Tuor

Tuor was of the Edain, called Atani in Quenya and reckoned the second of the Children of Ilúvatar, and within that kindred he belonged to the Third House, the folk who had followed Marach over the Blue Mountains and who took their later name from Hador Lórindol, to whom Fingolfin granted the lordship of Dor-lómin. His father Huor was a son of Galdor and a grandson of Hador himself; his mother Rían was a daughter of Belegund and so came of the House of Bëor, eldest of the three kindreds, with the result that the two lines met in him as they did in his cousin Túrin. The men of Hador's house were remembered as the tallest of the Edain and for the most part golden-haired, eager of mind, swift to laughter and to anger, and readier than the other houses to take up the ways and the learning of the Noldor. Tuor himself is described as of great stature and strength even by that measure.

His name is Elvish in shape rather than Mannish, as are those of his father and grandfather. The Edain had learned Sindarin from the Grey-elves not long after they entered Beleriand and used it freely, though the people of Hador kept a tongue of their own besides, out of which the Adûnaic of Númenor was afterwards formed; names given in the Elvish manner were therefore ordinary among them, and are no evidence of Elvish descent. No translation of Tuor is offered in the published writings, and the element or elements it contains are left unglossed. It is a word of two syllables, the u and the o standing apart and not forming a diphthong, with the stress on the first, as the rules set out for Elvish names require. In the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings the name appears only in the descent of Eärendil, where he is set down without further comment as being of the house of Hador.

He was born into a house already broken. Huor had wedded Rían only shortly before he rode north to the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, and by the time of the birth Dor-lómin had been given over to the Easterlings whom Morgoth rewarded with it, so that what Tuor inherited was the claim to a lordship that had ceased to exist and a name it was dangerous to be known by. Of the male line of Hador there remained in those years two boys only, each hidden in a different keeping and neither aware of the other. He was mortal Man by blood, without admixture of Elvish kindred, and was so reckoned by the Elves who took him in; whatever was afterwards said of his standing among them rested on grant and not on descent.

Tuor was born in Hithlum in the year 472 of the First Age, in the aftermath of the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, in which his father Huor had fallen with the rearguard of the House of Hador. His mother Rían, fleeing the Easterlings whom Morgoth had settled in the land, bore him in the wild and gave him into the keeping of Annael of the Grey-elves of Mithrim; she herself then sought out the great mound raised over the slain and died there. Tuor grew up among that dwindling Elvish remnant in the caves of Androth, taking their speech and their crafts. When he was sixteen the Elves resolved to abandon Hithlum and make for the havens in the south, but the company was waylaid on the road, and Tuor was taken and made a thrall of Lorgan, chief of the Easterlings. He endured three years of that servitude before escaping, and for four years more lived alone as an outlaw in the caves that had sheltered his fosterers, harrying the men who had enslaved him.

In his twenty-third year the desire to depart was set in his heart, and he left Hithlum by the hidden gate the Noldor had made, Annon-in-Gelydh, following an underground stream through the ravine called Cirith Ninniach until it brought him out upon the shores of the Great Sea at the Firth of Drengist. He turned south along the coast into Nevrast, guided by seven swans that flew before him, and came to Vinyamar, the deserted house of Turgon beneath Mount Taras. There he found arms that Turgon had left long before at Ulmo's bidding — hauberk, helm, sword and a shield bearing the device of a swan's wing — and took them for his own. At evening, amid a rising storm, Ulmo appeared to him out of the sea and laid on him the errand of seeking the hidden kingdom, promising that the words he must speak would be set in his mouth at the hour of need. On the strand he afterwards found Voronwë, the last survivor of the mariners Turgon had sent into the West, preserved by Ulmo to serve as his guide.

The two went inland through a bitter winter, keeping to the eaves of the woods and the course of Sirion. At the pools of Ivrin, which the dragon Glaurung had fouled, they saw a tall man clad in black pass northward in haste and did not speak with him; that was Túrin son of Húrin, and it was the only occasion on which the paths of the two kinsmen came near to crossing. In the first days of spring Voronwë brought Tuor to the dry riverbed that served as the outer road of the hidden city, and after challenge by its wardens they were led through the guarded gates and admitted. Standing before Turgon, Tuor delivered the counsel of Ulmo: that the doom pronounced upon the Noldor was drawing towards its fulfilment, and that the king should forsake his city and lead his people down Sirion to the sea. Turgon refused, unwilling to abandon the labour of so many years and hardened by the counsel of his sister-son Maeglin; thereafter the ways out through the mountains were closed altogether.

Tuor remained in Gondolin and rose high in the king's esteem, becoming a lord among its people. He and Idril Celebrindal, Turgon's only child, came to love one another and were wed with her father's consent — the second union of the Eldar and the Edain, and one still recorded in the genealogies kept by the Númenóreans and their heirs. Their son Eärendil was born in the city. Maeglin, who had long desired Idril and could not have her, hated Tuor from that time onward. Idril, mistrusting the security of the mountain wall, had a passage dug in secret from her house running beneath the plain and out beyond the Encircling Mountains, and few were told where it lay.

Gondolin fell when Eärendil was seven years old. Maeglin, taken captive while seeking ore beyond the mountains, purchased his life by betraying the way in, and Morgoth's host of orcs, Balrogs and dragons came over the northern heights on the eve of the midsummer festival. Tuor fought in the defence of the walls, then cut his way back to his own house, where he found Maeglin laying hands on Idril and the child; he cast him from the battlements down the sheer rock of Amon Gwareth. With the city burning behind them, Tuor gathered such of the people as could be found and led them into Idril's hidden passage. Their road out lay through the high pass of Cirith Thoronath, where an ambush was broken at the cost of Glorfindel, who fell with a Balrog into the chasm, and where the eagles of Thorondor covered the retreat.

Within the larger design of the Elder Days Tuor functions less as a hero of his own story than as the instrument by which Ulmo made his last intervention in the affairs of Beleriand. The Vala of Waters had long worked against the isolation of the hidden realms, sending counsel up the courses of Sirion and stirring the hearts of Men, and in Tuor he found a bearer who could enter Gondolin unhindered and speak with the king face to face. The role was anticipated even before Tuor's birth: at the Nírnaeth his father Huor, taking leave of Turgon, foretold that out of their two houses a new hope would arise for Elves and Men alike, and the sequel of that saying runs through Tuor's marriage to Idril and the birth of their son. Tuor is thus the hinge between the ruin of the Edain in Hithlum and the errand of Eärendil that eventually reached Valinor.

He possessed no faculty beyond the mortal. What distinguished him was borrowed and provisional: arms laid ready for him long before by another's foresight, a guide preserved from the sea to bring him where he could not have come by his own knowledge, and words given him at the moment of speaking rather than of his own devising. Those who met him on the road felt the presence of the Lord of Waters about him, and the wardens of the hidden way judged him by that token rather than by his own account of himself. The limits of such an office are plain in the outcome. Ulmo could persuade but not compel, being himself constrained by the will of the Valar and by the doom already pronounced upon the Noldor; Turgon heard the counsel and rejected it, and no further pressure was brought. Tuor's own strengths were those of a soldier and a lord — endurance, the tongue and crafts of the Grey-elves, prowess in arms — and they availed nothing against the treachery that opened the city, nor against the age that at last came upon him.

In the writings published in Tolkien's lifetime Tuor survives chiefly as a name in a pedigree, and that position is itself his most durable role. Through Eärendil and Elwing he stands at the head of the Half-elven line, and so of Elros and the kings of Númenor, and by that descent of the Lords of Andúnië, the realms in exile and the House of Telcontar. The lore-masters of the Third Age preserved his union with Idril as one of the three marriages of the two kindreds, the precedent invoked in the case of Aragorn and Arwen. His authority in the tradition rests on that inheritance rather than on any power he wielded in life.

Tuor's closest ties were with Elves rather than with his own people. Reared by Annael in Mithrim, he came to reckon the Grey-elves his kin and their losses his own, while of the House of Hador he had only report: his parents were names to him, and his uncle Húrin and his cousin Túrin men he never met. The severance was thorough, for the Edain of Hithlum had been broken and scattered, and the years of thralldom and outlawry that followed gave him almost no company at all. That a Man brought up in that fashion should end by being numbered among the Elder Kindred is less a marvel than the natural term of how he was raised.

Voronwë son of Aranwë took him up at real risk, since Turgon's ban forbade the admission of strangers and the wardens of the gates held the penalty for bringing one to be death; he answered for Tuor before them nonetheless, and the long winter road made the two companions in more than name. With Turgon the relation proved warmer than the errand warranted — the king honoured him, set him among his lords and gave him his daughter — and yet would not grant the single thing asked of him. Ulmo, by contrast, dealt with Tuor as a messenger and not a servant: after the strand below Mount Taras he did not appear to him again, and the longing for the sea that woke in him long afterwards was the only remaining token of that encounter.

In Gondolin his household drew to itself both the affection and the hatred that decided the city's end. Idril was his counsellor as much as his wife, reading the temper of the place more shrewdly than her father did, and Tuor's readiness to act on a warning he could not himself confirm was of a piece with his habit of trusting foresight not his own. Maeglin's enmity was older than Tuor and merely settled upon him: as Turgon's sister-son he had fixed his desire on his first cousin, a match the Eldar held unlawful, and the arrival of a mortal who won her openly gave that grievance a face. He remains the only adversary Tuor met in person; the enemy whose malice governed his whole life he never once faced.

The Fall of Gondolin is the oldest of the great tales to have been set down as a continuous narrative, written while Tolkien was on sick leave from the army, and its Tuor differs from the later figure in nearly everything but his errand. He is there the son of Peleg, with no place in the House of Hador and no kinship with Húrin or Túrin, and the earliest layer of the manuscript spells his name Tûr. Three swans rather than seven draw him southward, and Ulmo comes to him not at a deserted house on the coast of Nevrast but far inland in the Land of Willows, where he had lingered through a summer; the near-passing of Túrin belongs to that same region in the old version. His guide bears the Gnomish form of his name, Bronweg, and the tale is placed in the mouth of Bronweg's son, a mariner of Tol Eressëa who had watched the city burn. In Gondolin Tuor leads the people of the Wing and fights with an axe, Dramborleg, rather than with a sword, and the host he withstands includes engines of bronze and iron; his enemy within the walls is spelt Meglin.

Tolkien came back to the material repeatedly and never again finished it. The compressed accounts of the later 1920s and the Quenta Noldorinwa introduce the connections since taken for granted — Tuor as Huor's son, the kinship with Túrin, the line running through Eärendel to the Half-elven — while telling the story itself only in summary; a short alliterative lay on the same subject was begun and abandoned early. The last attempt, made about 1951, is by far the fullest and most deliberate telling of the journey from Hithlum, but it breaks off as Tuor first looks upon the city, so that the fall itself has no late narrative at all. The published chapter is therefore a compilation, resting chiefly on the summary version and filled out from the old tale, and the two are not everywhere reconcilable.