Melian

Melian was of the Maiar, those spirits who came into the world with the Valar and are of the same order, though of lesser might. In Aman she was counted among the people of Lórien, the gardens of Irmo, and there she tended the flowering trees; service she gave to both Vána and Estë. Her kinship with Yavanna is said to have been older than the making of Arda itself, and something of that kinship shows in her dealings with growing things, for wherever she dwelt afterwards the woods answered to her presence. She belongs, in short, to the same company as the great servants of the Valar, and not to the Elvish kindreds among whom her later life was passed.

Among the folk of Lórien none was reckoned her equal in beauty, in wisdom, or in the songs of enchantment, and the accounts of Valinor give her singing an effect that no other Maia is credited with: at the mingling of the lights the Valar would set aside their labours, the birds fall quiet, the bells of Valmar cease, and the fountains stand still while she sang. Nightingales attended her and were taught their music by her, and they remained her sign in Middle-earth long after. This union of enchantment, song and foresight defines her nature in the tradition, and it is on this basis that later writers treat her knowledge of coming events as a thing of a different order from Elvish lore.

The name by which she is always known is its Sindarin form. The published note on the elements of Elvish names traces Melian to a Quenya form Melyanna, understood as 'dear gift', and connects it with the root mel-, 'love', which appears in a number of other names of the Eldar. No separate name for her in the speech of the Ainur is recorded. In the narratives she is distinguished by her order rather than by further personal names, as Melian the Maia, and by the style she held in Beleriand, Queen of Doriath; and the protective enchantment set about that realm carries her name in the histories as the Girdle of Melian. Her name is stressed on the first syllable, and the -ia- is two syllables rather than a glide.

Melian's coming to Middle-earth belongs to the Years of the Trees, long before the rising of the Moon. She left the gardens of the West and walked in the outer lands, and for a season she dwelt in Nan Elmoth in East Beleriand, where her birds filled the wood with song. Thither, while the Teleri waited by the western shore for their passage over the sea, came Elwë their lord, straying from his people as he went to seek Finwë his friend; the voices in the trees drew him aside, and in the dusk of the wood he found her. A spell of stillness took them both, and they remained so while the stars wheeled and long years ran out over Beleriand. His host sought him and failed, and at length Olwë his brother assumed the lordship and led the greater part of the Teleri away; those who stayed behind to search were afterwards named the Eglath, the Forsaken People.

When at last the two came forth, Elwë took the name Elu Thingol and was made king of the Sindar who had remained in Beleriand, and Melian ruled beside him; the histories know no other marriage between one of the Ainur and one of the Eldar. Their wealth and their counsel drew the Dwarves of Belegost into the making of Menegroth beside the Esgalduin, and the shapes of the deep halls were said to follow patterns she remembered out of Valinor. There, while the Trees still gave light in the West, their daughter Lúthien was born. Only after Morgoth's return to Angband, when Orcs came south and the first battle of Beleriand went hard against the Grey-elves, did Melian set out her strength upon the land: an unseen fence of shadow and bewilderment closed about the woods between Aros and Esgalduin, and none passed it against her will. From that girdle the guarded realm took its name of Doriath.

After the Noldor returned out of the West and settled in Beleriand, Melian was the first in Doriath to measure what had come with them. Galadriel spoke often with her within the Girdle, but of the deeds at Alqualondë and the words of the Doom she said nothing, and Melian drew the shape of the concealment out of her silence: a shadow lay upon the exiled princes, she judged, and the tale of their coming was not whole. She warned Thingol that the Noldor were no longer counted friends of the Valar, and that the peace of his kingdom would be measured against their fortunes. When the truth of the kinslaying reached Menegroth at last, from Angrod, it was as she had foreseen; Thingol answered by forbidding the tongue of the Noldor in his lands, and the estrangement between the two peoples began.

The Girdle held against every assault of Morgoth for the length of the Siege and beyond it, and it opened only where a greater doom required it, as when Beren son of Barahir walked unhindered through the mazes into Menegroth. Melian took no part in the bargain her husband then made, but she told him plainly what it meant: in naming a Silmaril as the price of his daughter he had bound Doriath into the fate of a far mightier realm, and had condemned either Lúthien or himself. When Beren was taken and cast into the pits of Sauron's island, it was Melian who knew of it and told Lúthien where he lay. Later, when Lúthien came back at last out of the halls of Mandos, Melian looked into her eyes and read there what had been chosen, and knew that a parting was set between them that no counsel could undo.

In the years of decline that followed the breaking of the Siege, Doriath took in fugitives from the ruined north, and Melian's dealings with the house of Húrin belong to that time. Túrin was fostered in the king's house as a child; when Beleg Cúthalion went out after him into the wild, Melian gave him a store of the waybread of the Eldar, wrapped in silver leaves and bound with her seal, and the histories mark the gift as an unusual favour, for such stores were not commonly given to those who wandered outside her protection. Morwen and her daughter Niënor came afterwards to Menegroth for refuge, and Melian counselled Morwen against riding out to seek her son; the counsel was not taken, and both were lost. Her foresight in these matters was never compulsion: she gave warning, and the choices remained with those she warned.

Within the legendarium Melian functions less as an actor than as a condition of the story around her: she counsels, she perceives, and she protects, and the narratives record almost nothing of her striking a blow or leading a force. Her authority in Menegroth was nonetheless substantive rather than ceremonial, and the accounts treat the standing of Thingol's kingship as inseparable from her presence, so that Doriath held its place among the realms of Beleriand on the strength of what she had set about it and not on the number of its spears. She was also a source of learning for others. Galadriel remained many years in Doriath and was taught much of the lore of Middle-earth there, and the later commentary on her history returns to that schooling when accounting for what she was afterwards able to do.

On the extent of her power the texts are precise in a few places and silent elsewhere. The enchantment about her realm is described as working upon the will and the senses of those who came against it rather than as any barrier of stone: a traveller was turned in his path and lost his purpose, and the condition set on it was that none should pass unless with her leave or with a might greater than her own. Her foresight is presented as perception rather than omniscience; she reads what is concealed from the shape of the concealment, and where she is not told a thing plainly she reports only that a shadow lies over it. To dwell in Middle-earth she took the form of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the histories are explicit that this was not a costume but an acceptance of constraint, binding her to the conditions of the flesh in a way the unhoused Ainur were not.

The limits are marked as clearly as the powers. Her protection was territorial and stopped at the fence; beyond it she could give warnings and gifts, but no more, and those who went out from under it were subject to whatever met them. Nor was the enchantment proof against doom: the histories account for Beren's entry, and afterwards for the irruption of the wolf Carcharoth, by the fate that drove them and by the Silmaril he carried, and neither passage is ascribed to any failure of her craft. She is never shown contesting Morgoth in strength; the Girdle turned his assaults aside without diminishing him, and the destruction of the realm came at last from within the guarded land, out of a treasure and an oath rather than out of Angband.

Every other bond in Melian's life in Middle-earth rests upon the one she made with Thingol, and the narratives present it as an unequal partnership in knowledge that was never unequal in station. She held no separate authority and issued no commands over his people; what she offered was counsel, and he was free to set it aside. On the matters of greatest weight he did so. She measured the returning Noldor before he did and was heeded only in part; she opposed the price he set upon their daughter and was overruled; and when the treasure of the Dwarves came into his keeping she told him more than once that what he prized carried a doom in it, without effect. The recurring shape of the marriage is therefore warning given and choice left standing, and it is by this that the texts distinguish her power from any compulsion.

With Lúthien the relation is one of inheritance rather than instruction. What her daughter proved able to do — the songs that undid Sauron's tower and cast sleep upon Morgoth in his own hall — the tradition ascribes to descent from the Maiar, and Lúthien's arts are treated as her mother's nature working in an Elvish frame. Beren, coming into that house as a mortal, met no hostility from her; she read him accurately and reported what she read. The bond was bounded, however, by the one thing outside her order: the choice of mortal life placed Lúthien beyond any road Melian could take after her, and that limit, not any estrangement, ended the tie.

Beyond her own house, Melian stood among the Sindar as queen without ever being of them, and no other of her order shared her life in Beleriand. Galadriel is the nearest thing to a companion of comparable stature the records allow her, and the exchange ran both ways: instruction on one side, and on the other a reticence that Melian could not break. Her chief adversary she never met. Morgoth is present in her story only as the force her enchantment turned aside, a hostility conducted at the distance of a frontier and never at close quarters.

The figure is present from the earliest stratum of the mythology, but under other names. In the Lost Tales the queen who is met dancing in the woods and who draws the Elvish lord aside from his people was first written as Tindriel, a form replaced in the manuscript by Wendelin. In the Tale of Tinúviel she appears as Gwendeling, and in the tale of the Nauglafring as Gwenethlin, while the two versions of the alliterative Lay of the Children of Húrin give Gwendeling and Gwenniel respectively. The familiar form emerges with the Lay of Leithian, where she is Melian and her husband Thingol, and from that point the naming is stable in all later writing.