Gil-galad

Gil-galad belonged to the Noldor, and within that people to the kindred of Finwë, whose descendants held the high kingship of the exiles in Middle-earth. He was born in Beleriand during the long wars against Morgoth, in the closing generations of the Elder Days, and grew up in a world already shaped by defeat rather than by the memory of Valinor. The published Silmarillion names him the son of Fingon, and so a grandson of Fingolfin, placing him directly in the succession that passed from Fingolfin to Fingon and onward. The same narrative records that, when the northern lands were overrun, his father sent the boy west to the coastal Havens for safety, so that his upbringing lay among the mariners of the Falas rather than in the fortresses of Hithlum. Editorial matter in Unfinished Tales notes that Tolkien elsewhere set down a different descent for him, tracing his father to Orodreth; the two accounts were never brought into agreement in any narrative Tolkien completed.

His given name was Ereinion, a Sindarin form understood as marking him an offshoot of a royal line. The name by which he is almost always called is likewise Sindarin: it joins the element for star with one meaning radiance or bright light, the same second element that appears in Galadriel's name, so that the whole may be rendered as star of brilliance. Such a descriptive by-name, awarded in Beleriand and displacing the name he was born with, follows a pattern common among the exiled princes, whose Quenya and Sindarin names often competed until custom settled on one. In later ages the by-name stood alone, and Ereinion survived chiefly in genealogical notice.

In the writings published in Tolkien's lifetime the figure is thinner but consistent. The Tale of Years places him as an Elven-king in Lindon, the coastal remnant west of the Blue Mountains left when the older country foundered, and treats him throughout the Second Age as the recognised head of the Elves of the west. Hobbit-lore preserved verses about him in the Common Speech, which is how his name first reaches the reader of the Red Book, rendered there as a king of a people already passing out of the world. The initial consonant of the name is hard, as in the English word get, following the rule Tolkien set out for the transcription of Elvish names.

The kingship came to him young and by attrition. With the fall of Gondolin and the death of Turgon, the last of Fingolfin's sons, no prince of the elder line remained in the north, and the high kingship of the Noldor in Middle-earth fell to Gil-galad, who held it not from any fortress in Beleriand but from the Isle of Balar and the encampments at the mouths of Sirion, where Círdan's shipwrights and the refugees of the ruined realms had gathered. His rule in those years was less a government than a shelter: he commanded what could be defended from the sea, and made no attempt to recover the lands Morgoth had taken. When the host of the West came at last out of Aman and broke Angband, the war that freed Beleriand also destroyed it, and the country in which he had been raised went under the waters. What survived west of the Ered Luin was Lindon, and there he set his seat, so that the Second Age opened with him as king of a diminished but unbroken people.

The early centuries of that age are recorded chiefly through his dealings with Númenor. The mariners of the island came first to the Grey Havens, and Gil-galad received them as kinsmen of the Edain who had fought beside his house; from these visits grew a long exchange of gifts, craft and counsel between Lindon and the Númenórean court. He formed a particular friendship with Aldarion, the mariner-heir who spent much of his life in Middle-earth, and the two men's interests ran together: both wanted timber, harbours and a coastline that could be held. It was to Aldarion's father, Tar-Meneldur, that Gil-galad sent a written warning that a malice was stirring in the eastern lands and gathering strength, and that the Númenóreans would be needed. The message is the earliest surviving sign that he had identified the enemy who would occupy the rest of his reign.

That judgment was tested when Sauron, in fair form and under an assumed name, offered his friendship and instruction to the Elves who remained east of the sea. Gil-galad refused him admittance to Lindon and would not treat with him, distrusting a lord of great knowledge whose origin he could not account for; Elrond, then in his service, held the same view. The smiths of Eregion took the opposite course, and out of their long collaboration came the rings of power. Celebrimbor made the Three alone and unaided, and when he understood that Sauron had deceived him he sent them away out of Eregion: Nenya went to Galadriel, while Vilya and Narya were both conveyed to Gil-galad in Lindon. He kept the first and passed the second to Círdan, judging the Havens and their master better suited to it than his own hand.

Open war followed in 1693 of the Second Age, when Sauron moved to seize the rings by force. In 1695 Gil-galad sent Elrond east with a force to relieve Eregion, but the country was overrun and Celebrimbor killed in 1697; Elrond, unable to hold his ground, withdrew north with the survivors and established the refuge of Imladris. By 1699 Eriador was in enemy hands and Lindon itself under threat. The turn came in 1700, when a great armament out of Númenor sent by Tar-Minastir landed and joined Gil-galad's forces; Sauron's army was destroyed and he himself driven from Eriador in 1701. The victory bought the western Elves the longest quiet of the age, and Gil-galad's dominion in Lindon was not seriously challenged again for more than fifteen hundred years.

Gil-galad's function in the legendarium is institutional before it is personal: he is the point at which the Noldorin high kingship, carried out of Valinor and through the wars of Beleriand, comes to rest in a single surviving line of authority and then stops. The Tale of Years treats him as the standing head of the western Elves for the whole of the Second Age, the figure against whom Sauron's ambitions in Eriador are measured and the one to whom the Númenórean kings address themselves when they act in Middle-earth. His authority was territorial and comparatively modest in extent — Lindon, its havens, and such allegiance as the scattered Elvish settlements east of the mountains chose to render — but it was the only kingship of its kind left, and no rival claim is recorded. Within the narrative economy of the Second Age he is the fixed pole of resistance, an office as much as a man.

His characteristic act toward those he trusted was to hand something over. Círdan, a Sinda older than the kingship Gil-galad held and lord of the harbours on which Lindon's strength rested, was not a subject in any ordinary sense but a partner whose judgement the king deferred to; the transfer of a Ring of Power to him was an admission that authority and fitness were not the same thing. Elrond he made his herald, and then sent east with an army, and the refuge that grew out of that failed campaign became a second Elvish centre answering to no one. Celebrimbor is the counter-case: an ally in standing and friendship whom Gil-galad could not persuade, and whose independence produced both the disaster of the rings and the gift that came back west when the deception was discovered. Toward Sauron the relation was one of refusal maintained across centuries — no parley, no admittance, no exchange of gifts — which is the only form of dealing with him the king ever practised.

In the working papers the figure is unusually unstable, and the instability concerns his ancestry from the first. He is absent from the earliest phases of the Silmarillion tradition altogether; when a character of the name emerges in the Quenta Silmarillion of the later 1930s, printed in The Lost Road and Other Writings, he is given as a son of Inglor Felagund who escaped the ruin of the north and came to the Havens. That ascription could not survive the settling of Finrod Felagund as a lord who left his betrothed in Valinor and had no child, and it was abandoned without a narrative to replace it. In the Grey Annals of the following period the parentage was transferred to Fingon, with the boy sent to Círdan for safety when the northern defences broke; this is the version that reached print in the constructed Silmarillion.

The last stage reverses it again. In a note attached to The Shibboleth of Fëanor, among Tolkien's latest genealogical writings, Orodreth is demoted a generation and made a son of Angrod rather than a brother of Finrod, and Gil-galad is made Orodreth's son, so that he becomes a great-grandson of Finarfin and Finduilas of Nargothrond becomes his sister. The same note supplies him with a Quenya name, Artanáro, and its Sindarin equivalent Rodnor, which sits awkwardly beside the Ereinion recorded elsewhere and shows that no single birth-name was ever fixed. Christopher Tolkien's commentary in The Peoples of Middle-earth treats the Fingon descent as an editorial decision taken for the published text and states plainly that he had come to regard it as mistaken. Nothing in the drafts reconciles the three descents; they are successive replacements, not variants of one account.

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy Gil-galad appears only in the prologue to the first instalment, played by the New Zealand actor Mark Ferguson. The part is silent: he is seen among the Elven host at the alliance's battle before the Black Gate and is not named in the spoken narration, so viewers who do not read the credits are given no way to identify him. The larger departure is one of emphasis rather than invention. The sequence assigns the visible command of the Elves to Elrond, who stands at Elendil's side and afterwards follows Isildur to the fire, while the king in whose name the Elves marched is reduced to a background figure whose death goes unmentioned. Because his end is omitted, so is the reason Elrond later holds one of the Three, and the transfer of that ring is never explained anywhere in the three films.