Uldor

Uldor is named in the Quenta Silmarillion among the sons of Ulfang the Black, together with Ulfast and Ulwarth, and of the three he alone carries a fixed byname: he is the Accursed. The epithet is not a name given at birth but a verdict of the tradition that preserved the story, attached to him wherever he appears, much as his father's own by-name marks colouring rather than lineage. Tolkien nowhere glosses Uldor, and the name is not referred to Sindarin or Quenya; it belongs, like those of his father and brothers, to a people whose own speech the Elvish records did not keep. That the four names share an initial element is plain enough on the page, though the texts assign it no meaning.

His kindred were Men of the East, called by the Eldar the Swarthy Men and later reckoned among the Easterlings. They came into Beleriand out of the lands beyond the mountains in the years after the Dagor Bragollach, arriving as whole peoples with their households, and the chronicles describe them as thickset and broad, strong in the arm, dark of hair and eye, with skin swart or sallow. Two chieftains stand at the head of the incomers: Bór, whose sons held to their oaths, and Ulfang, Uldor's father. Their coming altered the manpower of the eastern marches considerably, for the sons of Fëanor took them into service.

Ulfang's house swore itself to Caranthir, and Uldor thus stands from the outset within the following of a Fëanorian lord rather than among the Edain of the three houses. The narrative marks the difference sharply: the older houses of Men mistrusted the newcomers, and the tradition holds that Morgoth's hand had already reached some of them before ever they crossed into Beleriand. Uldor is presented, in temper, as a man of counsel and calculation rather than of open battle, and his standing among his own people was high enough that the Elven-lords treated with him directly.

The years between the coming of Ulfang's people into Beleriand and the muster of the Union of Maedhros are the span in which Uldor rose. The Quenta gives no annals for them, only the shape of the outcome: the Eldar had small profit of the service they had bought, for of the two houses of incomers only Bór's held faith, while the sons of Ulfang proved false. The narrator adds that this was afterwards judged to have been settled long before, since Morgoth had reached them in the East and their coming west was itself part of his design. Within that arrangement Uldor moved as the chief figure of his house, taking precedence in the tale over his father and brothers alike, and the Elven-lords dealt with him as a captain in his own right.

When Maedhros gathered the alliance that bears his name, the sons of Fëanor brought to the field a great strength of Men out of the East, and Uldor's following stood among them. The plan agreed between the confederates turned upon timing: Maedhros was to advance openly across Anfauglith from the east and draw Morgoth's armies out, and Fingon was to come down from the hills of Hithlum when the signal was given, so that the enemy should be caught between two hosts. Everything therefore depended on the eastern host keeping its appointed day. Morgoth, forewarned by his spies and by the treasons already planted among the Easterlings, worked to break that timing rather than to meet it.

The instrument was Uldor, and his deed is the one the tradition remembers first. When Maedhros made ready to set out, Uldor came to him with warnings of an attack about to fall from Angband, warnings that he had invented; and Maedhros, taking counsel of them, held back. The delay was enough. Fingon's host stood arrayed in the west with no banner rising in the east to answer it, and the day passed while Morgoth's first armies were sent out to provoke them. The battle that followed was joined out of order, begun in the west by Gwindor of Nargothrond, whose charge carried the western host far towards Angband before Maedhros had come up at all. Thus the whole scheme of the alliance was undone by a piece of counsel, before any blow of Uldor's was struck.

Maedhros came at last onto Anfauglith, and for a time the eastern host pressed the enemy hard; and when the trumpets of Turgon were heard and the host of Gondolin came up unlooked-for, the day seemed still to be recoverable. It was at that turn that Uldor declared himself. He fell upon the rear of Maedhros's host, and with him came other companies of Easterlings whom he had summoned and who had been lying hidden in the hills to the east, so that the sons of Fëanor were beset on three sides at once. The array broke and was driven apart, and the eastern wing of the alliance ceased to exist as a fighting force. Whatever chance the Union had held died in that hour rather than in the general rout that followed.

Uldor did not survive his treason. He was cut down in the confusion by Maglor, who is named as his slayer and who is said to have reached the leader of the betrayal himself; and his brothers Ulfast and Ulwarth were killed by the sons of Bór, those Easterlings of the other house who kept their oaths and who fell in the same fighting. The sons of Fëanor escaped the ruin wounded, carried off by the remnant of their people. In the reckoning of the Quenta the treachery was therefore paid for on the field by nearly the whole leadership of Ulfang's house within a single day, and Bór's line was extinguished with it.

The consequences outlived the man. Morgoth's victory in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad opened the north, and the Easterlings who had served him were paid with the lands of Hithlum, where they were penned and forbidden to pass south, to oppress the surviving people of Hador in the years afterwards. Uldor's own name became the shorthand for the whole betrayal: the Accursed, the one who led the treason, remembered less for what he ruled than for the two acts by which he ruined an alliance, the false counsel that held Maedhros back and the stroke in the rear that broke him. It is a narrow record, and the tradition that kept it had no interest in enlarging it.

Within the architecture of the Quenta Silmarillion, Uldor holds a place out of proportion to the number of lines granted him. He is not a king, and he governs nothing: his father was living, the following belonged to Ulfang, and the land his people held they held at the pleasure of a Fëanorian lord. What the tradition gives him instead is a function. He is the standing instance of faithlessness among Men in the Elder Days, set in the same chapter against Húrin and Huor, whose refusal to yield ground is told a few pages later; the two cases are made to answer one another, and the contrast is plainly deliberate. Where the chronicle needs to explain how a confederacy of that size came to nothing, it points not to any deficiency of arms but to Uldor, and lets a single name carry the weight of the explanation.

No power of any other kind is attributed to him. He is a mortal Man, and the texts credit him with no art, no craft, no object of virtue, no sword or helm worth a name, and no speech of compulsion. His two instruments are entirely ordinary ones: he had access to the counsels of an Elven-lord, and he had men who would do as he told them. The first was not his own possession but a thing lent to him by those he betrayed, and it worked exactly once, since the sort of credit he spent cannot be spent twice. The second implies some capacity for organisation, for the companies that struck with him had been placed and kept in concealment beforehand, which is to say the treason was prepared rather than seized upon; but of how it was arranged the narrative says nothing at all.

The limits are drawn sharply by the same account. His authority reached no further than his father's people and those already bought in the East; over the other house of incomers he had no hold whatever, and their refusal shows that the Easterlings were never his to command as a whole. He could not choose his own hour, since his stroke was worth anything only while Morgoth's armies stood in the field to profit by it, and the design he served was not of his making. Nor did the gain accrue to him or to his line: the northern lands afterwards passed to the Easterlings collectively at the will of Angband, and the record names no domain, no heir, and no later act of his house. What he possessed was the ability to ruin one thing at one moment, and outside that moment the texts show him possessing nothing.

Within his own house Uldor stands where a chieftain's heir would not ordinarily stand. The tradition preserves his father as a name, a by-name and a line of descent, but records no deed of Ulfang's own; whatever authority the house held passed in practice to the son while the father still lived, and the Quenta shows no friction in that arrangement and no explanation of it. The brothers are treated the same way: they act only in company, never in counsel, and the narrative gives them neither speech nor separate purpose, so that the guilt of the house gathers upon one man and the epithet attaches to him alone. It is a family sketched entirely from the outside, by observers who had no interest in its internal order and who remembered it only for what it did to them.

His relations with the Eldar are drawn as a matter of credit rather than affection. He was bound in service to one son of Fëanor and admitted to the counsels of another, and the texts record no quarrel, no slight, no withheld reward, nothing that would furnish a private motive; the chronicle never suggests he had been wronged. That absence is itself telling, since it leaves the prior allegiance as the whole of his reason. There is a further irony the narrator does not press but plainly arranges: the house of Fëanor, whose own binding word had already cost Elves and Men much, came to grief through a Man whose word held nothing at all.

The two relationships that define him most sharply are with a rival and with a master. Bór and his sons Borlad, Borlach and Borthand came out of the same eastern lands, entered the same service on the same terms, and kept it to their deaths; set beside them, Uldor cannot be explained by his people or his origin, only by his choosing, and the chronicler places the two houses side by side precisely so that the comparison cannot be evaded. Against that stands Morgoth, who is never shown meeting him. No bargain is narrated, no summons, no promise; the corruption is asserted as something accomplished long before, offstage and in another country. Uldor's decisive loyalty is thus to a lord who never appears in his story, and the reward for it fell to his people at large rather than to his kin.

The defection of the eastern Men at the Fifth Battle belongs to the older strata of the legendarium, and Uldor is present in the connected prose accounts that precede the published Quenta. Already in the earliest compressed synopsis of the mythology, and again in the fuller prose Quenta that grew out of it, the battle turns upon the treachery of Men in the service of the sons of Fëanor, and the two-house arrangement is in place: one chieftain whose sons keep faith, one whose sons do not, with Uldor named as the leader of the betrayal and the epithet of accursedness already fixed to him. What shifted around him were the names of others rather than his own; the three brothers of his house kept theirs from the early texts onward, while the sons of the faithful house were renamed in the course of revision. Neither of these early accounts supplies him with a motive scene, and the corruption of his people in the East is asserted there as it is later, without narration.

The fullest late witness is the annalistic version of the Beleriandic chronicle, where the ruse that held the eastern host back and the companies concealed in the hills stand essentially as the published chapter has them; the printed text follows that account closely, since the sequence of Fifth Battle chapters was not among the parts of the Quenta that Tolkien rewrote in the last phase of work on the prose Silmarillion. The consequence for the figure is that Uldor was, in effect, finished early. He acquires no additional deeds, no explanatory dialogue and no reconsidered ancestry in the later drafts, and the surviving variation concerns spellings, the wording of by-names and the arrangement of the surrounding annals rather than anything he does. Where the later manuscripts do add matter about the eastern peoples, it is general ethnography of the incomers, not biography of the man.