Húrin

Húrin came of the third house of the Edain, the folk who took their name from Hador Lórindol, and he stood close to its head: he was the son of Galdor, called the Tall, and so Hador's grandson. His mother was Hareth, a daughter of Halmir of the Haladin, so that two of the three houses of the Edain met in him. The lands his family held lay in Dor-lómin, a region of Hithlum that Fingolfin had granted to Hador, and the lordship that came to Húrin was therefore held in fief of the Noldorin king rather than by any right of conquest. With his younger brother Huor he passed part of his boyhood in Brethil among his mother's kindred, so that both houses had a claim on his upbringing.

In body he did not match his forefathers, being of lesser stature than Hador's line was reputed to be, and less tall than his own son would grow; but the accounts insist on endurance rather than size, describing him as tireless and hard to wear down, quick in mood and swift in decision. That quickness is set down to his mother's people, who were counted less fair-haired and less easily read than the folk of Hador, and whose temper he was said to share. The house he was born into was reckoned the dearest of the Edain to the Noldor: its people learned the Grey-elven speech readily and were bound to the Elven-kings of Hithlum by service and by friendship, though they kept a tongue of their own.

The name Húrin is nowhere given a translation in the published narratives; like Galdor, Huor and Hador, it is Sindarin in form, reflecting the habit of his house of taking Elvish names. The weight of meaning falls instead on his byname, Thalion, which the texts render as the Steadfast, or Dauntless; the same element stands in Cúthalion, the name borne by Beleg the archer of Doriath. Beside it he is titled Lord of Dor-lómin, a style of place and office rather than of praise. In pronunciation the accented vowel is long, as marked, and the stress falls on the first syllable.

The first deed recorded of Húrin belongs to his boyhood in Brethil. He was seventeen, and Huor thirteen, when they rode out with the Haladin against an Orc-raid and were cut off from their company near the fords of the Brithiach; pursued, they would have been taken had a mist not risen off the waters of Sirion and hidden them, a concealment afterwards ascribed to Ulmo. Wandering north into Dimbar and up under the Encircling Mountains, they were found by the Eagles of Thorondor and borne over the heights into Gondolin. Turgon received them gladly, both for their kinship with Hador's house and because Ulmo had counselled him to show favour to the Edain, and they dwelt in the hidden city for the better part of a year. When they asked leave to go home to their own folk, Turgon granted it against his custom, binding them by oath never to speak of the road they had come; the Eagles carried them back by night, and neither brother told even their father where they had been.

The lordship came to him young. In the assault that followed the breaking of the Siege, Galdor was slain by an arrow at the fortress of Eithel Sirion, and Húrin, who was there beside him, took up both the defence and the rule of Dor-lómin. He married Morwen, called Eledhwen, a daughter of Baragund of the house of Bëor who had come as a fugitive out of ruined Dorthonion. Their son Túrin was born to them, and a daughter, Urwen, whom the household called Lalaith for her laughter; she died in her fourth year of a sickness carried on a wind out of the north, and the grief of it marked the boy who survived her. When the summons to the Union of Maedhros came, Húrin rode east leaving Morwen with child; the daughter born in his absence, Nienor, he was never to see.

At the Nirnaeth Arnoediad he and Huor led the men of Dor-lómin in the western host under Fingon, and they stood beside Turgon when the host of Gondolin came unlooked-for out of the south. After Fingon's fall, with the day lost, the brothers held the passage of the marshes at the Fens of Serech so that Turgon might draw off his people southward down Sirion and keep the secret of his city alive; Huor, according to the accounts, foretold at that parting that from his line and Turgon's a new hope would rise. Huor fell there, pierced in the eye by a venomed arrow, and the men of Hador died about him to the last. Húrin fought on alone with an axe, crying out at every stroke that the day would return, and the tally set down for him is seventy of Gothmog's troll-guard. He was not slain: Morgoth had commanded that he be taken living, and the Orcs bore him down by weight of numbers, clinging to him with severed limbs until he was bound and dragged to Angband.

What Morgoth wanted of him was the road to Gondolin, and he offered rank and power for it. Húrin answered with contempt, naming his captor a coward who would not come out from his fortress to face the kings of the Noldor, and refused what he could not have given without breaking his oath. Morgoth then laid a curse upon him and upon his wife and children, and set him in a high seat of stone upon Thangorodrim, bound by a power he could not shake off, where he sat unaging and undying for twenty-eight years while his family's ruin went forward far away. What he was permitted to see and hear of it came to him through the sight of Morgoth himself, so that every report was true in substance and poisoned in its telling.

When Túrin and Nienor were dead Morgoth released him, calculating that a broken and embittered man would do more damage at liberty than in chains. He went first to the mountain-wall about Gondolin and called aloud upon Turgon at the place where the hidden road had once begun; no gate opened, but the watchers of Angband marked where he stood, and the last secrecy of the city was thereby weakened. Turning south, he came at length to the standing stone raised above Cabed Naeramarth in memory of his children, and found Morwen sitting there, grey and near her end. They spoke together only briefly before she died at sunset, and he buried her beside the stone and went on.

In the structure of the tale Húrin is a vassal-lord rather than a king: he held Dor-lómin in fief and led its levies as a captain under the Noldorin kings of Hithlum, and every office attributed to him is a delegated one. Among Men of the First Age his standing was singular in a single respect. He was one of the very few mortals ever admitted to a hidden Elvish realm and permitted to leave it alive with its secret in keeping, and that made him valuable to Morgoth as no other Man was. What the Enemy tried to take from him was knowledge, not strength, and the whole of his importance in the later narrative turns on that fact: his silence preserved one hidden kingdom for a season, and his freedom, when it was at last granted him, brought two of them to ruin.

Powers in any preternatural sense he had none. What the texts credit to him is entirely human: strength above the common measure, an endurance that outlasted his opponents, skill at arms, and a temper that did not give way under pressure. He is nowhere described as possessing foresight, healing, or any craft of the sort attributed to the Elves or to Melian, and the marvels that touch his life are all worked by others — the mist upon Sirion, the Eagles of the Crissaegrim, the binding laid on him in the north, and the perception that undid Morgoth's work upon him at Menegroth. Even his survival unaging through the long years of his captivity was a condition imposed on him for a purpose, not any virtue of his own.

The limits are drawn plainly in the narrative. His refusal kept a secret but saved no one who depended on him: his land was taken from his house and given over to incoming Easterlings, his wife and children were left without protection, and from his seat he could act in no way at all. What was granted him was sight, and the sight was true in what it showed and false in what it left out, so that it was his understanding rather than his will that Morgoth overmastered. Once released he commanded no host, held no land, and had nothing left to give but the use his captor had intended. Against all this the texts set one boundary, and Húrin himself names it in defiance: that the Enemy's dominion did not extend past the confines of the world, and that beyond them his hatred could not follow.

The marriage at the centre of Húrin's life is drawn as a pairing of opposites. He was quick of speech and quick to laugh; Morwen was grave, proud, and sparing of words, and the texts note that people found her hard to approach and were slow to grow easy in her presence. The difference passed down unevenly to their children: the daughter who died young took after Hador's folk in her fairness and her lightness of heart, while Túrin was dark like his mother and was judged from early on to have inherited her temper rather than his father's. Húrin's brother made a match within the same kindred, taking to wife a kinswoman of Morwen's, so that the two brothers of Dor-lómin were bound to two women of the same fallen house. Something of Húrin's ordinary bearing survives in a smaller detail: he kept in his household a lame man, once a woodwright, whose injury had left him of little practical use, and let him stay on unbegrudged.

Outward, his strongest ties ran to Elves rather than to other Men. He held his land under Fingon and fought in his host, and the friendship formed with Turgon in the hidden city outlasted a separation of decades on both sides; it was reckoned the closest bond between any mortal and a Noldorin king save that of Beren with Thingol's house. That friendship is also what made him worth taking alive, and it is the reason his fidelity cost him everything: the oath he kept was sworn to a king who could not learn of the keeping and could offer nothing in return.

Against these stands a relationship of a different order. Morgoth's attention to him was personal and sustained over a span longer than most of the friendships in the tale, an enmity that did not slacken and that reached its object through his wife and children rather than directly. Two encounters at the end measure what it had done to him. Mîm he killed at once, in a quarrel he could settle with his hands; Thingol, whom he had never met and to whom he owed a debt he could not acknowledge, bore his insults without answering them. It was Melian, neither enemy nor kinswoman, who spoke to him in a way that let him see the borrowed malice in his own words.

The character appears in the earliest stratum of the mythology under the name Úrin, in the tale of Turambar and the Foalókë, where his wife is called Mavwin and his daughter Nienóri, and where his own part is compressed into a frame around his son's story. The essentials were fixed from the start: he was taken in the great battle that later bore the name Nirnaeth Arnoediad, he refused what his captor demanded of him, and he was set upon a height by Melko — the name Morgoth carried in that period — and held there by enchantment to watch a curse work itself out upon his children far away. What the later drafts altered was less his temper or his defiance than the shape of what he did once he was released.

In the tale of the Nauglafring the freed Úrin gathers about him not masterless Men but a company of Elves gone wild in the woods, and leads them to the caves where the dragon's hoard lay. The dwarf who sat upon that treasure was killed there, as in the later telling, but he cursed the gold as he died, and it is that curse, rather than any single ornament, which carries the ruin into Tinwelint's halls: the whole hoard is brought and flung down before the king, and the famous necklace is made only afterwards, by Dwarves working the metal at his command. At the far end of the writing stands the longest treatment the figure ever received, the Wanderings of Húrin, which follows him after his release through Brethil in much greater detail than any earlier version — his reception by the people of the forest, the hostility of their chieftain, the assembly called on his account, and the strife that broke them. None of it was brought into the published Silmarillion, which passes from Morwen's death to Nargothrond without the episode.