Maedhros

Maedhros was born in Aman in the Years of the Trees, the eldest of the seven sons of Fëanor and of Nerdanel, and so a Noldo of the direct line of Finwë, first lord of that people. His descent joined two very different tempers. From his father came the line of Míriel and the restless brilliance of the greatest craftsman of the Noldor; from his mother came the house of Mahtan, a smith whom Aulë held dear, and a steadiness of mood that the chronicles set deliberately against Fëanor's fire. The brief catalogue of Fëanor's sons in The Silmarillion distinguishes his brothers by gift or aspect — Maglor by his singing, Curufin by the craft he inherited most fully, Celegorm and Caranthir by colouring, the younger Amrod and Amras by their likeness to one another — while Maedhros is marked only by height and by precedence as the eldest.

The name under which he is remembered is not the name he bore in Valinor. Like the other princes of the Noldor, he is known in the Beleriandic tradition by a Sindarin form, for after the exiles settled among the Grey-elves they took up the speech of Beleriand for daily use, the more so once Thingol forbade the open use of Quenya in his realm; the High Speech survived among them chiefly as a tongue of lore and of lords speaking privately together. The published narrative accordingly preserves no Quenya name for him at all, and offers no gloss of the Sindarin one. What it does attach, steadily and almost as a fixed formula, is the epithet of stature: Maedhros the Tall, the tallest of Fëanor's house.

His name passed in turn into the map of Beleriand. The open country east of Dorthonion, watched from the bare hill of Himring — a name glossed in the geography of that land as the Ever-cold — came to be called the March of Maedhros, so that the northern frontier of the Fëanorian lands carried his name as its title. Of his own disposition the tradition says little directly, save that among his brothers he was the one least willing to press his father's quarrel with the house of Fingolfin, holding to a friendship formed in Tirion before the Noldor ever left Aman.

Maedhros first enters the record of great events at Tirion, where he stood with his brothers to swear the oath that bound the house of Fëanor to pursue the Silmarils against any claimant. He followed his father to Alqualondë and fought in the first slaying of Elf by Elf, and he went with the Fëanorian host over the sea in the stolen white ships. At Losgar, when Fëanor set fire to those ships rather than send them back for Fingolfin's people, Maedhros alone took no part in the burning and drew away from it, for he did not wish to abandon Fingon. Soon after the landing came the battle in Mithrim against the orc-host sent out from Angband, won by the Noldor but ending in Fëanor's death of the wounds the Balrogs dealt him in the hills before Angband's gates. The lordship of the Fëanorians, and with it the leadership of the Noldor then in Beleriand, passed to Maedhros as the eldest son.

Morgoth answered the Noldor's victory with an embassy, offering terms and even the surrender of a Silmaril. Maedhros received the offer intending treachery of his own and came to the meeting with a force greater than had been agreed; Morgoth had sent a greater force still, and the whole company was destroyed save Maedhros, who was taken alive. He was hung from a sheer face of Thangorodrim by a steel band about his right wrist, and Morgoth refused to release him unless the Noldor abandoned the war and departed. He was delivered at last by Fingon, who went alone and unadvised into the north and found him by answering song, and who was borne up to the cliff by Thorondor when he could not climb to it. Unable to loose the band, and at Maedhros's own asking, Fingon struck off the hand above the wrist and brought him back to the camps. Maedhros recovered, learned to fight left-handed, and was accounted more formidable afterwards than before.

The rescue reopened dealings between the two houses. Maedhros asked pardon for the desertion at Losgar and yielded the kingship of the Noldor to Fingolfin as the elder in years of the surviving princes of Finwë's line, though several of his brothers, and Curufin most openly, resented the surrender. To lessen the friction he then led the Fëanorians away from Mithrim into the wide lands east of Dorthonion, where the sons of Fëanor divided the marches and the passes between them. Through the long peace that followed the third battle, a watch upon Angband that held for close on four hundred years, Maedhros kept the most exposed post of that eastern frontier and remained the ally of Fingon and Fingolfin, so that the old grievance was contained rather than healed.

The siege was broken by the sudden fire out of Angband. The pass of Aglon was forced and Celegorm and Curufin fled south to Nargothrond, and the level ground held by Maglor was overrun, but Maedhros held his hill, and the assault could not take it; Maglor's people withdrew to him there. In the years after that ruin Maedhros began to gather strength again, taking Easterling followers into service with his brothers, and the deeds of Beren and Lúthien encouraged him to attempt what became known as the Union of Maedhros, a coordinated assault by two hosts from east and west. Fingon, by then High King, joined it, and Turgon came out of hiding with a great force; but Thingol would give no aid because of the Silmaril and the conduct of Celegorm and Curufin, and Nargothrond sent only a small company against the wish of its king.

The plan failed in the field. Maedhros's eastern host was delayed by the contrivance of Uldor, one of the Easterlings in Fëanorian service, and Fingon in the west was forced into battle before the two armies could close. When Maedhros at last came up, Uldor's people turned upon his rear at the decisive moment and fresh enemies fell on his flank; the eastern host was broken, though Maglor killed Uldor and the faithful Easterlings under Bór died holding the treachery in check. No son of Fëanor was slain in that battle, but all were wounded, and their following was destroyed as a power. Maedhros brought the survivors away southward and thereafter the brothers lived as landless wanderers in the country between the mountains and Ossiriand, no longer lords of a march.

Within the legendarium Maedhros functions less as a solitary figure of might than as the holder of an office: he is the head of a house and the warden of a frontier, and his importance is measured by what that position permitted and prevented. The lands he took after leaving Mithrim were not a retreat but the most exposed sector of the Elvish line, and the geography of Beleriand is described in terms of that arrangement, with his brothers set along the passes and plains to the south and east of him while he kept the bare hill that faced Angband most directly. His capacities are consistently those of an Elvish lord rather than anything beyond them: command in the field, the ordering of a march, and the making and keeping of agreements between peoples who had cause to distrust one another. It was in that last capacity that he and Maglor came to Fingolfin's feast of reconciliation with warriors of the eastern march, a gesture of policy as much as of goodwill.

The high point of his effective power is recorded in the preparations for the Union, when the strength he had assembled drove the servants of Angband out of the northern regions of Beleriand and reopened roads that had been closed since the breaking of the siege. That success also marks the boundary of what he could achieve. He could gather and equip a host, but he could not command Thingol's help, nor overrule the king of Nargothrond, nor restrain his own brothers from acts that made such help impossible; the alliance he built was assembled from consent that could be withheld, and much of it was. Nor did his authority reach the Men who fought under his standard, whose loyalties he had no means of testing before the day they were needed.

Among his brothers Maedhros held the precedence of the eldest rather than the authority of a ruler, and the tradition is careful to show the difference. Maglor stood nearest him, the one who followed his policy most consistently and who remained with him after the others had fallen; yet even there the relation was not simple obedience, for at the last it was Maedhros who overbore Maglor's reluctance rather than Maglor who checked him. With Celegorm and Curufin his dealings were those of a head of house attempting restraint after the fact: he could disavow what was done in the woods of Doriath, and he could not undo it. The pattern repeats through his life — he was answerable for his brothers' acts to everyone outside the house, and able to govern them within it hardly at all.

The bond that most shapes his portrait runs outside his own family, to Fingon of the house of Fingolfin. It is the single relationship in the Noldorin exile that survives every reason it had to break, and the chronicles use it as the hinge on which the two houses turn from feud toward alliance. Its limits are as instructive as its strength: the friendship was personal and did not transfer, so that while Maedhros and Fingon acted together for two ages of the sun, the estrangement of the Fëanorians from Doriath and from Nargothrond persisted, inherited from deeds their eldest had not counselled. When Fingon fell, Maedhros lost not only a king and a kinsman but the one tie through which his own house could still be counted among the friends of the Eldar.

With Men his record is divided precisely. The people of Bór, who followed him and Maglor, held faith to their deaths, while the sons of Ulfang, sworn to Caranthir, sold the eastern host to Angband; the same willingness to take Men into service produced both. Against Morgoth the enmity is unusually intimate for the legendarium, since Morgoth had held him, bargained over him, and set him up as a token of what defiance would cost — an adversary who had used him as an instrument before ever meeting him in war.

Through the earlier phases of the legendarium the figure is Maidros, and the spelling holds steady across many years of writing: it stands in the Lost Tales account of the assault upon Dior's household, in the alliterative verse of the Húrin lay, and in the compressed prose narratives of the nineteen-thirties, where the coalition of the Fifth Battle is accordingly the Union of Maidros. Much of the surrounding nomenclature was still unsettled at that stage. The two youngest sons of Fëanor were Damrod and Díriel rather than Amrod and Amras, the cousin who came to the rescue is called Finweg, an earlier form of Fingon, and the hill of the eastern outpost appears as Himling before it became Himring. The substance of the story — the captivity, the severed hand, the surrender of the kingship, the alliance built and broken — was present early and altered little; what changed was chiefly naming and the density of the telling.

The fullest treatment of his names is late and belongs to a linguistic essay rather than to any narrative. There the father-name is Nelyafinwë, marking him as the third Finwë and pressing the claim of Fëanor's line to the succession, a claim the other branches of the house resented; the mother-name is Maitimo, referring to beauty of form; and beside these he bore the by-name Russandol, from the copper-brown hair he took from Nerdanel's kindred, a colouring of Mahtan's house and not of Finwë's. The Sindarin name by which he is remembered is explained there as a blend of the mother-name and the by-name rather than a rendering of either, which accounts for its having no single Quenya original behind it. The same essay supplies father-names of like pattern for all seven brothers, so that his stands at the head of a set.