Andúril

The sword called Andúril did not begin as a new work. It was made from the fragments of Narsil, the blade of Elendil that had failed him in the overthrow of Sauron at the end of the Second Age, and which the heirs of Isildur afterwards kept unmended as an heirloom rather than a weapon. When Aragorn came to Rivendell in the autumn before the Company set out, the shards were given over to the smiths of Elrond's house, who forged them anew. The blade they produced is described as bearing a device wrought upon it: a sun and a crescent moon set between them, and seven stars, the emblems long associated with Elendil and his sons. Runes were set about these figures as well. Nothing in the narrative names the individual smiths, and the account gives no measure of how long the labour took beyond its completion before the departure from Rivendell.

The naming belonged to Aragorn himself, not to those who had done the forging, and it marked the sword as his rather than as a relic returned. He gave it the Quenya name Andúril, rendered in the story as the Flame of the West. The elements of the name are transparent within the languages Tolkien set out in the appendices to the tale: the first part carries the sense of the west or the sunset lands, the second the sense of brilliance or radiance, and the compound thus points at once westward toward Númenor and its exiles and upward toward the light that the West stood for in Númenórean memory. A name in Quenya rather than Sindarin suits a weapon that descended from the kings out of the Sea, and it distinguishes the reforged blade from Narsil without severing it from that inheritance.

Around this given name a small cluster of by-names gathered in the telling. The blade is spoken of as the Sword that was Broken and, after Rivendell, as the Sword Reforged, phrases used of the weapon before the reforging as much as after it, since the broken sword served as a token of Aragorn's descent among those who did not yet know him by any royal title. Later in the story others in Rohan and Gondor come to know it by the name Aragorn had given it, and the sword serves as a form of credential in halls where the man carrying it was a stranger. In pronunciation the long ú of the second syllable draws the stress, following the rule Tolkien set down for such names.

The best-known departure belongs to Peter Jackson's film trilogy, where the reforging is moved out of Rivendell and postponed by two films. In the first instalment the fragments of Narsil are treated as a museum piece kept in Elrond's house, and Aragorn, played by Viggo Mortensen, sets out with the Company carrying an ordinary sword of no stated ancestry. He fights at Amon Hen, in Rohan and at Helm's Deep with that anonymous weapon, so that the emblem of his descent is absent from precisely the halls where, in the book, it serves to identify him. The reforged blade reaches him only in the third film, brought to the Rohirrim's muster at Dunharrow by Elrond, played by Hugo Weaving, on the eve of Aragorn's ride to the Paths of the Dead. With that change the naming passes from Aragorn to Elrond, who both delivers the sword and pronounces its name, and the reforging becomes a signal that Aragorn has accepted the kingship rather than a preparation for the journey south. The book's arrangement, in which Aragorn's kinsmen ride to him with tokens from Rivendell during that stage of the war, is folded into Elrond's single errand.

The older adaptations give the sword much less room. Ralph Bakshi's animated film, which halts after Helm's Deep, compresses the Council of Elrond severely and passes over the smithwork and the naming; Aragorn, voiced by John Hurt, simply appears armed, and the blade is never distinguished from any other weapon in the picture. The Rankin/Bass television film of the last part of the story, in which Theodore Bikel voiced Aragorn, likewise omits the whole Rivendell strand, since it begins long after the Company has dispersed. The BBC Radio dramatisation, being the fullest of the three, is also the closest here: its twenty-six parts retain the broken heirloom as Aragorn's credential and the reforging before the departure from Rivendell, with Robert Stephens as Aragorn. Radio, of course, can carry the device on the blade only by describing it, so the sword exists in that version as a matter of speech and title rather than of appearance, and its weight in the drama rests almost entirely on how other characters react to hearing its name.