Morwen

Morwen belonged to the House of Bëor, the first of the three houses of the Edain to cross into Beleriand and enter the service of the Eldar. Her father was Baragund, a nephew of Barahir and one of the outlaw company that held out in Dorthonion after the Dagor Bragollach; through that line she was a close kinswoman of Beren son of Barahir, being his first cousin. When the northern lands fell and the remnant of Bëor's people was scattered, Morwen was brought south as a young woman into Dor-lómin, the region of Hithlum granted to the House of Hador, and there she came to dwell among a people not her own. Her marriage to Húrin Thalion, son of Galdor and lord of Dor-lómin, joined the two chief lines of the Edain of the north, and by it she became the mother of Túrin and, later, of Niënor.

Her name is Sindarin in form, as were the names borne by many of the Edain who had long lived under Elvish tutelage, and it carries the sense of darkness, in keeping with the black hair and grey eyes that the folk of Bëor commonly bore. To this was added the epithet Eledhwen, rendered as Elfsheen, given for a beauty that seemed to those who saw her to belong rather to the Firstborn than to mortal women. The by-name is glossed elsewhere with the meaning Elven-fair, and the element eledh is the Sindarin word for an Elf. In the manner of the Edain she was also known by her holding, as the Lady of Dor-lómin, a style that clung to her in the memory of that land after the lordship itself had passed out of her house.

In temperament Morwen was held to be proud and stern, sparing of speech and slow to ask help of any, and the sorrows that came upon her house hardened rather than softened that reserve. Those who knew her measured her by a certain coldness of bearing that concealed both grief and a stubborn courage; she was reckoned by the Elves to be of high heart, and her pride was of the kind that will not stoop to a conqueror. This disposition sets the terms for nearly everything told of her afterwards, for her decisions in Dor-lómin and beyond followed from it as much as from circumstance, and it was inherited in some measure by her son.

The greater part of Morwen's life in Dor-lómin belonged to the uneasy years after the Dagor Bragollach, when Hithlum still stood behind its mountain wall and the lordship of Húrin held. In that house were born her son Túrin and, some three years later, a daughter named Urwen, whom the household called Lalaith for the sound of her laughter. In the child's third year a sickness came south on a wind out of Angband, and it fell heaviest upon the young; Urwen died of it, and Túrin, still a small boy, was left as the only child of the house. Morwen bore the loss without open mourning, and it was not her way to speak of it afterwards, so that the memory of the dead sister became something her son had to carry silently beside her. The years that followed were short, for the alliance that would end in the Nirnaeth was already being made in the north.

When Húrin rode east to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Morwen was again with child. He did not return: taken alive at Morgoth's command and set in torment upon Thangorodrim, he was counted among the dead by those who came home, and no certain word of him ever reached his wife. Hithlum was given over to the Easterlings who had served Morgoth in the battle, and they were penned within its borders and set to hold down the folk of Hador; the people of Dor-lómin were dispossessed, and many were made thralls upon their own fields. Morwen kept her house and some remnant of her goods chiefly because the incomers were afraid of her, whispering that she was versed in the spells of the Elves; Brodda, who seized much of Húrin's household and took his kinswoman Aerin to wife, let her alone, and Aerin sent her help in secret when she could.

Seeing that her son would either be taken as a thrall or killed as the heir of Húrin, Morwen resolved to send him out of Dor-lómin to Thingol in Doriath, kin to Beren's house being reckoned welcome there. She would not go with him. She was near her time, the road over the mountains was long, and she would not leave the house of her husband to come as a beggar into the halls of another; she also held to the hope, against all report, that Húrin lived and might return to find his hearth kept. Túrin was given into the charge of two aged servants of the household, Gethron and Grithnir, and sent away in the autumn, believing that his mother would follow; her daughter Niënor was born after he had gone, so that brother and sister did not see one another in that land. Later, when messengers of Thingol came north bearing an invitation to Doriath, she refused it still, and sent back with them the dragon-helm of Hador, the last treasure of the house, as a gift to the king.

For years she held out in Dor-lómin, while the roads southward closed and word between Hithlum and Doriath failed altogether. At length, when her position had grown untenable, she fled with Niënor by secret ways and came at last to the Girdle of Melian, where she and her daughter were received with honour by Thingol and by the queen. There she learned that her patience had been spent too late: Túrin, after a death that came of a quarrel he had not sought, had left Doriath and gone into the wild, and no message could be got to him. Morwen dwelt in the Hidden Kingdom for a long time thereafter, a guest and not a suppliant, keeping her own counsel while rumours came south of a masked warrior called the Black Sword who had risen to power in Nargothrond.

Within the legendarium Morwen occupies a structural place rather than a heroic one: she is the point at which the two chief lines of the northern Edain meet, and the tale of Húrin's children turns as often upon her decisions as upon her son's. Her marriage gave Túrin a double descent, and it was her kinship with the house of Barahir, not the fame of Hador, that opened the doors of Doriath to a fatherless boy; without it the fostering that shapes the whole first half of the Narn could not have been claimed. After the Nirnaeth she is the last representative of a lordship that no longer exists in any practical sense, and the narrative uses her to show what remains of a house when its men, its arms and its lands are gone. What is left is title, bearing and memory, and these she maintained with unusual persistence.

She possessed no faculty that could be called a power in the sense the Eldar or the Ainur knew. The single thing in the record that resembles one is a misapprehension: the Easterlings settled in Hithlum thought her skilled in Elvish sorcery and were afraid to lay hands on her, a belief that rested on their own dread of the Firstborn and on her cold manner, not on any art she had learned. That reputation served as a kind of protection, but it was a borrowed and brittle one, and it did nothing for anybody else. Her real instruments were rank, secrecy, the loyalty of a few old servants, and the covert charity of a kinswoman married to the man who had taken her husband's goods. By these she kept a household intact for years; she could not keep her people out of thralldom, nor make the road south safe, nor obtain reliable news of anything beyond her own valley.

The limits are drawn sharply at both ends of her story. Her house had no Girdle and no queen to set it, and against the design laid upon Húrin's kin she had no defence whatever; her judgement was sound within the horizon allowed her, but that horizon was narrowed by distance, silence and rumour until every choice she made was made on bad information. When she at last acted directly, riding to learn the truth for herself, the encounter proved that neither courage nor standing counted for anything against Glaurung, whose terror scattered an escort of March-wardens as easily as it undid her. The texts grant her endurance and constancy as the measure of her worth, and no victory at all.

The match between Morwen and Húrin joined two temperaments as unlike as the houses they came from. Húrin was quick, ardent and outwardly cheerful, given to hope where little warranted it; his wife was grave and withholding, and the household read her moods rather than heard them. Yet the texts allow no rift between them: he deferred to her judgement in the ordering of his hall, and she held to his memory long after every report had counted him dead. That constancy became the hinge of Morgoth's cruelty, for the torment devised for Húrin was to watch, through his enemy's sight and hearing, what befell the woman and children he could not reach. Their marriage is thus less a domestic detail than the mechanism by which the curse was made to work.

With her children the same reserve produced estrangement in one case and imitation in the other. Túrin and his mother never met again after the parting on the road south, and much of what he became can be read as an attempt to satisfy a woman who was not there to be satisfied; both were proud past the point of usefulness, and neither had the habit of asking. Niënor, raised by her alone and never seen by her brother in Dor-lómin, inherited the refusal to be governed rather than the silence, and it was that inheritance which sent her riding after her mother in defiance of an express prohibition. Morwen's dealings with those outside her blood follow a consistent rule: she took the covert help of Aerin, who was kin by marriage and gave what she could without being seen to give it, while conceding nothing to Brodda, who held the land. In Doriath she accepted honour from Thingol and kindness from Melian, and neither could turn her from a purpose. Mablung, charged with her safety and unable to keep it, reproached himself for years afterwards and searched long in vain. She was, in the end, easier to serve than to counsel.

The earliest form of the story, the prose tale of Túrin composed during the period of the Lost Tales, gives Túrin's mother the name Mavwin, wife of Úrin and dweller in Hisilómë, with a daughter Nienóri; the shape of the narrative is already recognisable, including the sending of the boy south to the Elvenking's court and the fatal journey afterwards to the caves where the dragon lay. What is missing is nearly the whole genealogical apparatus that later gives her decisions their weight. There are as yet no distinct houses of the Edain, so she belongs to no line of Bëor; and since Beren in that earliest stratum was himself an Elf and not a Man, no kinship could join her to him, and Túrin's reception among the Elves rests on his father's fame and on pity rather than on blood-claim.