Hathol

Hathol belonged to the Third House of the Edain, the folk who followed Marach out of the East and who are named in the Quenta after him until his descendants gave the house another name. His descent is set out plainly in the account of the coming of Men into Beleriand: Marach begot Malach, who was called Aradan; Malach begot Magor; and Magor begot Hathol. He stands, in other words, in the fourth generation of a line that the chroniclers of the Elder Days were careful to preserve, and the notice given to him is the notice given to a link in a chain rather than to a man with a story of his own. Nothing is recorded of his mother, his wife, or any brothers or sisters.

The name Hathol is left unglossed in the published texts, and no meaning is attached to it in the narrative where it appears. In form it keeps company with Marach, Malach, and Magor, names that belong to the speech the Third House brought west with it rather than to Sindarin. That distinction is visible in the same passage, for the tale records how his great-grandfather Malach, having spent years among the Elves and learned their tongue, was given the Elvish by-name Aradan, and how his son would be known by the Sindarin epithet Lórindol. Hathol himself bears no such second name in the record.

His people were the last of the three kindreds of the Edain to pass into Beleriand, and they were the most numerous; the tall and golden-haired appearance for which his house became known is described of his kin rather than of him. Where Hathol dwelt, and in what part of the northern lands his life fell, the texts do not say, and the genealogies that later editors set out beside the tale of Húrin's children carry his name without further comment. What is certain is only his place between Magor before him and Hador after him.

A history of Hathol can only be a history of the years through which he must have lived, for the record preserves no act of his and attaches no date to him. The published narrative of the Elder Days does not number the years of the early generations of the Edain in Beleriand at all; such annalistic reckoning as exists for the house belongs to material outside the Quenta, and the tale itself moves from one generation to the next without counting. What can be established is that his life fell between two moments that are described: the passage of his people over the mountains into the western lands, and the entry of his son into the service of the Noldorin kings. Everything set down about him lies in the space between those two events.

The events that shaped the first of those moments happened two generations before him. Men came westward over Ered Luin in three kindreds, and those who followed Marach crossed last, settling for a time in the eastern marches near the folk who had come before them. There they were suffered to remain by the leave of the Elven-kings, and there the long argument arose among Men that the chronicle sets at Estolad, when some urged a return east over the mountains and others held that their fortune now lay with the Eldar. That debate broke the unity of the kindreds: a part turned back and passed out of the tale, while the greater number scattered west and north and took service with the princes of the Noldor. Hathol's forebears stood on the side that stayed.

That dispersal, and the movement of his kindred toward the northern lands under the shadow of Ered Wethrin, is the setting in which his generation must be placed, though the chronicle does not follow the Third House year by year through it. What it does record is the outcome in the generation after him. His son came in youth into the household of Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor, and won such regard there that the king granted him the lordship of Dor-lómin to hold in fief. From that grant the house took both a settled country and a new name, for its people were called after Hador thereafter and no longer after Marach. Hathol is therefore the last man of his line to be numbered under the older name alone, and he is named in the chronicle at the very sentence in which the change is introduced.

The later history of the house belongs to his son and grandsons, and it is a martial one. When the Siege of Angband was broken and Morgoth's fire came down over the northern plain, Hador held the fortress of Eithel Sirion for the High King, and he fell there with his younger son Gundor while covering Fingolfin's retreat. The lordship of Dor-lómin passed to his elder son Galdor, and the men of that house remained in the wars of Beleriand as the chief strength of the Edain in the north. It is at the introduction of Hador into this narrative that Hathol's name is carried, for the chronicler names the lord of Dor-lómin by his father and grandfather when he first sets him among the hosts of the kings.

The line that ran through him did not end with the fall of Dor-lómin. Galdor's sons were Húrin and Huor, and from Húrin came Túrin, whose ruin is told at length; from Huor came Tuor, who was brought to the hidden city of Gondolin and there wedded Idril daughter of Turgon. Their son was Eärendil, whose voyage into the West brought the aid that overthrew Morgoth, and Eärendil's son Elros became the first king of Númenor. Reckoned forward, Hathol stands four generations before Eärendil and at the head of the mortal descent from which the Númenórean kings and, through them, the line of Elendil derive. Nothing in the texts suggests that any of this was foreseen at his own time, and nothing is said of how or when his own life ended.

Hathol's role in the legendarium is entirely transmissive: he exists in the text as a patronymic, a name carried in the introduction of another man. The chronicle of the Edain uses this device throughout its account of the Three Houses, naming a lord by his father and grandfather in order to fix him in a known descent, and Hathol appears in exactly that position and no other. No office is attached to him. The fief that his house came to hold was a grant made by an Elven-king to the generation after his own, which means that nothing in the record permits him to be called a lord of any land, a captain of any host, or a chieftain of his kindred; the sources say only that men of his people had leave to dwell where the Eldar suffered them, and they do not name who among them led.

Of powers in any stronger sense there is nothing to report, and the silence is not an accident of transmission. The Edain of the Elder Days are described as mortal Men, short-lived beside the Eldar and subject to the fate appointed to their kind, and the chronicle nowhere ascribes to any of the three kindreds an art or faculty beyond the ordinary. What distinguished the Third House in the eyes of the Noldor was stature, fidelity, and skill in arms, qualities the tale illustrates in the deeds of Hathol's son and his son's sons rather than in his own; and even those are the qualities of soldiers and vassals, not of powers. Where a member of that line does something the chronicle marks as extraordinary, it is by the gift of others or by a doom laid upon him, never by an inherent strength of the house.

The limit worth stating plainly is this: the compression of the narrative accounts for the emptiness of his entry, and that emptiness cannot be read either as obscurity or as significance. The Quenta moves through several generations of Men in a few sentences because its subject is the Silmarils and the wars of the Noldor, not the domestic history of the Edain, and many names in that stretch of the tale are given the same single mention. Any statement about what Hathol did, held, or was esteemed for is therefore extrapolation from his kindred and not evidence about him. His weight in the legendarium is retrospective, conferred by what came after and not by anything attested of himself.

The one bond that can be traced through Hathol with any confidence is the one his house held with the princes of the Noldor, and it was an inheritance rather than an achievement. It began two generations before him, when his great-grandfather went north into Hithlum and lived a long while among the people of Fingolfin, returning with their speech and an Elvish by-name. It was completed two generations later, when a grant of land in fief made the friendship formal and turned a wandering kindred into vassals with a country of their own. Hathol occupies the middle of that arc, and the chronicle gives him no part in either end of it. What his position does show is that the attachment between his family and that particular Elven-king was old, continuous, and older than any oath or tenure; it was kept up across the lifetimes of men who are otherwise unrecorded.

Sideways, toward the other kindreds of the Edain, the record is thinner still. His folk had settled near the people of Bëor in the eastern lands, but the two were distinct in tongue and custom and are described as neighbours rather than as one people, while the third kindred, the Haladin, kept apart from both by choice. The marriages that eventually knit the three houses together fall after Hathol: his grandson took a wife from among the Haladin, and his great-grandson wedded a woman of the house of Bëor. In his own generation the Third House was still a thing unto itself, and nothing suggests he stood in any relation to the other Edain but that of a man among allied strangers.

Of enemies he has none that the texts will name. The enmity that consumed his descendants was directed at a power in the north whose war was with the Eldar first and with Men only as their allies, and it fell upon the house in the generations that held the fortresses and the fief, not upon the one that had neither. There is a quiet asymmetry worth noting here: the Elven-lords who befriended his great-grandfather were the same persons who later received his son, for their lives spanned the whole of his line's rise, while three generations of mortal men passed between one meeting and the other. Whatever Hathol's dealings with the Eldar were, they were with people who would remember them long after he was gone.

The pedigree in which Hathol stands was not present in the earliest forms of the legend, and the layers of drafting published in The History of Middle-earth show it forming late. In the tale of the fall of Gondolin written during the First World War, Tuor is given a wholly different descent, from a father and grandfather among the folk of Hisilómë, and neither Hador nor a house named after him has any part in it. In the Quenta of 1930 the three fathers of the Edain themselves lead their peoples over the mountains into Beleriand, so that the chieftain of the golden-haired folk is the man who made the crossing rather than the descendant of one who did. There is no room in that scheme for the generations that later stand between the passage west and the lordship in the north, and so none for Hathol.

The names of those intermediate generations belong to the reworking that opened this space, and his is one of them. Its shape invites a philological remark that the narrative texts do not make: the word-list of the mid-1930s printed in The Lost Road glosses a Noldorin word of just this form as 'axe', and nothing in the drafts connects the two. The silence is worth noting, because in his late essay on the dealings of Dwarves and Men Tolkien treated the speech of Marach's people as the ancestor of the Adûnaic of Númenor, a tongue held apart from Elvish; the Elvish cast of several names in this same line is thus a question the drafts raise without resolving. What the drafts do not do is alter his position or supply him with any deed. The revisions touch the frame around him, never the man.