Ulmo

Ulmo belongs to the order of the Ainur, the first beings brought forth from the thought of Ilúvatar before the making of the world. In the great Music by which Arda was foreshadowed, each of the Ainur understood most fully that part of Ilúvatar's mind from which he or she had chiefly come, and Ulmo was instructed more deeply than any other in the matter of water. Of that teaching came his mastery of sound and rhythm, for water carries the echo of the Music more clearly than any other substance of the world, and Ulmo's own understanding of melody is said to surpass that of all his kindred. When some of the Ainur descended into the newly made world to labour at its shaping, he came among them, and thereafter his being was bound to Arda until its ending.

Among the Valar he is reckoned second in strength to Manwë alone, and he stands with the eight of chief reverence, those whom the Elves name the Aratar. His usual title in Elvish lore marks his dominion rather than his person: he is the Lord of Waters, and also called King of the Sea, since every ocean, lake, river, spring and rain of Arda lies within his governance. He takes no spouse and keeps no settled hall in Valinor, dwelling instead in the Outer Ocean that encircles the world, or passing unseen through the deep waters beneath the lands. His music is made upon the Ulumúri, great horns of white shell fashioned for him by the Maia Salmar; among the Maiar of the sea, Ossë and Uinen are subject to him.

In temper he is solitary and little inclined to the formal counsels of his peers, and he seldom comes when the Valar are assembled; where the others take shape and settled dwelling, he prefers to remain diffused through the element he rules. Because all waters run together, his awareness extends into every land, and little that stirs upon or beneath the earth is hidden from him. He rarely clothes himself in visible form, and when he does so his aspect is not comforting but formidable, more like a rising wall of dark water than a figure of the Elder King's court. Alone among the Valar he retained a constant regard for both Elves and Men after their coming, which shaped the manner of his dealings with them.

The earliest act recorded of him belongs to the Music itself. When the discord of Melkor broke into the third theme, Ilúvatar took Ulmo aside and showed him what water would become in the world made from that Music: rain falling upon the lands, the shapes of frost, the drifting of snow. What his adversary had intended as ruin of heat and bitter cold had in fact deepened his own element beyond anything he had devised for himself, and he saw a design in it that was not his. In the first labours upon Arda he worked most closely with Manwe, since cloud and rain pass continually between their two realms, and the gathering of the seas fell to him. He was present at the raising of the two Lamps and the brief ordered spring that followed them; and when Melkor cast the Lamps down and the shape of the lands was broken, the Valar withdrew west over the Sea. Ulmo kept his labour in the waters that lay east of it, so that the marring of the world never closed those channels.

At the awakening of the Quendi by the waters of Cuivienen the Valar took counsel whether to call them into the West, and Ulmo was the chief voice against the summons, holding that the Children should remain in the lands appointed to them and order their own affairs, and that the Valar should send teaching to them rather than fetch them away. Manwe's judgement prevailed, and Ulmo obeyed it; it was he who carried the hosts over the Sea, drawing up a half-sunken island and moving it as a great ship, first with the Vanyar and the Noldor, and afterwards returning for the Teleri. When Osse, who had grown dear to that last host, followed and at their own asking fixed the island fast in the Bay of Eldamar, Ulmo consented rather than compel them, for the outcome ran close to the counsel he had first given. Osse had earlier been drawn for a time into Melkor's service and had troubled the seas, and it was at the entreaty of Uinen that Ulmo received him back into his allegiance.

After the Darkening of Valinor and the rebellion of the Noldor, tidings of the exiled lands came to Valinor chiefly through him, and he spoke for pity toward those under the Doom of Mandos. In Beleriand his work was secret and worked through others. While Turgon and Finrod were travelling together they rested by the banks of Sirion, and he laid heavy dreams upon them that left a disquiet neither could shake off, so that each sought out a stronghold hidden from the north: Finrod the caves above the Narog, and Turgon the vale of Tumladen within its ring of mountains, which Ulmo revealed to him. Gondolin was fifty-two years in the building. When it was finished Ulmo came to Turgon in Nevrast and bade him remove to it, warning him that the sentence spoken upon his people stood, that he should not love the work of his hands too well, and that the hope of the Noldor would come out of the West and off the Sea. At his instruction Turgon left behind in the deserted halls of Vinyamar a hauberk, a helm, a shield and a sword, for a messenger who would one day come.

As Morgoth's strength grew his warnings became more urgent and were less often heeded. He sent counsel to Cirdan at the Havens, and Cirdan dispatched the Elves Gelmir and Arminas to Nargothrond bearing it: that the doors of the fortress should be shut and the great bridge over the Narog cast down, since the open road the realm had built in its confidence would serve the enemy first. The counsel was rejected at Turin's insistence, and when Glaurung came the bridge gave him his crossing. The pattern is consistent throughout his dealings in the First Age: the warning is precise, it is delivered at a remove, and it leaves those who receive it free to refuse.

His one recorded appearance in visible form to a mortal came late, on the shore below Vinyamar. Tuor, led southward along the coast by seven swans that he read as a sign, found the empty house of Turgon and took up the arms laid there, and Ulmo came out of a rising storm to charge him with an errand and to give him a cloak of shadow for concealment on the road. He told Tuor plainly that his own power in the waters of Sirion was waning as Morgoth's grew, and that a hope for Elves and Men alike would come of him. Of the mariners Turgon had sent west to seek Valinor he preserved one, Voronwe, casting him ashore so that a guide should be at hand. Tuor carried the message into Gondolin: that the city should be emptied and its people brought down Sirion to the sea. Turgon, after long counsel, refused, trusting to his walls, and the city was taken and burned.

The survivors of the sack came at last to the Mouths of Sirion, where river and sea still held something of his guard, and there the son of Tuor and Idril grew and afterwards built the ship in which he sought the West. When Earendil reached Aman and the Valar debated whether a man of mortal kindred might set foot on the Undying Lands and live, Ulmo spoke on his behalf, saying that he had been born into the world for precisely this errand; the plea was allowed, and the host of the West sailed to the war that ended Morgoth's dominion. Beleriand was broken in that war and the sea took nearly all of it. Nothing further is set down of his open dealings with Elves or Men in the ages that followed, though the whole of the enlarged ocean and every water that runs into it remained within his keeping.

Ulmo's function within the ordering of Arda is custodial rather than territorial. Where other Valar shaped a particular region and remained near it, his charge is an element that touches every region, and the tasks assigned to him in the world's making — the gathering and dividing of the waters, the drawing up of vapour and its return as rain — are continuous rather than finished. This gives him an instrument the others lack: the veins of water beneath the earth, by which he learns the griefs and needs of the lands without leaving the deep. The same channels carry his influence outward, so that his counsel reaches those who never see him. His music upon the great horns is not ornament but the working of his office, since the substance he governs conveys the Music of the Ainur more faithfully than stone or air, and those who hear that sound are said to keep an unappeased longing for the Sea afterwards.

The limits upon that power are set out plainly in the sources, and they are of three kinds. The first is jurisdictional: the governance of Arda rests with Manwë as Elder King, and when Ulmo's counsel is overruled — as it was at the summoning of the Elves out of the East — he complies. The second is territorial in a strict sense: his strength is in water, and it diminishes where water is scarce or where the enemy's dominion is heaviest, a decline he acknowledged himself when the rivers of Beleriand fell under pressure from the north. The third is the most consequential. He does not compel. His interventions take the form of dream, sign, embassy and spoken warning, delivered so that the hearer remains free to reject them, and the ruin of Nargothrond and of Gondolin followed refusals he did not override.

What distinguishes him from his peers is therefore not raw might but persistence in a policy the others abandoned. After the flight of the Noldor the Valar closed Valinor and withdrew their aid from the exiles; Ulmo alone continued to work in the Hither Lands, holding that the Children of Ilúvatar should not be left without help even under a sentence justly pronounced. His method was indirect and often mistaken for chance by those it moved, which is why he is remembered in Elvish tradition as a friend of Elves and Men without being counted among the visible powers of the world.

Among the Valar, Ulmo's closest working bond is with Manwë, and it is a bond of complement rather than of company. The two are described as the least alike of the Valar in temper and yet most in accord in purpose, since air and water pass into one another and neither element can be governed without the other. Their disagreement over the summoning of the Quendi did not break that accord: Ulmo pressed his contrary judgement in open council and then carried out the decision he had argued against. With Aulë he shares no such sympathy, for the smith's art works in matter that Ulmo does not shape, and the sources note a coolness between them that never became enmity. Toward Melkor his opposition is total but curiously indirect; where Tulkas met the enemy in battle and Manwë in judgement, Ulmo answered him by keeping open what the other had tried to close, and his element proved the one substance Melkor could not corrupt to his own use.

He has no spouse and no children, and the household that surrounds other Valar is replaced in his case by service. Ossë and Uinen are his vassals rather than his kin, and the difference in how he treats them is instructive: Ossë, violent and easily turned, was pardoned at Uinen's asking and left in his office, and Salmar, who made his horns, is remembered chiefly through the instrument he wrought. The pattern extends to the Children of Ilúvatar, with whom his relations are always those of a patron who does not stay to be thanked. Turgon received a hidden vale and a warning he could not fully keep; Finrod received a disquiet that drove him to Nargothrond; Círdan received counsel to pass on to others. Only Tuor was met face to face, and even that meeting was an errand given, not a friendship formed.

What these dealings share is that the recipient is generally left ignorant of who has moved them, and that the benefit falls to a third party or a later generation rather than to the one addressed. The men and women of Gondolin never knew whose foresight had walled them; the household of Húrin was never told whose warning Nargothrond had refused. In Elvish memory this produced an affection unlike that felt for any other of the Powers — Ulmo is loved without being approached, honoured in the songs of the Noldor and named with reverence by mariners, yet possessed of no temple, no festival and no settled place where he might be sought. The nearest thing to a return of his regard came at the end, when he stood as advocate for Eärendil before his peers, arguing the case of a mortal against the law of the Undying Lands. That was the only occasion on which he pleaded for a single person by name.

Ulmo is among the few figures whose name survived unaltered from the first stratum of the mythology, though it did not stand alone. In the tales written from about 1917 onward the Gnomish tongue gave him the form Ylmir, and that variant proved durable enough to be carried forward into the alliterative verse of the following decade, where it appears in place of the Quenya name; it was eventually discarded together with the notion of Gnomish as a separate speech. The early conception is also more domestic than the later one. He is given a settled dwelling, the halls of Ulmonan in the outer ocean then called Vai, whereas the published account leaves him diffused through his element and without a hall at all. His attendants are named differently: the spouse of Ossë is Ónen rather than Uinen, and Salmar is identified with a second name, Noldorin, which later vanished from the texts. In the same period the ferrying of the Elves is accomplished with the help of Uin, the eldest of whales, who drew the island westward — a piece of machinery that no later version retains.

His dissent from the policy of his peers was present from the outset. In the early narrative of the closing of the West he is the single voice raised against the sealing of Valinor and the abandonment of the lands beyond the Sea, which is the seed of the position attributed to him in all later accounts. The great alteration falls instead upon his one meeting with a mortal. In the original tale of the fall of Gondolin the encounter takes place far inland, in the willow-country beside the waters of Sirion, where he comes upon Tuor at evening and lays the errand on him there; the coast of Nevrast, the abandoned house, and the arms left in it for an appointed messenger belong to a much later reworking, and the older Tuor receives no equipment but the charge itself. His guide in that version is Bronweg, whose name was afterwards recast as Voronwë. The music Ulmo makes beside the river is already described as leaving an unquiet longing in the hearer, one of the details that passed unchanged through every subsequent revision.