Idril Celebrindal

Idril is known in the sources by a Sindarin name, as are nearly all the Noldorin princes who dwelt in Beleriand; the Quenya of Valinor was set aside as a daily tongue after the Noldor settled among the Grey-elves, and the forms preserved in the histories reflect that change. To this name is joined the byname Celebrindal, glossed in the Silmarillion's index as Silverfoot. Its elements are transparent in the Elvish tongues: celeb, the word for silver that also stands behind such names as Celeborn and Celebrant, joined with tal, foot, which appears likewise in Ramdal and Celebrindal alone among the names of the Noldorin house. The epithet is descriptive rather than titular, of the kind the Eldar readily attached to a person for a mark of bearing or appearance, and it accompanies her name so consistently that the two are usually given together.

By descent she belonged to the House of Fingolfin, and so to the Noldor who had dwelt in Eldamar under the light of the Two Trees. Her father was Turgon, the second son of Fingolfin, and her mother Elenwë; she was their only child, and no brother or sister is recorded. Her birth falls within the Years of the Trees, in the Blessed Realm and before the departure of her people, though the histories preserve no date for it. Through her father's kindred she stood close to Fingon and to Aredhel, and thus, in the reckoning of that house, to Aredhel's son Maeglin, who was her cousin.

What the texts say of her nature is brief but consistent. She is described as wise and far-sighted, and her judgement of persons is presented as a faculty rather than a mood, something her father's counsellors did not always share. In the fuller narrative of Tuor's journey she appears beside Turgon in the high court of the hidden city, the king's sole heir and second only to him in the regard of its people. No account gives her office or command; her standing rests on lineage and on the weight her word carried within her father's house.

Idril's recorded history begins with the exile of the Noldor. She went out of Aman among her father's people and was brought north with the host of Fingolfin, and so came into Middle-earth by the crossing of the Grinding Ice, a passage that cost that host many of its number. Among those lost was her mother, and Turgon thereafter had no other wife, so that his daughter stood alone beside him in his house. After the coming of the Noldor to Beleriand, Turgon held Nevrast and dwelt in his hall by the western sea, and Idril was there with him during those years; when at length the hidden city in the encircled vale was finished, after more than half a century of secret labour, she went thither with the whole of her father's folk. From that removal until the last days of the realm her life was bound to Gondolin, and the histories say nothing of any journey she made beyond its mountains.

The long peace of the hidden years is passed over swiftly in the sources, and the next event that touches her directly is the arrival of her aunt and her aunt's son from the eastern woods. Maeglin rose quickly in the king's favour and became a lord of the city, skilled in mining and in the working of metals, and Turgon set much store by his counsel. But he set his desire upon Idril, and this the Eldar held unlawful, for the children of brother and sister did not wed among them; moreover she gave him no encouragement of any kind. The texts state plainly that she perceived his mind before he spoke of it, and that from that time her regard for him cooled and she watched him. He said nothing openly, but nursed the matter in silence, and the histories mark this concealed refusal as the seed of what followed.

When the great alliance was broken in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Turgon marched out and returned with such of his people as were left to him, and the city closed itself more strictly than before. In the year of that defeat Tuor son of Huor was born, and long afterwards he came at last to Gondolin, guided by Voronwë and sent as the messenger of Ulmo. Idril appears again at that point in the narrative, present when the stranger was brought before the throne, and the fuller account of his journey breaks off soon after his coming. Ulmo's errand was that Turgon should abandon the city and go down to the sea while there was yet time; the king refused, trusting in his walls, and the counsel was set aside. Idril alone is named as sharing the misgiving, though she had no power to move her father.

Tuor remained in the city and love grew between them, and after some years they were wedded with Turgon's consent and to the joy of the people, save one. This was the second joining of Elves and Men, after Beren and Lúthien, and to Maeglin it was the bitterest of all injuries. Their son Eärendil was born not long after. In the same period Idril's foreboding deepened, and she caused a way to be delved in secret downward from her own dwelling and outward beneath the plain, issuing at a distance from the city where the mountains were watched least; the work was known to few, and above all it was kept from her kinsman. Not long after, Maeglin was taken by Orcs beyond the encircling heights, and bought his life and the promise of the city's lordship by betraying the way in; he was released and returned, and no one guessed what he had done.

The assault fell at the festival held on the eve of summer, when the watchmen were on the walls awaiting the sunrise and the enemy came over the northern heights with dragons and Balrogs and a great host of Orcs. In the burning of the city Maeglin laid hands on Idril and on the child, meaning to destroy the boy and take the mother; Tuor came upon them and fought him upon the walls and cast him down the sheer rock of the hill. Idril then gathered such of the people as could be found and brought them to the mouth of her tunnel, and by it a remnant escaped while the city was taken. Their road out of the mountains lay through a high and perilous cleft, where a Balrog assailed them and Glorfindel fought it and fell with it into the chasm, and Thorondor lifted his body up so that it might be buried under a mound of stones.

Idril's function in the legendarium is dynastic before it is anything else. She is the point at which the royal line of the Noldor in exile passes into the House of Hador and thence into the line that carries the Silmaril out of Middle-earth, and the histories treat her chiefly as the mother of Eärendil and so as an ancestress of the kings of Númenor and of Elrond and Elros. Within Gondolin itself she held no office. The city was governed by her father and its lords commanded its houses; her weight lay in blood and in the private authority of a king's only heir, which was sufficient to have a work of delving carried out unremarked but not sufficient to alter a royal decision. That limit is the most instructive thing the texts say about her: when the errand of Ulmo was rejected, she is the one person recorded as dissenting, and her dissent changed nothing.

The one faculty ascribed to her is foresight, and the sources are careful about what kind of foresight it is. She is not shown receiving visions or messages, as Tuor is; what she has is an unease that grows and an accurate reading of a man who had said nothing aloud. Her response is practical rather than declarative — a second way out, dug quietly and kept from the person she suspected — and it is presented as prudence acting on a presentiment rather than as knowledge of what would come. The distinction matters, because her foresight told her that the city was not safe but not that it would be betrayed, nor by whom, nor when. She could not name Maeglin's treason when it happened, and the assault found the city unprepared.

Nothing else in the way of power is claimed for her. She is credited with no craft, no weapon, and no deed of arms; in the sack of the city she is seized and must be rescued, and the escape through the mountains is bought by Glorfindel's death, not by any act of hers. What she does in that hour is organisational — gathering those who could be found and bringing them to the tunnel — and it is on that account, rather than on any display of strength, that the survival of the remnant is laid to her. The measure of her importance in the narrative is accordingly indirect: the line she preserved mattered more than anything she was able to do herself.

Every relationship recorded of Idril is a relationship of the house, and the house is small. Turgon is the constant: a father who kept no second wife, who set his daughter at his side in his hall, and whose regard for her the narrative never questions even as it shows him disregarding her judgement. The bond is affectionate and asymmetrical, and it is the asymmetry that the sources make legible — she can be heard without being heeded. Her mother is a name and an absence, dead before Beleriand and never again mentioned in connection with her; the histories give the daughter no memory of her, no mourning, no invocation. What remains of Elenwë in Idril's story is structural: the crossing that took her is also what left father and daughter as the whole of that branch of Fingolfin's line in the hidden realm.

Against this stands the one relationship in her life that is wholly adversarial, and it is worth noting how little of it is transacted in speech. Maeglin never declares himself to her; she never accuses him; nothing passes between them that the city could observe. The texts describe a mutual reading — his desire, her perception of it, her withdrawal — conducted entirely beneath the surface of a court in which he was honoured and she was heir. It is an unusual kind of enmity for the legendarium, which more often stages its hatreds in open challenge, and it explains why her countermeasure had to be secret: she had no charge she could lay, only a certainty she could act upon. Turgon's continuing favour toward his nephew, set beside his refusal of his daughter's misgiving, forms the quiet triangle on which the fall of the realm turns.

Her marriage runs counter to all of this. Where the kinship of the Noldor bound her to caution and concealment, the union with Tuor is presented as open, sanctioned, and glad, and the accounts stress that the people of the city rejoiced in it. It is also the relationship that carries her out of Elvish reckoning altogether: through Tuor she is joined to the Edain, through Eärendil to the fates of both kindreds, and through her son's marriage to Elwing to the house of Thingol and Melian. Of her feeling for Eärendil the sources say almost nothing directly; what they show is that she twice acted to preserve him, and that when she departed she left him a thing made in Gondolin to keep. The pattern across all these ties is consistent — she is described far more often by what she did for her kin than by what she said to them.

Idril belongs to the oldest stratum of the legendarium. She is already fully formed in the tale of the hidden city's ruin that Tolkien wrote during the First World War, the earliest sustained narrative of the mythology, where her marriage to Tuor, the birth of her son, her distrust of the king's nephew and the secret delving she ordered are all present in substance. What altered afterwards was chiefly nomenclature. The early Gnomish tongue supplied the byname Talceleb for the sense later carried by Celebrindal, and the appendix of names attached to that tale records the corresponding forms in the Qenya of the period; the personal name Idril itself survived every revision unchanged. Much later, in the philological essay on the Fëanorian pronunciation, Tolkien gave her Quenya name as Itarillë, with Itarildë beside it, of which Idril is the Sindarin equivalent — a derivation supplied only at the end of his work and never worked into any narrative.

One genuine contradiction separates the earliest conception from the published account. In the Lost Tales the lover of Lúthien was himself of Elvish kind, so that the union of Tuor and Idril stood as the first joining of Elves and Men rather than the second, and the weight the early narrative places upon it follows from that priority. The traitor's name is spelled Meglin throughout the early material, the later form appearing only with Tolkien's revisions of the Sindarin. In the condensed prose histories of the following decades her part shrinks to a few sentences, the tunnel and the escape retained and everything else compressed, and the fuller retelling begun in the last years breaks off before reaching her at all; so the detailed portrait of Idril remains, in the manuscripts, essentially the one first set down.