Finrod Felagund

Finrod was the eldest child of Finarfin, third son of Finwë, and of Eärwen, daughter of Olwë who ruled the Teleri of Alqualondë. He was born in Tirion upon the hill of Túna in the long peace of the Years of the Trees, and grew up alongside his brothers Angrod and Aegnor and his sister Galadriel. The house of Finarfin was marked out among the Noldor by golden hair, drawn from Indis of the Vanyar, Finwë's second wife, so that Finrod and his siblings were visibly distinct from the dark-haired descendants of Míriel. His mother's line mattered as much as his father's: because Olwë and Elwë Singollo were brothers, Finrod stood in close kinship with the king of Doriath, a tie that shaped how the Sindar of Beleriand received him.

Two of his best-known names were given to him by others rather than borne from birth. The Dwarves who worked with him in the west named him Felagund, a word of their own tongue understood as hewer of caves, and the title clung so closely that his own people took it up and used it beside his given name. Much later, the first Men to come over the mountains called him Nóm, meaning wisdom in their speech, and named his followers Nómin, the Wise, after him. Both names record how he was seen from outside his own kindred, the one fixing his skill in stone, the other his learning; in Beleriand he is most often set down simply as Finrod, with Felagund appended.

In temperament Finrod was among the most open-handed of the princes of the Noldor, quick to seek out other peoples and to learn their tongues and their crafts rather than hold apart. He took no wife: Amarië of the Vanyar, whom he loved, remained behind in Valinor and did not follow the Noldor into exile, and no other marriage is recorded of him. Those who wrote of him afterwards remembered his foresight and his willingness to bind himself by his word, qualities that his kinsmen sometimes found difficult and that his friends counted on absolutely.

Finrod's recorded history in Middle-earth begins with the revolt of the Noldor. When Fëanor led the host out of Valinor after the theft of the Silmarils and the killing of Finwë, the people of Finarfin followed unwillingly and last, and Finrod was present at Alqualondë when the mariners of his mother's kindred were cut down in the quarrel over their ships. After the doom spoken upon the Noldor on the road north, Finarfin turned back with part of his following and was pardoned, but his children would not abandon the march; Finrod went on with the host of Fingolfin and endured the crossing of the Grinding Ice. He came into Beleriand at the first rising of the Moon, and about twenty years afterwards he attended the feast that Fingolfin held near the springs of Ivrin, where the exiles and the Sindar met in a peace that was long remembered.

In the early years of the Siege of Angband, Finrod and Turgon rested during a journey beside the waters of Sirion, and Ulmo sent them dreams that unsettled them and turned their thoughts to hidden strongholds. Finrod first fortified the island of Tol Sirion in the river's course, raising there the watchtower of Minas Tirith to guard the pass out of the north. Afterwards, on counsel given by Thingol, he sought out the gorge of the Narog in the west and the caves beneath the high moors, and there founded Nargothrond, working with the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains who gave him the name by which he is best known. When the delving was complete he committed the tower on Tol Sirion to the keeping of his brother Orodreth. Among the treasures gathered in his halls was the Nauglamír, a carcanet wrought for him by Dwarvish smiths, which he valued above the rest.

In the three hundred and tenth year of the Sun, while hunting east of the mountains with the sons of Fëanor, Finrod came upon the encampment of Bëor's people in Ossiriand, the first Men to pass into Beleriand. He waited until they slept, took up a harp that lay among them, and played and sang of the making of the world, so that they woke believing they had dreamed. He remained with them for a season, learning their speech and teaching them, and Bëor afterwards left the leadership of his folk to his son and followed Finrod to Nargothrond, serving him until his death. From this meeting grew the policy that distinguished Finrod among the Noldorin lords: he made room for Men in the lands his house held, and treated the alliance as a lasting obligation rather than a convenience of war.

The Siege broke in the year 455, when Morgoth loosed fire across the northern plain in the battle afterwards called the Dagor Bragollach. Finrod's brothers Angrod and Aegnor were killed in the ruin of Dorthonion, and Finrod, marching north to give aid, was driven into the marshes of Serech and cut off with a small company. Barahir son of Bregor came to him there with the men of his house and broke through the encircling host, and Finrod swore in return an oath of friendship and help to Barahir and to all his kin, giving him his ring in token of it. Two years later Sauron took Tol Sirion, and Orodreth was driven from the tower to Nargothrond, the island becoming a place of terror in enemy hands. Barahir himself was hunted down and slain in 460, and his ring was recovered from his killers by his son Beren.

Beren came at last to Nargothrond bearing that ring, sent by Thingol to fetch a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown as the price of Lúthien. Finrod acknowledged the debt and declared he would go with him, but Celegorm and Curufin, who dwelt then in his halls, invoked their own oath and turned the people against the venture with warnings of what the Fëanorians would do to any who took a Silmaril. Finrod set his crown on the floor before them and renounced the kingship, naming Orodreth to hold the realm in his absence, and left with ten who would not forsake him, chief among them Edrahil. Waylaying an orc-company in the northern pass, they took their gear and Finrod altered their forms by his skill so that they passed as servants of the enemy. Sauron detected the deception as they came beneath his tower, and the two contended in songs of power until Finrod was overthrown and the disguise stripped away.

Within the exiled Noldor Finrod stood apart from the contest for the High Kingship, which passed from Fingolfin to his sons; the house of Finarfin held no claim in it, and Finrod's authority was territorial rather than dynastic. What he held, however, was the widest single lordship in Beleriand outside Doriath. From the caverns above the Narog his rule ran west to the sea and north toward the sources of the river, taking in the wooded plain called Talath Dirnen, the Guarded Plain, which his scouts watched so closely that no stranger crossed it unmarked. The shipwrights of the Falas under Círdan were reckoned within his overlordship, and he helped rebuild their havens; his kinship with Thingol, alone among the Noldorin princes, gave him free access to Menegroth at a time when the king of Doriath admitted few of the exiles. He also functioned as the chief patron of Men among the Eldar, granting lands to the houses of Bëor and Hador and treating their service as alliance rather than clientage.

His gifts, as the sources describe them, were three: building in stone, learning, and song. The delving of Nargothrond was work of the first order, done with Dwarvish help but under his direction, and it produced a stronghold that survived the collapse of every other Noldorin realm in the north. His learning showed most plainly in language. When he came among the first Men he grasped their speech quickly, and the accounts add that he could perceive their thoughts directly — but only such thoughts as they were willing to put into words, so that the faculty amplified conversation rather than replacing it. The songs of power he commanded were likewise real and likewise bounded: he could alter the seeming of a company well enough to deceive watchers at a distance, yet when tested against Sauron in open contention he was overmastered and his work undone.

His dealings with the sons of Fëanor expose the cost of his openness. He gave shelter to Celegorm and Curufin when their own lands were overrun, though it was their father's house that had shed the blood of his mother's kindred at the Swanhaven, and he neither held that against them nor guarded against them. They repaid the hospitality by using his hall as a platform to break his authority, and the people who would not follow him were the same people who had accepted his rule for four centuries. Orodreth expelled the pair only afterwards, when their conduct toward Lúthien could no longer be argued about. Finrod's answer to the betrayal was not reprisal but abdication, which suited his temper and settled nothing.

The character is absent from the earliest stratum of the legendarium. In the Lost Tales version of Beren's story there is no lord of Nargothrond and no sworn debt to a house of Men; the captor is Tevildo, Prince of Cats, and the tale turns on him rather than on any Elvish ally, while the caverns that would become Nargothrond appear separately as the delvings of the Rodothlim, whose lord is Orodreth. Felagund enters with the alliterative and octosyllabic poetry of the 1920s, where he is already king of Nargothrond and already dies for Beren, but is styled the son of Finrod — that name then belonging to the father who would later be renamed Finarfin. The son's own name in the writings of the 1930s and 1940s was Inglor, so that Inglor Felagund stands where the later texts read Finrod Felagund; the transfer of Finrod down a generation came late, and the discarded Inglor left no trace in the published narrative.

The epithet itself was reinterpreted. In the Etymologies Felagund is given an Elvish derivation, glossed from elements meaning cave and lord; the account of it as a Dwarvish word for one who hews caves, which the published text follows, belongs to Tolkien's late philological essays. Two genealogical questions attached to him were never settled. Orodreth, his brother in all the earlier material and in the Silmarillion as printed, was in late notes made instead the son of Angrod and therefore Finrod's nephew, which alters who inherited Nargothrond and on what claim; and Gil-galad, before he was assigned to Fingon and later to Orodreth, was at one stage written as Felagund's son — difficult to reconcile with the childlessness the finished story insists on. The most substantial late addition is the Athrabeth, a dialogue in which Finrod and Andreth of the house of Bëor argue over death, over whether mortality was native to Men or inflicted on them, and over a hope Andreth reports that the world's maker will one day enter the world himself. It is discursive rather than narrative, and stands outside the Silmarillion tradition it was written beside.