Gundor

Gundor belonged to the third and last of the houses of the Edain to pass over the Blue Mountains into Beleriand, the folk who followed Marach and who were afterwards named for the greatest of his descendants. His father was Hador Lórindol, son of Hathol, son of Magor, son of Malach whom the Elves called Aradan, son of Marach himself; the line is set out plainly in the Quenta, and Gundor stands in it as the second of Hador's two sons. His elder brother was Galdor, called the Tall, who wedded Hareth of the people of Haleth; a sister, Glóredhel, married Haldir of Brethil. Beyond this place in the genealogy the published narrative tells little of Gundor's own person, and nothing of his marriage or of children.

The kindred into which he was born is described as tall and strong, golden-haired for the most part and grey-eyed, eager in mind and quick to learn craft and lore from the Noldor, whose friendship they held above that of any other of the Elven-kindreds. Where the people of Bëor had largely set aside their own tongue and taken up the speech of the Grey-elves, the folk of Marach kept their ancestral language in daily use, although their lords understood Sindarin and dealt in it with the princes of the Noldor. That mixed usage explains the shape of the names in Gundor's family: forms such as Hador, Galdor and Gundor itself are Elvish in appearance rather than in the manner of their own speech.

The name Gundor is nowhere glossed in the published writings, and no meaning should be pressed upon it here; it is recorded, like many names of the Edain, without commentary. His home was Dor-lómin, the southern and western part of Hithlum beyond the Ered Wethrin, which his father received in fief from Fingolfin after entering that king's household, so that the sons of Hador grew up as heirs to a lordship held of the High King of the Noldor rather than to any independent realm. Gundor was thus a younger son in a house bound closely to the Elven war, raised within a march-land whose lords were expected to answer when the northern defence was called upon.

The whole of Gundor's life falls within the years of the Siege of Angband, the watch that the Noldor kept about Morgoth's stronghold after their third battle in Beleriand. That leaguer was never a sealed blockade: the north beyond Thangorodrim lay out of reach, and the Enemy could send out spies and raids when he chose. Fingolfin's share of the watch was the west, with his seat in Hithlum and his forward fortress at Eithel Sirion, where the springs of the river break from the outward face of the Ered Wethrin and look northward across the grassland of Ard-galen. Dor-lómin lay behind that mountain wall, sheltered by it and bound to its defence. The published narrative sets down no year for Gundor's birth, and none for any act of his before the last.

Of the long peace itself nothing personal is told of him. The Quenta describes what the three houses of the Edain did in those generations — they multiplied, took lands of the Elven-kings, learned craft and lore, and served in the armies of the north — but it follows named men only where the greater tale requires them. Gundor is required twice: once at the listing of Hador's sons, and once at their end. What a lord's second son did in Dor-lómin in the meantime, in the holding of land and the ordering of the levies that such a fief owed, is left unwritten, and later tradition added nothing to fill the gap.

The turn came in a winter, without warning. Morgoth had prepared long in secret, and the assault opened at night with rivers of fire poured out from Thangorodrim; the green plain of Ard-galen burned from end to end and was thereafter a waste of dust, renamed Anfauglith. Glaurung came out in his full growth, and behind him the Balrogs and orcs in numbers past reckoning, so that a leaguer of nearly four hundred years was undone within days. Dorthonion was overrun and the sons of Finarfin who held it were killed; in the south the attack pressed towards the passes of Sirion. In the north-west one arm of the onslaught came up against the Ered Wethrin and fell upon the fortress at the wells of Sirion.

Hador was in that fortress with his younger son when the attack struck, and both died in its defence. The Quenta sets Hador at the rear of Fingolfin's force, holding while his lord's people drew off, and Gundor fell close beside him, brought down by many arrows. His father's age at that death is given as sixty-six years; for Gundor no age is recorded, only that he was the later-born of the two brothers. The chronicle adds that the Elves mourned them, and the remark is not incidental: it registers what that house had come to mean in the war of the Noldor, and it is the nearest thing to a personal notice that Gundor receives.

The stronghold itself was not taken. Ered Wethrin held against that first flood, and Hithlum was not broken, though much of Beleriand beyond it was lost in the same season. Fingolfin, hearing that ruin had come everywhere, rode alone to the gates of Angband and was killed there by Morgoth in single combat, and Fingon took the kingship and with it the northern defence. In Dor-lómin the lordship passed at once to Galdor the Tall, who inherited both the fief and the obligation that had just cost his father and his brother their lives. Gundor's death thus stands at the opening of the long decline of the Edain of the north rather than at any turning that he shaped himself.

No wife and no child are recorded for him, and in the genealogies of the Edain his branch simply ends; the house ran on through Galdor to Húrin and Huor, and so to Túrin and Tuor. Eithel Sirion took more of that family than the two who fell there together. Some years afterwards, when Morgoth probed Hithlum again in the time before the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Galdor was killed by an arrow at those same walls that his father had defended, and the lordship of Dor-lómin passed to Húrin. What survives of Gundor in the sources is therefore a position rather than a career: a younger son who stood where his father stood when the Siege broke, and did not outlive the day.

Within the legendarium Gundor holds no office and exercises no authority of his own. Command in the house of Hador rested with his father while he lived and passed thereafter to the elder brother, and no separate holding, following or charge is assigned to the second son anywhere in the published matter. His function, so far as it can be recovered, is that of a man of his father's household in arms: one of the Edain who served in the war of the Noldor because their lords had taken land and lordship of the Elven-kings and owed them the levy in return. He appears in the tale where that service is discharged and nowhere else, and to speak of a career, a policy or a sphere of influence would be to supply what the sources do not.

No power beyond the mortal is claimed for him or for any of his kindred. The praise given to the folk of Marach is of body and temper — tall, strong, ready in mind — and of an aptitude for craft and knowledge that was learned from the Noldor rather than possessed before them; nothing in the account grants the Edain enchantment, foresight or unusual length of days such as the Eldar had. The manner of his death states the limit plainly enough: he was brought down by arrows in the defence of a fortress that held, which is the end of a competent soldier and not of a champion. The Quenta reserves feats of the other order for others in the same campaign — for Fingolfin before the gates of Angband, or later for Húrin at the rearguard of the Nirnaeth — and it makes no such claim here.

What he does carry is a measure. The stature of a disaster in these chronicles is often taken from the names it removes, and Gundor's presence in the roll of the fallen tells the reader what rank of men the northern defence was consuming in its first night. His branch of the family contributes nothing further: the line of Hador runs on through the elder brother, and the descent that matters to the later legendarium — to Húrin and Huor, and through Tuor into the house of Elros — passes him by entirely. He survives in the text because the genealogies of the Edain were kept whole, which is a modest kind of importance and the only one the sources support.

Gundor exists in the Quenta almost entirely as a relation. He is never described apart from another person: he is the son of Hador, the brother of Galdor, and the two names are set down together both where the house is introduced and where it is broken. That paired formula is worth noticing, because the chronicle elsewhere separates brothers by temperament or by deed, giving one a following and the other a fate; here the pair is treated as a single unit of the lordly household, and the reader is told nothing that would distinguish the younger from the elder in character, counsel or skill. Whatever bound the two brothers is left to inference, and the only evidence of it is that they were in the same place when the defence of the north was called for.

His generation of the family was, in the matter of marriage, unusually outward-looking. Both of his siblings married into the people of Haleth: his sister to the son of that folk's lord in Brethil, his brother to a daughter of the same kindred, so that in one generation the house of Hador was joined twice over to the woodmen of the south. Those two matches carried consequences well beyond their own lifetimes, since the descendants of each would meet again, and unhappily, in the forest of Brethil. Gundor stands aside from all of it. He is the sibling through whom no alliance runs, and in a lineage recorded chiefly to preserve such connections, that silence is itself the fact about him.

The one bond that certainly shaped his life he did not make himself. His father had gone as a young man into the household of the Noldorin High King and was held in great love there, and the tie of lord and vassal that followed was personal before it was territorial; the sons inherited it without having chosen it. Gundor's obligation was thus to a friendship contracted a generation earlier, and he discharged it in the only act the sources record. Against this he has no adversary of his own. No orc-captain, no dragon, no named servant of the Enemy is set opposite him, and the power that ended him is described only as a weight of numbers. Where the legendarium usually gives its men a particular antagonist, Gundor is granted none, which leaves his standing in the tale defined wholly by those he stood with.

The sentence that carries Gundor in the published chapter descends from the annalistic strand of the tradition rather than from any early narrative interest in him. In the Grey Annals, the late and fullest of the year-by-year chronicles Tolkien made for the Elder Days, the assault on the fortress at the wells of Sirion is entered under the year given to the Sudden Flame, and the fall of the old lord of Dor-lómin with his younger son at the rearguard stands as part of that entry; the editorial text of the Quenta follows this account closely, stripping the date and keeping the substance. The annalistic setting is worth registering because it explains the character of what survives: Gundor is preserved by a form of writing that records losses by name and year, not by a tale that had any use for him.

The names around him were less stable than his own. In the earlier phase of the legendarium the lord who inherited Dor-lómin and fathered Húrin was called Gumlin, and it is under that name that he appears in the alliterative lay of the children of Húrin and in the prose Quenta of the same period; the substitution of Galdor came later, so that Gundor's brother bore a different name for much of the writing. The remoter pedigree set out in the published chapter is later still. Marach, Malach whom the Elves named Aradan, Magor and Hathol belong to the reworking of the coming of Men that Tolkien undertook after The Lord of the Rings, with genealogical tables of the Edain drawn up alongside it; in the older texts Hador stands at or near the head of his house with no such ancestry behind him. Through all of this Gundor himself is neither expanded nor removed. No draft assigns him a deed, a wife or a following, and the two notices he receives — the naming of Hador's sons and the death at Eithel Sirion — are the whole of him in the earlier manuscripts as in the printed book.