Haldan

Haldan belonged to the chieftain-kin of the Haladin, the second of the three houses of Men to pass into Beleriand. He was the son of Haldar and the grandson of Haldad, who held the leadership of that scattered folk in Thargelion; through his father he was also the nephew of Haleth, since Haldar and Haleth were born of the same birth. Nothing is recorded of his mother, of the year or place of his birth, or of his childhood, and the published narrative gives him neither a wife nor children by name. He must, however, have been born before the assault upon the settlements between the rivers Ascar and Gelion, for it was in that attack that both his grandfather and his father were slain, leaving the line of Haldad to run onward through him.

The name itself is nowhere glossed in the writings published in Tolkien's lifetime or in those edited after his death, and no meaning can be assigned to it with confidence. It is best read as belonging to the speech of the Haladin, who kept a tongue and a manner of naming apart from those of the households of Bëor and of Marach, so that their names resist the Sindarin etymologies that serve elsewhere among the Edain. What can be observed is a pattern rather than a translation: Haldad, Haldar, Haleth and Haldan all carry the same opening element, which marks them as a single house of kin. To press further and read Elvish roots into the form would go beyond what the sources allow.

The folk into which he was born were described as unlike their neighbours: wary of strangers, dwelling in scattered family groups without a single lord over them, and unwilling to be gathered into another people's realm. That looseness of governance was ended by the Orc attack and by the defence that followed, and the survivors afterwards moved west to Estolad as one company. From that time the Haladin were known among Elves and Men alike by the name of the woman who had held them together, so that the tribe Haldan stood to inherit was already, in common speech, the People of Haleth. His position rested on kinship within a chieftain-house rather than on any crown or sworn allegiance to an Elven king.

The first event in which Haldan's family stands at the centre of the narrative is the Orc assault upon the Haladin in Thargelion, in the angle between the rivers Ascar and Gelion. Because the folk lived in separate homesteads and acknowledged no single lord, they were cut off and slain piecemeal, until Haldad gathered those he could reach and built a stockade between the two waters. There Haldad was killed in a sortie made against the besiegers, and Haldar, Haldan's father, fell in the attempt to recover his body from the enemy. Haleth then held the enclosure for seven days, though food failed and the defenders were pressed hard, until a mounted force under Caranthir came down and broke the siege. The published account gives no word of where Haldan himself stood during those days; it names only the two men of his house who died and the woman who held the stockade, and the reader is left to infer that the heir of Haldad survived among the remnant.

The victory changed the standing of the Haladin with the Elves of the east marches. Caranthir, who had held Men in slight regard before, spoke honourably of the defence and offered Haleth land further north under the protection of his people. She declined, being unwilling to have her folk set under any lord's guard, and within a short time she brought the survivors over Gelion and away from Thargelion altogether. Their dwelling in Estolad, on the open lands south of Nan Elmoth, proved to be a halt rather than a home, for she would not stay where the other houses of the Edain were settling and where the counsels of the Noldor reached. In these years Haldan was the nearest male kinsman of a chieftain who had no children of her own, and every further move his aunt made determined the country he would afterwards govern.

The westward march from Estolad was the hardest passage the folk ever made. Rather than seek leave to go through Doriath, Haleth led them along the narrow ground north of the Girdle, between the mountains of terror and the enchanted borders, where the horror of the valley took a heavy toll of the company. The narrative treats the crossing as a feat that few would have attempted and fewer completed, and it records that the endurance of the women in the march was reckoned equal to that of the men. Those who came through reached the lands between Teiglin and Sirion, and there Haleth turned into the great forest of Brethil, which the folk then made their own. Among the households that travelled with them were the small dark woodcrafty people afterwards called the Drúedain, who had come west in company with the Haladin and settled with them in the forest.

Brethil was counted part of the realm of Thingol, and the settlement was at first without leave. Finrod, who had friendship with Haleth, interceded, and the King granted the wood on the condition that its people guard the crossings of Teiglin and suffer no servant of the Enemy to pass that way. Haleth answered sharply, reminding the messengers that her father and her brother lay dead by Orc hands and that no bargain was needed to make her fight them. The terms were nonetheless the frame within which her successor held the forest: possession by sufferance of Doriath, paid for by the watch on a ford, with no oath of service and no tribute. It was this arrangement, and not any grant of kingship, that Haldan inherited.

Haleth died in Brethil after ruling there for the rest of her life, and a green mound was raised over her in the high woodland by the folk she had led. She had never married, and so the headship of the People of Haleth passed to Haldan son of Haldar, the nearest heir of Haldad's line. With that sentence the sources release him: no year is given for his accession, no deed of his chieftaincy is told, no wife or child of his is named, and his death goes unrecorded. His rule must be placed in the long quiet of the Siege of Angband, when Beleriand was not yet broken and the folk of the forest lived scattered in their old fashion, keeping the watch on the fords and holding themselves apart from the wars of the Elven-kings.

The narrative next takes up the Men of Brethil after the breaking of the Siege, when their lord is Halmir, who joined with Beleg of Doriath to ambush an Orc-host coming south down the road to the crossings of Teiglin. The published text does not state how Halmir stood to Haldan, and the interval between the two names is not measured, so the length of Haldan's chieftaincy cannot be fixed from the sources alone. What the record does establish is that the line of Haldad continued unbroken through him: the lordship that Haleth received by the choice of a beleaguered people became a heritable office in her brother's descendants, and the chieftains who later ruled Brethil in the days of Túrin traced their right back through this succession. Haldan's place in the history is therefore that of a link, and the sources are unusually plain about how little else they can supply.

The place Haldan occupies in the legendarium is structural rather than dramatic. Under his aunt the leadership of the Haladin had been an emergency measure: a scattered people who had never accepted one head over them accepted her because she had held the stockade, and the authority she carried was personal, resting on what she had done rather than on any settled rule of descent. When it passed to her brother's son it became something else, an office inherited within a single kin-group, and from that point the chieftaincy of Brethil is treated by the annals as a heritable dignity handed down among the descendants of Haldad. Haldan is the hinge on which that change turns, which is why the chroniclers name him at all.

What that office conferred was modest and can be described fairly precisely. It was headship of a folk, not lordship of a realm: the People of Haleth never grew numerous, they went on living in separate homesteads under the trees rather than gathering into a stronghold, and they were slow to take up the Sindarin speech or the manners of their neighbours. Their strength lay in knowing their own wood and in the fords they were bound to watch, not in horse, mail or fortress, and as a rule they fought within their own bounds and did not take service with the Elven-kings. A chieftain of Brethil could therefore summon a small body of woodsmen to a border action; he could not put an army into the field, treat with Angband, or command anything outside the forest eaves.

Beyond that, nothing is attributed to him. He is a mortal Man of the First Age with no Elvish kindred, no counsel from the Valar, no weapon or heirloom of note, and no craft or foresight ascribed to him by any source; the writings record no battle he fought, no judgement he gave and no ruling he made. The silence is consistent with how these annals work, since they preserve what touched the wars of the Eldar and the fate of the Silmarils, and a chieftain who kept his people apart from both left correspondingly little to preserve. Any account that credits him with feats or qualities is supplying them, for the text itself is content to let him hold the succession and say no more.

Every relationship that gives Haldan his place in the story is defined by an absence. The sources name him by his father, a man who did not live to hold the leadership himself and who is remembered for a single act of loyalty toward his own father's body; whatever bond lay between father and son is nowhere described, and Haldan enters the record only after Haldar has left it. His standing then depended wholly on a woman who bore no children, for it was Haleth's unmarried state, not any designation of an heir, that made her brother's son the nearest of the house. The relation is thus lateral rather than direct: he is nephew before he is anything else, and the chroniclers keep him in that grammatical position even at the moment they hand him the chieftaincy.

The ties his people held with the Eldar were likewise not his own. Caranthir's regard was given to the defender of the stockade and was declined by her, and it lapsed of itself once the folk crossed Gelion; the tenancy of the forest rested on Finrod's friendship with Haleth and on terms she answered with some heat. Haldan therefore received obligations that others had contracted and goodwill that had been spent on a person rather than on a line. Nothing in the writings suggests that he renewed either tie, and no Elf-lord is named as his friend, patron or adversary.

Within the wood his folk shared their homes with the small woodland people who had come west with them, and that association was one of neighbourhood and mutual liking rather than of subjection, since those households kept their own customs and were held in esteem for their watchfulness. Outward marriage came only in later generations of Haldad's house: a son of Halmir wedded a daughter of Hador, and a daughter of Halmir became the mother of Húrin and Huor, so that the chieftains of Brethil were afterwards kinsmen of the lords of Dor-lómin. For Haldan himself no wife, child, companion or opponent is recorded at all. He is remembered entirely through other people, which is a fair description of what the office he received then was.

No figure answering to Haldan exists in the earlier phases of the legendarium, because the position he fills had not yet been created. In the Quenta Noldorinwa and in the annalistic texts that accompany it, the chieftain of the second house of Men is Haleth the Hunter, a man, and the leadership of that folk descends from him in the ordinary way to his son Hundor, who falls in the great battle of the northern plain. At that stage there is no Haldad, no Haldar and no unmarried woman holding a stockade between two rivers; the whole episode in Thargelion, with the siege and the rescue by the son of Fëanor, belongs to a much later reworking of how Men entered Beleriand.

Haldan is therefore a consequence of one of Tolkien's structural changes: when Haleth was recast as a woman and a leader by choice of the people rather than by descent, the male line of the house had to be carried by someone else, and the later narrative supplies a twin brother, Haldar, whose son takes up the chieftaincy when she dies childless. The texts gathered in the volume dealing with the wars over the jewels show this arrangement in place, both in the annals that lie behind the published chapter and in the genealogical material for the folk of Brethil drawn up in connection with the late account of Húrin's return. That material also carries the succession one step further than the published narrative does, setting Halmir in the line as Haldan's son, so that the interval which the Silmarillion leaves unmeasured is closed in the drafts. Haldan's function in the invented history is thus visible in his origin: he was made to join two names that a change of conception had separated.