Glóredhel

The name Glóredhel is Sindarin in form, as are the names borne by nearly all of her close kin. The third and greatest of the houses of the Edain, the folk who followed Marach out of the East and afterwards dwelt in Hithlum under the lordship of Fingolfin, gave up their own speech for everyday use and took the tongue of the Grey-elves in its stead, keeping the older language chiefly for lore and remembrance. Her name appears to join an element denoting golden light to the common Sindarin word for an Elf, a formation in keeping with the naming habits of the house: her father was known by a byname that marked the gold of his hair, and the fairness of that line was remarked upon by Elves and Men alike. No form of her name in the older speech of her people is preserved, nor any epithet of her own beyond her place in the genealogies.

She was a daughter of Hador Lórindol, son of Hathol, to whom Fingolfin granted the lordship of Dor-lómin, and she grew up in that land during the years of her father's rule there, with Galdor the Tall for her brother. The people among whom she was born are described as tall and strong, for the most part golden-haired and light-eyed, quick to anger and to laughter, eager in the learning of the Eldar and swift to master it, yet shorter-lived than the other houses of the Edain and impatient of long counsel. Their loyalty was given to the sons of Fingolfin, and their households in Hithlum stood in close and constant traffic with the Noldor; something of Elvish custom and speech had passed into their daily life within a generation of their coming.

Within the tradition Glóredhel stands at a junction between two of the three houses of the Edain, for the same occasion that bound her to the ruling line of the Haladin of Brethil bound her brother to a daughter of that people. What survives of her is almost wholly relational: she is named as her father's daughter, her brother's sister, the wife of a lord of the woodland folk, and by that reckoning the aunt of Húrin and Huor. No deed of her own is set down in the chronicles, and the annals record neither her birth nor any saying attributed to her; she belongs to the class of figures preserved because their marriages joined kindreds whose later history the chroniclers meant to explain.

The one dated event of her life that the tradition sets down falls in the years of the Long Peace, while the Siege of Angband still held and travel between the realms of the Edain was open. The lordship of the woodland Haladin was then in the hands of Halmir, and the friendship between his folk and the house of Hador in Dor-lómin was sealed by a double marriage celebrated at a single great feast: Glóredhel was wedded to Haldir, Halmir's son, and on the same occasion her brother Galdor took Hareth, Halmir's daughter. The chroniclers report the alliance and not the courtship; nothing is preserved of where the feast was held, who was present, or what passed there. It stands in the narrative as a hinge, since much of what follows in the history of both Dor-lómin and Brethil turns upon the kinship made that day.

The marriage carried her out of Hithlum into a wholly different manner of living. The people of Haleth held the forest of Brethil between Teiglin and Sirion by the leave of Thingol, on the understanding that they would guard the crossings against the Orcs; they dwelt scattered in the woods rather than gathered in halls, kept their own speech instead of taking up Sindarin as her father's people had done, and were fewer, warier of strangers, and slower to give allegiance than the folk among whom she was reared. What her place was in that household the sources do not say, whether she was reckoned a lady of the woodmen or remained in their eyes a daughter of the northern lords. From the feast onward she is present in the record only through her husband, her son, and the children who were sent to her house.

The Battle of Sudden Flame broke the Siege within her lifetime and struck at both the kindreds she belonged to. In the north her father was slain at Eithel Sirion, holding the rearguard while Fingolfin's people withdrew, and Gundor her younger brother fell there with him, shot through with arrows; the lordship of Dor-lómin passed to Galdor. Southward the Orcs came down the vale of Sirion as far as the marches of the woodland realm, and Halmir gathered the Haladin and had aid of Beleg and the bowmen of Doriath, so that the raiding host was destroyed at the crossings of the river. Glóredhel is not named in either account, and no word is recorded of how the news from Hithlum came to Brethil, but from that time she was the sister of a lord rather than the daughter of one.

The custom then followed among Men brought her brother's sons into her household, for Húrin and Huor were sent to be fostered in Brethil, where they were kin twice over: their mother Hareth was of that people, and their host Haldir was their uncle by his marriage to their father's sister. Their stay ended in the raid that carried them out of the tale of the woodmen altogether. Riding with the men of Brethil against Orcs who had come to the crossings of Teiglin, the boys were cut off from the rest, and a mist off the river hid them until the Eagles bore them away over the mountains into the hidden city of Gondolin. They were held there for a year and then set down again in their own country, sworn to say nothing of what they had seen, and Brethil had long since given them up for lost.

When the great muster was made against Angband, Haldir led the men of Brethil out of the woods to join the host of the north, and in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears he was slain; most of those who went with him never came back to their own country. The lordship of Brethil then fell to Handir, whom the genealogies of the Edain reckon the son of Haldir and Glóredhel, and after Handir was killed fighting Orcs at the Teiglin crossings it passed to his son Brandir the Lame, in whose days Túrin came to the forest and the house of Haleth came to its end. Of Glóredhel herself the published tradition says nothing further. No year is given for her death, no burial or lament is recorded, and no saying of hers is preserved; she leaves the narrative at the feast that put her there.

Measured by office, Glóredhel holds none that the tradition names. She is nowhere given a title among the woodmen, no rule or stewardship is assigned to her, and she speaks no word that the chroniclers thought worth setting down. The nearest she comes to a part in events is domestic: the household into which her brother's sons were received was hers as much as her husband's, and whatever daily governance of that house fell to her must be assumed rather than read, since the sources credit the fostering to Haldir alone and pass at once to the raid that ended it. Her importance to the narrative is therefore borne entirely by her kinship, and the chroniclers use it as a bracket to hold two histories together rather than as a source of action.

No faculty beyond the ordinary human is attributed to her, and none should be inferred. The Edain of her generation had won no gift of long life or of sight from their friendship with the Eldar; what they gained was learning, arms, and lands held of Elven lords. The kinds of power available to a woman of her station were accordingly practical ones — authority in a household, weight in the counsels of kin, the leading of a people in extremity — and the tradition attests all three among her contemporaries while attesting none of them in her. Haleth had held the chieftainship of the very folk she married into and led them out of the east country by her own will, and Emeldir gathered the women and children of Dorthonion and brought them south through the mountains when the men could not be moved to go. Against those examples the silence about Glóredhel is a gap in the record, not a limit set by custom.

What effect she has on the legendarium is exercised after her, and through descent rather than deed. Because the ruling line of Brethil ran on through her son, the last chieftains of the woodland people carried the blood of Dor-lómin, and when Túrin came at length to that forest the lame lord he found there and afterwards killed was his own kinsman twice reckoned — through his grandmother, who was of Brethil, and through his father's aunt, who had married into it. Nothing in that outcome answers to a choice of hers. Where Morwen's decisions visibly drive the disaster of her house, sending her son away and then following him, Glóredhel is given no decision at all; the consequences attached to her name are consequences of a marriage arranged between lords, and the tradition offers no ground for crediting her with intending any of them.

The bond that defines her position was reciprocal, and reads best when taken as such. Two women passed between the houses on the same day and in opposite directions, so that her brother and her husband became brothers twice over, each having married the other's sister; Hareth went north into the land of the golden-haired lords as Glóredhel went south into the woods. Such symmetry is characteristic of how the Edain sealed friendships in that age, and it leaves the individuals inside it curiously featureless. The tradition preserves no exchange of any kind between the two couples, no word of liking or dislike, and nothing that distinguishes Glóredhel's temper from Hareth's; what is recorded is the shape of the arrangement, not the people arranged. Even the relation of wife to husband is inferred rather than described, since Haldir appears afterwards only at the head of armed men.

The wider effect of that pairing was to knit the second and third of the Edain kindreds into one family within a single generation, and the first was drawn in soon after, when the elder of the boys reared under her roof married a woman of the line of Bëor out of ruined Dorthonion. Glóredhel is thus one of two joints in a net that closes on the children of Húrin, and her name appears in the genealogies mainly because the chroniclers needed those joints named. By that reckoning Morwen of Dorthonion was her nephew's wife and Rían of the same house her other nephew's, though neither woman is ever shown in her company, and no source places her in Dor-lómin again after the feast.

The silence about her is measured most sharply against those same two women, who stand at exactly her remove from the disasters that follow. Both are given grief, speech, and consequence: one waits out the years in an occupied land and is made to answer for her choices, the other goes out to the mound of the slain and dies upon it. Glóredhel, who lost a father, a brother, a husband, and in time a son to the same war, is granted no reaction to any of it. Her son Handir succeeded to the woodland lordship and was killed at the river crossings, and the account of his death does not mention that his mother had once come from another people.

The kindred into which she married had a different shape in the earlier writing, and her position within it shifted accordingly. In the Quenta of the early nineteen-thirties and in the annals that accompanied it, Haleth was a man — Haleth the Hunter — who led the woodland folk himself, and the son who ruled after him was named Hundor. It was Hundor, not Haldir, who took the daughter of Hador to wife, and it was Hundor who fell in the great battle in the north among the men of his people; no chieftain stood between him and Haleth, so that the husband of Hador's daughter was in those versions the son of the founder of the house rather than his descendant at two removes. The counterpart marriage, which carried a woman of the woodmen north into Dor-lómin, was already fixed in the same place in the narrative, and the double alliance was from the first the reason the two houses were joined in the record at all.

The decisive change came when Haleth was recast as a woman, the chieftain who brought her people west out of the eastern lands and refused lordship over them. That recasting displaced the male line downward and required new names above her husband: Halmir appears as lord of the forest folk, and Haldir as his son, taking over the marriage and the death in battle that Hundor had carried before. What survived unaltered was the descent below her. Handir and Brandir the Lame stand in the earlier verse and prose exactly as they stand in the later work, Brandir son of Handir son of the slain lord of Brethil, so that the generations running down to the coming of Túrin were never in doubt while the generations above them were rewritten twice over. Her own place in the genealogy is therefore stable in function and unstable in its particulars: throughout the revisions she remains the daughter of Hador who married into the woodland lordship and gave that lordship its later heirs, while the name and parentage of the man she married did not settle until the last phase of the work.