Túrin Turambar

Túrin was born in Dor-lómin, the northern land held in fief by his father Húrin Thalion under the lords of Hithlum. Through Húrin he belonged to the House of Hador, the third of the Edainic houses to pass into Beleriand and the one most closely bound to the Noldor of Fingolfin's line; through his mother Morwen, called Eledhwen, he descended from the House of Bëor, for she was the daughter of Baragund and had come south out of Dorthonion when that land was lost. In looks he favoured her rather than the fair-haired kin of Hador: dark of hair, pale of face, and already as a child grave in bearing, quick to feel another's hurt and slow to be moved to laughter. Of his sisters, the elder was named Urwen, though the household called her Lalaith, Laughter, after the stream that ran beside their house; she did not outlive her childhood. The younger, Nienor, he scarcely knew.

Only the name Túrin was given him at birth; the rest he took for himself or received from those among whom he lived, and nearly all of them were names of concealment. Among the outlaws of the marches he called himself Neithan, the Wronged, a name that asserted a grievance rather than an identity. When he bore the dragon-crested helm of his house, an heirloom of Dor-lómin wrought by Telchar of Nogrod, the Elves and Men who took heart from his deeds knew him as Gorthol, the Dread Helm. Coming to Nargothrond he named himself Agarwaen son of Úmarth, the Bloodstained, son of Ill-fate, a patronymic that was no patronymic at all; there he was also called Adanedhel, the Elf-man, for his speech and bearing seemed to the Elves more their own than a mortal's, while Finduilas gave him the name Thurin, the Secret. From his black-bladed sword came Mormegil, the Black Sword, the name by which rumour of him ran furthest.

The last of these names is the one set beside his own in the tales. Turambar is Quenya, not the Sindarin of the others, and it renders as Master of Doom; he chose it himself, in the will to have done with what had gone before and to be reckoned by his deeds rather than by his descent. The pattern is consistent enough to be legible: names laid on him by others describe what they saw, while the names he assumed describe what he wished to be, and each new one is set up against the fact of being Húrin's son. That the elvish glosses were preserved at all is owed to the lay from which the prose accounts descend, which keeps both the names and their meanings in the mouths of those who used them.

The turning of Túrin's life came with the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the battle in which the alliance of Elves and Men in Beleriand was broken. Húrin was not slain there but taken alive to Angband, and when he refused to yield what he knew of Turgon's hidden city, Morgoth set a curse upon his wife and children and bound him to a high seat where he might watch it work. In Dor-lómin the Easterlings who had betrayed the battle took the land, and Morwen, though they feared her and left her unmolested for a time, judged that her son would soon be taken as a thrall or worse. She resolved to send him to Thingol in Doriath, both for the safety of the House of Hador's heir and because her own kin were remembered there. He went south with two old servants of the household, Gethron and Grithnir, being then a boy not yet nine years old; Morwen remained behind, for she was with child, and Nienor was born after he had gone. Mother and son never met again.

Thingol received him as a foster-son in memory of Húrin's deeds, and Melian's care lay upon him while he was in Menegroth. In his seventeenth year he asked for arms and went out to the north-marches of the realm, where he became the companion of Beleg Cúthalion, the chief marchwarden, and learned war in the woods against the servants of Angband. Word from Dor-lómin had by then ceased, and the silence made him grim and heedless of his own safety. Returning to Menegroth after three years of that service, ill-clad and travel-worn, he was mocked at the king's table by Saeros, a counsellor of Nandorin kin, who spoke slightingly of the women of Hithlum; Túrin flung a cup at him, and on the next morning Saeros lay in wait for him on the road. Túrin overcame him, stripped him and drove him through the trees until he fell to his death in a ravine. Mablung urged him to submit to Thingol's judgement, but he would not, and he passed out of Doriath as an outlaw of his own choosing.

The testimony of Nellas, a woodland elf who had known him as a boy, later showed the king that Saeros had struck first, and Thingol pardoned him and sent Beleg to seek him; but by then Túrin had joined a band of landless men on the borders of the realm and in time become their captain, and he refused the pardon. When the band seized Mîm the Petty-dwarf, his ransom was his own dwelling in the hill of Amon Rûdh, and there Túrin and Beleg together made a stronghold, drawing to themselves the scattered fighters of the region. For a season the country between Teiglin and the western marches was held against the Orcs and was called the Land of Bow and Helm, after Beleg's great bow and the dragon-helm that Túrin now wore openly. Mîm, who had lost a son to an arrow of the outlaws and hated the Elf, betrayed the refuge; the company was destroyed and Túrin taken to be carried to Angband. Beleg followed and, with Gwindor of Nargothrond, an escaped thrall, cut him free in the dark of a storm; and Túrin, waking bound and mistaking his rescuer for a tormentor, killed Beleg with Beleg's own sword. His mind failed him after that, and he did not speak again until Gwindor had brought him to the springs of Ivrin.

Gwindor brought him to Nargothrond, where he took the name Agarwaen and hid his descent, and where the black sword he had carried from Beleg's body was reforged for him as Gurthang. He rose swiftly in the counsels of King Orodreth and turned the policy of the city from secrecy to open war, urging that its strength be shown; a great bridge was built over the Narog before the gates so that armed companies might pass swiftly out. Finduilas, the king's daughter, turned her love from Gwindor to him, and Gwindor at last revealed his true name and warned that the curse of Morgoth followed him. Two messengers, Gelmir and Arminas, came from Círdan bearing a warning that the bridge should be cast down and the gates shut, but Túrin's counsel prevailed against them. Glaurung led the host of Angband south; the army of Nargothrond was broken on the field of Tumhalad, Orodreth fell and Gwindor died of his wounds, and the dragon crossed the bridge into the city. Túrin came too late, and Glaurung held him motionless under his eyes while the captives, Finduilas among them, were driven away.

The dragon set him free with the report that his mother and sister lived in want in Dor-lómin, and he abandoned the pursuit of the captives and went north. There he found the Easterling Brodda holding his father's lands and learned that Morwen and Nienor had long since gone to Doriath; he killed Brodda in his hall and fled the country. Seeking Finduilas at last, he came to the woodmen of Brethil and was told that she had been slain by the Orcs at the Crossings of Teiglin as their escort was harried, and buried under the mound of Haudh-en-Elleth. He stayed among that people, took the name Turambar and laid the black sword aside for a time. Meanwhile Morwen and Nienor had ridden out from Doriath with an escort under Mablung to learn the truth of Nargothrond; Glaurung scattered the company, Morwen was lost in the confusion, and Nienor, meeting the dragon's gaze, was stripped of all memory of her life and name. She was found naked and speechless on the mound of Haudh-en-Elleth by Turambar, who called her Níniel; and after two years among the Men of Brethil she married him, neither knowing the other.

Túrin's position in the legendarium is that of its most fully recorded mortal life. The chapter allotted to him is among the longest in the Silmarillion, and the same matter survives in a far more detailed telling in the Narn, which the editorial tradition assigns to Dírhavel, a Man of the House of Hador by descent who dwelt at the Havens of Sirion late in the First Age and gathered what he could from those who had known Húrin's people. The tale is thus Mannish in origin though made in the Grey-elven tongue, and its author did not outlive the age he wrote of. This accounts for a quality unusual among the Beleriand narratives: its attention rests on the household, the temper and the private misjudgements of one family, where the surrounding chapters are concerned with realms and kings.

The limits are stated plainly and twice over. Against Glaurung, strength of body counted for nothing: the dragon's eyes held Túrin immobile while a city was emptied behind him, and worked upon his sister to the same end without a blow struck. In counsel he was worse served than in battle, urging open force upon a realm that had survived by concealment and refusing warnings from those best placed to give them, and his judgements, once formed, were quick and could not be recalled. Whether his ruin proceeded from Morgoth's curse or from his own nature the texts do not settle; Húrin, answering the curse when it was first spoken, denied that Morgoth was master of the fates of Arda and held that his reach stopped at the bounds of the world.

The bonds that shaped Túrin were mostly bonds broken early or held at a distance. Húrin he last saw as a small child, and thereafter the father was less a presence than a measure: a man whose deeds opened doors for his son among Elves who had never met the son himself. With Morwen the difficulty was likeness rather than distance. Both were proud past prudence, and neither could be a comfort to the other; she would not go south with him while she still had a roof, and she sent the dragon-helm of the house to Thingol with him so that his fostering might look like an exchange between equals and not charity. His only easy companionship in Dor-lómin was with Sador, a lame household servant whom the child called Labadal, and from whom he first heard men speak of death and of the departure of Men from the world; the boy gave him a knife of elvish work that had been his own.

Among the Eldar he was given more than he could accept. Thingol's affection for him was real and outlasted his defiance, and Melian granted him a share of the waybread of Doriath by Beleg's hand, a thing seldom given to mortals. Beleg was the one attachment that survived every change of name: he sought Túrin twice, the second time surrendering the marchwarden's office he had held for an age, and asked nothing in return but that his friend take counsel. At Nargothrond the pattern repeated in a harsher form. Gwindor, who had carried him out of the wild broken in mind, watched his own place in the city and in Finduilas's regard pass to the man he had saved, and spent his dying breath charging Túrin to go after her, saying she alone stood between him and his fate. Túrin honoured Finduilas and did not love her, and the debt he owed her was one he discharged too late.

What the sources set against these are figures whose advice he refused and enemies he could not reach. Mablung, Gwindor, Brandir, and the messengers out of the Havens all urged restraint upon him, and each was answered with impatience or worse; Nellas, whose word cleared him, he never learned of. Mîm is the single relation founded on grievance from both sides, a bargain struck under duress and kept badly by each. Morgoth, meanwhile, is an adversary Túrin never confronted and perhaps never wholly believed in, since the curse worked through ordinary human error and reached him as bad luck rather than as a visible hand. Only Glaurung spoke with him, and the dragon's chief weapon was not fire but accurate information given at the wrong moment. Where Túrin met open enmity he generally prevailed; the harm was done by those who wished him well and by the one enemy who chose to converse.

The tale is among the oldest matter in the legendarium, and a full version of it stands in the Lost Tales as "Turambar and the Foalókë", written while most of the surrounding names were still unsettled. There Túrin is the son of Úrin and Mavwin, his sister is Nienóri, the king who fosters him is Tinwelint, and the dragon is Glorund; the stronghold that would later be Nargothrond is the caves of the Rodothlim, the escaped Noldo who guides him there is Flinding, and Failivrin stands where Finduilas would afterwards stand. His sword bears the name Gurtholfin. The quarrel at the king's table is with Orgof, and in that telling the flung cup kills him outright, so that Túrin's flight is from a killing plainly done rather than from a judgement he will not wait for.

The alliterative Lay of the Children of Húrin, twice begun and twice left unfinished, carries the same material a good deal further in detail, and there the outlaw band is betrayed not by Mîm but by Blodrin, a traitor within the company itself. Mîm at that stage belongs to a wholly separate strand, as the dwarf who guards the dragon's hoard, curses it, and is killed by Úrin's men; his transfer into Túrin's own story, and with it the whole of the Amon Rûdh episode, came late. Late as well are the annalistic account in the Grey Annals and the unfinished Wanderings of Húrin, which follows the aftermath among the Men of Brethil further than the published text does. One element was abandoned rather than developed: the earlier prose versions close with a prophecy that Túrin would return from the dead at the world's ending and strike down Morgoth with his black sword, and this was not kept.