Malach

Malach was one of the Edain, the Men who in the First Age crossed the Blue Mountains and came into Beleriand, and within that migration he belonged to the third and most numerous of the three kindreds, the folk led by his father Marach. This people came last over the mountains, marching in ordered companies rather than straggling, and were remembered as tall, strong and ready for war, fair-haired for the most part; when they had passed into Beleriand they dwelt for a time in Estolad, the land east of the river Celon and south of Nan Elmoth, where the Edain gathered before their several departures. The published accounts give Malach no more of a personal setting than this: he is named as Marach's son, without a mother, a birth-date, or any title of lordship, and it is his descent and his second name that the record preserves.

He carries two names. Malach is the name of his own kindred, in the tongue the folk of Marach had brought with them out of the East; it is not translated anywhere in the narrative and no meaning is attached to it. Aradan is the name the Elves gave him during the years he spent among them, after he had learned their speech, and it is Sindarin in form. The Quenta itself offers no gloss, but the list of name-elements appended to the work accounts for both halves: ara-, an element of the sense high, noble or royal, joined to adan, the Elvish word for Man and the singular of Edain. The compound is thus best read as something like noble Man, or Man of high rank, and it belongs to a wider habit of the age, by which Men who came to live among the Eldar received Elvish names beside their own.

In the genealogy of the Edain, Malach stands at the head of the chief line of his house rather than at its beginning. From him came his son Magor, from Magor came Hathol, and from Hathol came Hador Lórindol, in whose day the kindred ceased to be called the folk of Marach and was thereafter known as the House of Hador. Malach himself is never styled lord of that house in the surviving text, and the narrative treats him as the point at which the family's connection with the Elves begins; the double naming that starts with him, a mannish name matched by a Sindarin one, recurs in his descendants and marks the house through the rest of its history in Beleriand.

Everything the published narrative records of Malach belongs to a single stretch of quiet years. His father's people crossed the mountains during the long peace that followed the Dagor Aglareb, when the Noldor still held Angband besieged and the north of Beleriand was safe enough for newcomers to be settled rather than merely defended, and the Quenta assigns no year of the Sun to any event of his life. When the Edain had halted in the empty lands granted to them east of the Elvish realms, Fingolfin, as High King of the Noldor, sent messengers to greet them; the welcome was more than a formality, for the Eldar had already taken the measure of these Men and found them valiant and quick to learn. The immediate consequence was a movement of the young: many eager men of the three kindreds left their families and went west and north to take service with Elvish kings and lords, and the son of Marach was one of them.

Malach went to Hithlum, the land held by Fingolfin himself, and remained there fourteen years. The text gives that number and little else: not the manner of his going, not what office or arms he bore, not whether he returned to his kindred at the end of the term. What it does record is what he carried away. In those years he learned the tongue of the Eldar, and the Elves among whom he lived gave him the name Aradan, so that he came back into the traditions of his own people bearing a Sindarin name beside his native one. The fourteen years are the earliest instance in the annals of a bond between the folk of Marach and the house of Fingolfin, and that bond outlasted him by generations.

While men of his generation were dispersing into Elvish service, the settlements they had left behind grew uneasy. Emissaries of Morgoth moved among the Edain in secret, and discontent hardened into open argument: some held that the Eldar had drawn Men west only to be spent as a shield against the Enemy, others that the debt of welcome was real and should be honoured. Bereg of the first kindred spoke for departure, and so, it seemed, did Amlach son of Imlach, and therefore a grandson of Marach and a kinsman of Malach's own house. Amlach afterwards denied the words attributed to him, and it was concluded that a phantom in his likeness had sat in the council; in anger he took service with Maedhros, while Bereg led about a thousand of his people back east over the mountains and out of the tale. Malach is not named anywhere in this quarrel, and no position is ascribed to him in it.

The dispersal that followed carried his kindred away from the eastern lands for good, and the direction it took was the one his own youth had prefigured. Marach's folk moved north and west, and in the fourth generation from Malach the Elvish kings gave them a country of their own: Hador Lórindol, who had been reared in Fingolfin's household as Malach had once lodged in Fingolfin's realm, received the lordship of Dor-lómin, and his people settled in the land of Hithlum where their forefather had spent his fourteen years. There the Elvish speech Malach had learned became the common tongue of the household and the court, and the folk of Hador were reckoned the dearest to the Eldar of all the kindreds of Men and the readiest to take up their language and lore.

Of Malach's later years, his death and his burial the published accounts say nothing whatever. He is given no lordship over his father's people, no battle, no last words; the narrative uses him once, to explain how a Sindarin name and the Elvish tongue entered the chief line of the third kindred, and then passes to his descendants. This silence is not unusual for the generations between Marach and Hador, whom the Quenta treats as a genealogical bridge rather than as actors, but it is conspicuous beside what came after. Within a few lifetimes the peace that framed Malach's whole recorded life was gone: when the Siege of Angband broke in the Dagor Bragollach, Hador fell in the defence of Fingolfin's fortress at Eithel Sirion, and the alliance between the house of Marach and the Noldorin king that began with a young man's fourteen years in Hithlum ended in the ruin of both houses.

Malach's function in the Quenta is documentary rather than active. The chapter that introduces the Edain makes a general statement — that after Fingolfin's greeting many young men of the three kindreds went away to serve Elvish kings and lords — and then names one of them, with a term of years attached. He is, in effect, the instance by which a movement of a whole generation is made concrete, and the narrative asks nothing further of him. No office is recorded: he is not sent as an envoy, given no command, entrusted with no message, and takes no part in any council or campaign. The decisions that shaped his people in those years, the grant of lands and the later dispersals, are made by others and reported without reference to him.

Nothing beyond ordinary mortal capacity is attributed to him anywhere in the published matter. He works no craft, bears no named weapon or heirloom, and is credited with no feat of arms, no wisdom-saying and no foresight; the one ability the text does record is that he learned the speech of the Eldar, and even that is presented as a trait of his kindred rather than a distinction of his own. The Eldar are said to have found these Men valiant and quick to learn, and the folk of Marach in particular took to the Elvish tongue more readily than the other kindreds. Whatever standing Malach acquired in Hithlum came from the favour of the king who received him, not from any power he possessed, and it evidently did not extend to a lordship, since the text never gives him one.

His weight in the legendarium is therefore consequential rather than personal: the tie between his father's people and the house of Fingolfin, and the Elvish speech and Elvish naming that followed from it, run forward from him to the House of Hador and its part in the wars of Beleriand. That is a real effect, but it is not evidence of ability, and the later eminence of his descendants should not be read backwards into him. He is also mortal, and the record grants him no exception; he vanishes from the narrative without a death-scene, and the silence around his end is the plainest measure of the small space the tradition allotted him.

Every relationship the tradition grants Malach is one of descent, and all of it runs through men. He stands between a father who led a people and a son through whom that people's chief line continued, and the record supplies nothing on either side of that vertical line: no wife, no mother, no brother named as such, no companion or sworn follower, not even a household. This is partly the habit of the genealogies of the Edain, which were kept as lines of inheritance rather than as accounts of families, and the tables appended to the Quenta reproduce the same narrowness. The effect on Malach in particular is that he has no lateral ties at all in the text, and cannot be shown acting toward anyone as an equal.

The one bond the narrative does describe is with Elves rather than kin, and it is worth measuring against the parallel case in the first kindred. Bëor's attachment to Finrod was personal and permanent: he entered that lord's household as an old man's whole remaining life, and his people kept the connection with the sons of Finarfin in Dorthonion afterwards. What is recorded of Malach is different in kind, a stay of fixed length in another king's country from which he returned to his own folk; nothing in the account makes him a vassal, and no oath, gift or office marks the arrangement. Yet the tie he formed with Fingolfin's realm proved as durable for his house as Bëor's did for the first kindred, which suggests that among the Edain such bonds were understood to hold between peoples and not only between the men who made them.

Set beside his own generation, Malach also marks one pole of a divided response to the Eldar. His kinsman of the following generation turned instead to Maedhros and the eastern lords, and a spokesman of Bëor's folk led a thousand back over the mountains rather than accept Elvish neighbours at all; the second kindred, meanwhile, kept largely to itself, held to its own speech and took no such service. Malach appears in none of these disputes and is never given a side in them. His relationships are therefore best described as those of a man the tradition remembered for a single choice made young, whose kin quarrelled around him without his being recorded as party to it.