Glorfindel

Glorfindel bears a single Sindarin name, without patronymic or house-name attached to it in the narratives, and the name is transparently descriptive: it joins the element meaning gold, which recurs in such names as Glorëdhel and Loeg Ningloron, with the element meaning hair or tress, familiar from Finduilas and Findis. The sense is therefore something close to golden-haired, and the older accounts of Gondolin present him accordingly, as a lord distinguished by the colour of his hair among a people in whom golden hair was uncommon. In the hidden city he stood at the head of one of its noble households, the House of the Golden Flower, whose emblem answered to his name; the twelve such households formed the ordered military and social divisions of Turgon's realm. By kindred he belonged to the Noldor, the people who had come out of the West into Beleriand and whose princes held the northern kingdoms in the First Age.

In the work published in Tolkien's lifetime the name appears again, borne by a lord of Elrond's household, and the narrative supplies no genealogy for him at all: he is introduced simply as one of the folk of Rivendell, and it is left to Gandalf to say what sort of person he is. Readers and editors commonly distinguish the two occurrences by attaching the place-names Gondolin and Rivendell to the name, though neither compound is a title used within the stories themselves. The pronunciation is fixed by the appendix on spelling and sound: the initial consonant is the hard one heard in English get, never the soft sound of gin, a point on which the name is often mishandled aloud.

What is said of his nature belongs less to lineage than to standing. Gandalf describes him as an Elf-lord of a princely house, and explains that he had lived in the Blessed Realm across the Sea, so that those like him inhabit the visible and the invisible worlds at once and can meet the servants of the Enemy on either footing. This accounts for the impression he makes on mortal eyes in moments of strain, when he seems to shine with a light of his own, and for the weight his counsel carries in Elrond's house. He is, in short, presented as one of the elder and more powerful of the Firstborn still remaining east of the Sea, a figure whose authority is assumed rather than argued.

The first stretch of Glorfindel's recorded life belongs wholly to Turgon's hidden kingdom, and the earliest deed set down for him is an errand rather than a battle. When Aredhel, the king's sister, grew weary of the enclosed city and pressed to be allowed out of it, Turgon at last consented on the condition that she go to Fingon in Hithlum, and he put three lords of his household at her side, charged with seeing the command kept. Once beyond the encircling mountains she overruled them and turned instead towards the lands of the sons of Fëanor, and in the shadowed country north of Doriath the company was scattered and she was lost to them. The three searched without success and came back to Gondolin with nothing to report, which the king received in grief. The episode is characteristic of how he is used in the older narratives: a trusted captain, sent where the king's authority must travel in person.

The Silmarillion does not say who those three were. The names attached to them come from a pencilled marginal note that Tolkien made on one typescript of the Maeglin material, preserved in The War of the Jewels: against the opening words about the three lords he wrote Glorfindel, Egalmoth and Ecthelion, and added a barely legible remark on the etymology of the last two. That is the whole of the evidence. It is enough to place Glorfindel in the episode and too little to make the errand a settled part of his story — which is why the published text leaves the three unnamed.

The name is next attached to events of the Third Age, in the north of Eriador. In 1975 the Witch-king's power at Angmar was broken at Fornost by a combined force, among which was a company sent out of Rivendell under Glorfindel; the beaten army was pursued and destroyed east of the hills. When Eärnur of Gondor wished to ride after the fleeing lord of the Nazgûl himself, Glorfindel held him back, saying that the enemy's end was not yet and would not come at the hand of a man. The saying was remembered and repeated for centuries afterwards, and it was still current in Gondor when Eärnur later disappeared in Minas Morgul; its bearing on how the Witch-king was in fact brought down at the Pelennor was not understood until the event itself.

In the autumn of 3018 he was sent out from Rivendell with others of Elrond's household to search the westward roads for the travellers Gandalf had failed to meet. Riding north-west, he drove the Black Riders from the bridge over the Hoarwell on 11 October and left a green stone there as a sign for whoever should follow; the hobbits and Aragorn crossed two days later and found it. He continued searching for a week before he came upon the party at dusk on 18 October, when Frodo's wound from Weathertop had begun to overmaster him. He set Frodo on his own horse, which knew his voice and would carry no one unwilling, and pressed the march east. At the Ford of Bruinen on 20 October he sent the horse ahead with Frodo while he turned to face the pursuit; when the flood loosed by Elrond broke over the Riders in the water, he and Aragorn drove the remainder in after them with fire. To the eyes of the Riders in that moment he appeared as a figure of white flame.

He remained at Rivendell through the deliberations that followed. At the feast held after Frodo's recovery he sat at Elrond's side, and it was there that Frodo, seeing him without the strain of the pursuit, asked who he was. At the council of the following day he spoke twice to practical effect: he urged that the Ring be taken west and sunk in the deep sea, an expedient Gandalf answered by pointing out that the sea would not hold it for ever and that the burden would only be deferred; and he objected to the alternative of giving it into the keeping of Tom Bombadil, whose indifference to it made him an unreliable guardian. He was not chosen for the company that went south, though his name was raised in the argument over its composition, and Elrond set aside the proposal on the ground that no display of Elvish strength could carry the Ring through Mordor by force, where secrecy might. He appears no further in the record of the war, and the narrative leaves him where it found him, in Elrond's house.

In the Third Age narrative Glorfindel functions as the strength of Elrond's house employed outward. He holds no office that the text names — he is neither a ruler of any land nor the chief of Elrond's counsellors, and no Ring of Power is attributed to him, nor any working of spells — yet he is the member of that household sent where both authority and force are required, and he speaks in council as one whose opinion is expected rather than solicited. What he does possess is a presence effective against the Enemy's servants: the horses of the pursuit shied from him, and the Riders themselves were checked by his approach in a way they were not by mortal weapons. Frodo, whose sight was failing into the wraith-world at the Ford, perceived him not as a rider in the ordinary sense but as a shape of white light, which is the plainest indication the published book gives of what such a person is on the unseen side.

The same episode marks the limits with unusual clarity. Glorfindel did not break the Nine and did not attempt to; the destruction at the water was contrived by Elrond, who commanded the river, and shaped further by Gandalf, and Glorfindel's part was to hold the road and then to drive the last of them in. He could do nothing for the knife-wound Frodo carried, which required Elrond's skill and days of labour. His counsel at the council was heard and set aside on both points he raised, and the wider argument there — that no strength of that order could be spent to advantage against the Ring — applies to him as much as to any other lord present. Even his warning to Eärnur was foresight of an end, not power to bring it about or to prevent what followed.

In Elrond's house the bonds are again those of household rather than blood, but the arrangement is markedly unhierarchical. Erestor is named as the chief of the counsellors there, yet in open debate the two contradicted one another before their lord without apology on either side, which suggests a company of equals gathered round Elrond rather than a court arranged beneath him. With Gandalf the relation is collegial and mutual: the wizard vouches for him to Frodo in terms no hobbit could have supplied, and answers his proposals in council as an equal correcting an equal. With Aragorn there is evidently long acquaintance, since the two greet each other by name in Elvish on the road and afterwards act together at the water without any need to arrange it beforehand.

His connection with Frodo is short, one-sided, and practical: he lends the hobbit his own horse Asfaloth, walks beside it, and afterwards has no further dealings with him beyond a place at the same table. As for enemies, the published narrative never sets him against Sauron in person, nor against Morgoth; his opponents are always servants — a demon on a mountain path, the Nine on a river road, and the lord of Angmar, whose end he foresaw at Fornost without being the instrument of it.

Glorfindel has fared badly in adaptation, chiefly because the one scene in which the published novel gives him work to do is also the scene most often reassigned. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 cuts him altogether: the ride to the Ford of Bruinen is carried by Aragorn and the hobbits alone, and no Elf-lord comes out from Rivendell to meet them on the road. Since that film breaks off after Helm's Deep and never reaches the council in Elrond's house in the form the book gives it, the character's later contributions disappear with him. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, running to twenty-six half-hour parts, is the exception among the older versions: its greater length allows it to keep the encounter on the East Road and the crossing at the flooded ford substantially as written, with Glorfindel present and named, and it is generally the adaptation cited when the character's fate elsewhere is discussed.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003 omits Glorfindel as well, and its substitution is the best known of all the departures attached to his name: the rescue on the road and the ride to the ford are given to Arwen, played by Liv Tyler, who takes the wounded Frodo onto her own horse and speaks the words that loose the flood. The change enlarges a character who has almost no presence in the first half of the novel, and it removes the only sequence in which the published book shows what an Elf-lord of the elder kind can do against the Nazgûl. Nothing of Glorfindel's part in the council survives either; the arguments he raises there are dropped or redistributed among the speakers who remain.