were the sons of Fëanor and the children of Finarfin.

The name by which he is known in the histories is Fingon, a form belonging to the Sindarin tongue of Beleriand rather than to the speech of his birth. Like the names of his father Fingolfin and his grandfather Finwë, it carries the element fin-, and the family of names built upon it marks out the descent of that house in the chronicles of the Grey-elves. Tolkien's guidance on pronunciation applies here as elsewhere: the g is sounded hard, as in English get, never softened as in gin. In Middle-earth Fingon bore the style of High King of the Noldor after his father, a title that carried authority over the Noldorin realms in exile, though in practice it was honoured unevenly among the princes who held lands of their own.

Among the Noldor of Valinor he was reckoned bold and quick to act, and of a temper less given to brooding than that of many of his kin. He was close in friendship with Maedhros, eldest son of Fëanor, a bond formed before the quarrels of their fathers hardened, and this attachment across the two houses is the chief thing the histories record of his character in the days before the exile. His father's house and Fëanor's stood on either side of a deepening estrangement in Tirion, and Fingon's position was that of one who belonged wholly to the one and yet held affection for the other.

Fingon's recorded history begins with the crisis that followed the theft of the Silmarils and the slaying of Finwë. When Fëanor roused the Noldor in Tirion and led them out of Aman, Fingolfin's people went also, and Fingon marched among them. At the haven of Alqualondë he was drawn into the first slaying of Elf by Elf: the host he led came up while the fighting was already joined, saw kinsmen falling, and threw itself into the fray without knowing where the fault lay, some believing that the Teleri had set an ambush upon the march. When Fëanor took the white ships at Losgar and burned them on the far shore of the sea, Fingon was left behind with his father's people, and shared in the bitter crossing of the Helcaraxë, the grinding ice of the far north, where many perished. Fingolfin's host at last set foot in Middle-earth at the hour when the Moon first rose, and came to the northern shores of Lake Mithrim in Hithlum, encamping over against the Fëanorians.

The two hosts lay in a hostile silence, for the followers of Fëanor had been shamed by the burning of the ships and Maedhros, their eldest, had been taken by Morgoth and hung by the wrist from a precipice of Thangorodrim. Fingon set out alone to find him, without leave and against the counsel of others, carrying his harp and passing into the desolate lands beneath the mountains, where he sang aloud in the hope of an answer. Maedhros heard him and cried out, but Fingon could find no way up the sheer rock, and in his despair he called upon Manwë; Thorondor, lord of eagles, came and bore him to the place where Maedhros hung. Since the fetter could not be loosened, Fingon at Maedhros's own request struck off his hand above the wrist, and the eagle carried them both back to Mithrim. The deed ended the enmity between the two camps: Maedhros asked pardon for the desertion at Losgar, waived his claim to the lordship of the Noldor, and yielded the kingship to Fingolfin, so that the houses were joined again in a single cause against Morgoth.

In the ordering of the realms that followed, Fingon held Dor-lómin, the southern part of Hithlum, under his father, while the sons of Fëanor removed eastward to the marches of Beleriand. He fought in the third battle of the wars, the Dagor Aglareb, in which Morgoth's assault was broken and thrown back to Angband, and afterwards shared in the long watch upon the north that became known as the Siege of Angband. Roughly two centuries into that peace Morgoth made a trial of his enemies, sending out Glaurung, the first of the dragons, still young and not come to his full growth; the creature scorched the plain of Ard-galen until Fingon rode against him with a company of mounted archers, whose arrows so galled him that he fled back beneath the gates. The exploit was long remembered among the Elves, though Morgoth was ill pleased with the failure of the venture, and the quiet years continued for a long age after.

The Siege was broken at last in the Dagor Bragollach, when rivers of fire poured down from Thangorodrim and the northern defences were overwhelmed. Fingolfin rode to Angband alone and was slain by Morgoth in single combat, and the High Kingship of the Noldor passed to Fingon. His own position was hard: Hithlum was assailed from the north and its garrisons pressed back, and the land was held only when ships of Círdan came up the Firth of Drengist and landed a force in the Elves' aid. Judging the Havens themselves unsafe in the years that followed, Fingon sent his son Ereinion, afterwards called Gil-galad, to Círdan's keeping by the sea. Through the remaining years he kept his realm in being while other Noldorin lands fell one by one, and in that time the fugitives and errantries of the war passed back and forth across his borders.

No arts of enchantment are ascribed to him. Where the histories credit Melian with the girdle about Doriath, Finrod with a contest of songs of power, and Lúthien with spells that unmade the works of the Enemy, Fingon's recorded abilities are those of a captain and a horseman: skill at arms, command of mounted archers, the endurance of the Grinding Ice, and a courage the chroniclers mark by naming him the valiant. He was also a harper, an accomplishment of his rank rather than a power. The limits of what he could do are drawn plainly in the two deeds for which he is best known. On Thangorodrim his own strength and skill availed nothing against the rock and the fetter; the rescue was completed only by the intervention of an Eagle sent in answer to a prayer, and then only at the cost of a maiming. Against Glaurung his archers prevailed because the dragon was not yet full-grown and had come out before his time, and Morgoth counted the sortie a failure of his own planning rather than a defeat of dragons.

As a commander his authority proved similarly bounded. The great alliance of the last assault was conceived and led by Maedhros; Fingon held one wing of it and could neither hasten the eastern host nor choose the hour at which battle was joined. When Morgoth provoked the western army by a deliberate cruelty before its lines, the charge went forward without his order and his host was carried after it, and the discipline on which the whole design rested failed in a moment. His personal valour was not in question at the end, but it could not retrieve a position already lost. In this he serves the larger design of the tale: the Noldor of the exile are shown as capable of great feats within a doom they cannot overturn, and Fingon, who acts more readily and calculates less than his kin, illustrates both the reach and the insufficiency of that valour.

The friendship with Maedhros is the one bond the narrative treats as decisive, and its shape is asymmetrical. Fingon went to the Fëanorian side unbidden and at his own hazard; what returned to him was a political settlement, the waiving of a claim and the yielding of precedence, rather than an answering deed. Nor did the reconciliation extend to the house as a whole. The Oath was untouched by it, Celegorm and Curufin pursued their own ends in the south, and the two branches held apart for long years as allies rather than as one people. When they acted together again, the design was Maedhros's, and Fingon served in it as one commander among several.

In the earliest connected prose accounts of the mythology the character now called Fingon bears the name Finweg. He appears so in the brief outline that Christopher Tolkien printed as the 'Sketch of the Mythology' and in the fuller Quenta Noldorinwa that grew from it, where he is already the son of Fingolfin and already the one who goes alone to the mountains of the north and frees the captive heir of Fëanor, cutting away the fettered hand. The essentials of that episode were therefore fixed very early and altered little afterwards, while the name did not survive; Finweg was replaced by Fingon during the revisions of the nineteen-thirties, and the earlier form belongs to a stage at which the Sindarin naming of the princely house had not yet settled into the pattern later given it. Nothing corresponding to the figure or the rescue stands in the older Lost Tales material, so his place in the legendarium begins with the Quenta tradition rather than with its first stratum.