Handir

Handir belonged to the Haladin, the second of the three peoples of the Edain to cross into Beleriand, more often named in the later tales after Haleth, the woman who led them west and gave the folk of Brethil their identity. They were the smallest and least tractable of the three houses: they kept their own speech rather than adopting the tongue used by the followers of Bëor and Marach, dwelt scattered among the trees instead of in ordered settlements, and took no part in the wars of the Eldar except when their own borders were touched. Handir's name is not glossed anywhere in the published matter, and no meaning can be given for it with confidence; what can be observed is that it stands within a close-woven series of names in the chieftains' line — Haldad, Haldar, Haldan, Halmir, Haldir, Hundar, Hunthor — whose shared opening element marks the family as clearly as any title.

He was the son of Haldir, who was son of Halmir, and so stood in direct descent from Haldad and from Haleth herself. His mother was Glóredhel, a daughter of Hador Lórindol of Dor-lómin, wedded to Haldir in the same season that Haldir's sister Hareth was given to Glóredhel's brother Galdor. That double alliance bound the woodland folk to the House of Hador more tightly than any oath, and it made Handir cousin twice over to Húrin son of Galdor — a kinship that would later shape events in Brethil far more than either house could have foreseen.

The inheritance waiting for him was a lordship of an unusual kind. The Haladin acknowledged no king and used no royal style; their leaders were chieftains, raised up from within the kindred, and the forest of Brethil between Teiglin and Sirion was held not as a possession but by the leave of Thingol, on the understanding that its people would keep watch over the crossings and let no evil thing pass. Handir was father of Brandir, called the Lame, who was born to a father already burdened with the guarding of a wooded march on the edge of a failing peace.

The lordship of Brethil came to Handir out of a defeat fought far from his own borders. His father Haldir led the men of the Haladin north to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad and stood with the western host; there Haldir fell, and with him Hundar his brother and the greater part of the company that had marched out, so that few of the woodmen came home again. Whatever the battle cost the Eldar and the other houses of the Edain, for the Haladin it meant that a small people lost most of its fighting strength in a single day. Handir therefore came into an inheritance that was less a war-band than a remnant, and the wood he was set to keep now lay far nearer the reach of Angband than it had a generation earlier.

Of the years of his rule the chronicles say almost nothing, and the silence is itself informative. After the Nirnaeth the northern kingdoms were broken, Hithlum was lost to the Easterlings, and the free lands west of Doriath shrank to Nargothrond and the wood between Teiglin and Sirion. No second muster out of Brethil is recorded in Handir's time; his people appear thereafter only as watchers of their own marches, holding the fords and the fringes of the forest against whatever came south. That the Haladin survived at all through those years, without walls and without allies within reach, suggests a policy of guarded withdrawal rather than one of arms, though no source states it in those terms.

The end of that quiet is placed, in the narrative, immediately after a change of policy in a realm not his own. Túrin had risen high in Nargothrond and had persuaded its people to abandon their old secrecy: to fight openly, to arm heavily, and to build the great bridge over the Narog before their gates. For a season the lands between Narog and Sirion were cleared and the servants of Angband were driven from them; but the concealment that had kept Nargothrond alive was gone, and Morgoth now knew where to look. The chronicle sets Handir's fall directly after this turn, side by side with it, without stating that the one caused the other.

Orcs came into Brethil in force, and Handir met them in the field rather than yielding the eaves of the wood. The attempt failed: his men were beaten, driven back among the trees, and Handir himself was killed in the fighting. Nothing further is told — not the place of the battle, not the numbers on either side, not whether he fell in the first onset or in the retreat. Nor does the published narrative attach a year to it; the event is dated only by its position within Túrin's years at Nargothrond, in the season before the host of Angband came down upon that city.

The consequence of that single defeat outlived the man. The lordship passed to his son Brandir, lame from childhood and no leader of armies, who governed by concealment and by keeping his folk from the open war that had killed his father, and who was little loved for it by the bolder men of the wood. Within a short span Nargothrond was sacked, the roads filled with fugitives, and Túrin came at last into Brethil, where his presence overturned Brandir's cautious rule and drew the dragon after him. Brandir died by Túrin's hand at the close of that story. Handir's own part in the legendarium is thus small in words and large in effect: his death set a mild and unwarlike lord over the last free wood of the West at precisely the hour when the ruin of the House of Hador walked into it.

Within the legendarium Handir functions chiefly as a joint between two better-attested figures: he is named as the son of one chieftain and the father of another, and almost every sentence in which he appears also names Haldir or Brandir. No speech is attributed to him, no counsel, no journey, no dealing with the Eldar or with the other houses of the Edain; the published narrative preserves a title, a parentage, and an end. This is not unusual for the Haladin, whose internal history is reported at a distance throughout, but it is more marked in his case than in that of Halmir or Haldir, both of whom are shown acting. What he provides to the tale is continuity of the line and, at the necessary moment, its interruption.

The authority he held was real but narrow. A chieftain of Brethil commanded a small, scattered woodland folk, held no crown and no fief granted by any Elven-king in the manner of the lords of Dor-lómin, and governed a wood whose tenure depended on the continued goodwill of Doriath and on a standing obligation to keep the river-crossings clear of enemies. That obligation was set from outside; it defined the one duty on which his lordship rested and left him little room to choose a different policy when armed strength failed. He had no stronghold, no walls, and after the losses of the northern battle no reserve of men worth the name, and the nearest powers able to help — Nargothrond and the Girdle of Doriath — were each occupied with keeping themselves hidden.

Nothing beyond ordinary human capacity is claimed for him anywhere. The Haladin chieftains are credited with courage and with stubborn independence, not with long life, foresight, craft, or gifts from the Eldar; no weapon, heirloom, or token of office is associated with Handir, and no dealings with the Valar or the Wise. The single recorded test of his judgement is his decision to meet an invading force in open battle rather than let it into the forest, and it ended in defeat and in his own death. Whether that was misjudgement, or the only course open to a lord charged with holding a boundary, the text does not say and offers no material for deciding; the measure of his power is simply that it was insufficient once, and that once was enough.

Handir stands at a point where three lines of the Edain converge. Through his father he held the descent of Haleth's kindred; through his mother he was grandson of Hador of Dor-lómin; and the genealogical table of the House of Haleth printed with the later telling of Túrin's tale names his wife as Beldis, who came of the people of Bëor. If that is right, then Brandir his son carried blood from all three houses that had crossed the mountains into Beleriand, a distinction belonging to no other chieftain of Brethil. It is a striking inheritance for a man remembered chiefly for lameness and caution, and the sources make nothing of it; the marriages are recorded, the significance is left to lie where it falls.

Within the wood his nearest kin were the sons and grandsons of Halmir. His uncle Hundar had gone north with Haldir and had not returned, and Hundar's son Hunthor was therefore Handir's cousin and one of the few men of the chieftains' house left standing beside him. Hunthor's later part is instructive about the family Handir left behind: he is the one man of Brethil who both defends Brandir openly in council and goes down into the gorge at Túrin's side, and he dies there, struck by a falling stone, before the dragon is reached. Against him stands Dorlas, who despised Brandir's rule and taunted him with his lameness and with the memory of his father's fighting. The quarrel that split Brethil in Brandir's day was thus in part a quarrel about Handir — about whether a lord should ride out as he had done.

He has no adversary with a name. The force that killed him is described only as Orcs sent into his land, with no captain identified, no dragon, no servant of Angband whom the tale troubles to distinguish; the enemies that would ruin his house individually — Glaurung, and the curse carried by his own kinsman — arrived in Brethil only after he was gone. Nor did his ties outward ever become alliances in his own lifetime: the closest kinship he possessed, to the lords of Dor-lómin, produced no recorded exchange of aid in either direction, and when it finally told upon Brethil it did so through a cousin's son arriving as a hunted man rather than as a friend of the house.

The account of Handir in the published narrative rests principally on the Grey Annals, the late annalistic chronicle of Beleriand that Christopher Tolkien printed in The War of the Jewels. There the chieftains of Brethil are set out year by year, and Handir appears in the same shape he has in the finished text: son of Haldir, heir to the lordship after the northern battle, and killed when Orcs entered the forest during the years of Túrin's ascendancy in Nargothrond. The annals differ from the published chapter chiefly in manner rather than substance. As the Túrin material approaches, the entries grow compressed and increasingly defer to the fuller separate tale, so that the events of Brethil are registered as dated occurrences rather than narrated; what survives of Handir there is essentially a line in a chronicle. No earlier or rejected form of his name is recorded alongside it, and no variant of his parentage.

More is added obliquely by The Wanderings of Húrin, an unfinished late narrative of Húrin's coming to Brethil after the deaths of his children, which Tolkien never brought into final form and which stands outside the published Silmarillion altogether. It is set a short while after the events that ended Handir's house, and it takes for granted that the chieftainship had passed out of his direct line: the ruling chieftain is Hardang, descended not from Handir but from the collateral branch springing from Hundar, and his kinsman Manthor belongs to the same stock. The text is largely concerned with the resentments and legal claims within that kindred, and it shows the Haladin as a people with formal customs of succession and inheritance that the earlier writings had not developed. Handir is present in it only as a stage in a genealogy that ended, and the quarrel over who might rightfully lead is the clearest surviving indication of what his son's childless death cost the family.