Narsil

The sword's name combines two old Elvish elements: nar, tied to fire and the sun, and sil, tied to silver light and the moon, so that Narsil reads as a name invoking both great lights of the sky at once. The Silmarillion glosses the name directly, noting that the blade flashed with the light of the sun and of the moon together, an image that places the weapon alongside other paired solar-and-lunar namings found in Númenórean and Elvish tradition, such as Anor and Ithil. When the shards were later reforged, the new blade kept only the fiery half of this old imagery in its own name, leaving Narsil as the sword's original, dual-natured title.

Narsil was not made by Elendil or by any craftsman of his household; it was already an ancient weapon when he carried it out of Númenor at the island's fall. Notes on the history of Isildur's house attribute the forging to Telchar of Nogrod, a renowned Dwarf-smith of the First Age whose other works included the small knife later used to cut a Silmaril from Morgoth's iron crown. That the chief sword of the line of Elendil had been wrought not by Elf or Man but by a Dwarf of a far earlier age reflects how old, and how widely gathered from other peoples, the treasures of that house had become by the Second Age.

Two further names attached to the blade in the West beside Narsil itself. As Elendil's own weapon it was remembered formally as the Sword of Elendil, invoked at the Council of Elrond alongside Gil-galad's spear Aiglos among the great arms raised against Sauron. After it broke, it came to be called, more plainly, the Sword that was Broken, a name repeated in the rhyme concerning Isildur's Bane that circulated among those seeking word of the Halfling and the Ring, and that hinted at the blade's eventual renewal. Both names traveled with the shards through their long keeping as an heirloom of the Dúnedain, alongside the older name Narsil, until the sword was given a third name at its reforging.

As a weapon, Narsil was made for war rather than display, and its history shows a blade of high but not unbreakable craftsmanship. Elendil carried it as his sword in the last battle against Sauron, and it was there, as he himself fell, that the blade snapped beneath him. Nothing in the record credits the sword with any innate protection for its bearer or any strength beyond that of a well-forged weapon; its breaking marks it, deliberately, as a mortal object bound to the fate of the man who wielded it, not as a talisman proof against defeat.

Even broken, the remaining hilt-shard kept an edge capable of cutting. It was with this fragment, still fixed to its hilt, that Isildur severed the Ring from Sauron's hand after Elendil's fall, turning what was left of his father's sword into the instrument that ended Sauron's first bodily defeat. The text credits this act to Isildur's own resolve and to the shard's remaining sharpness, nothing more; no supernatural potency in the metal is claimed for the deed, only that a broken blade could still serve as a knife when nothing else was at hand.

For the long centuries of its keeping, the object was two shards and a hilt, not a functioning sword, and it is described that way when Boromir sees it at Rivendell: he takes it at first for a broken heirloom of more sentimental than practical worth, an old thing kept for its history rather than its use. Yet those who had guarded it evidently judged the metal still sound, since the shards were thought fit to be given new form rather than melted down or left as relics, and Elrond's household in due course had them reforged into a whole blade again. Beyond this readiness for renewal, the narrative attributes no further property to Narsil itself while it lay broken.

Elendil bore Narsil with him out of the ruin of Númenor at the end of the Second Age, one of the few treasures the Faithful carried into their exile, and with it he founded the realms of Arnor and Gondor on the shores of Middle-earth. For more than a thousand years afterward the sword remained his own, the mark of his kingship rather than an heirloom yet passed to any heir, until the growing power of Sauron in Mordor drew Elendil into alliance with Gil-galad and the Elves of Lindon against him.

That alliance brought Narsil to the field in the long war against Sauron's realm, a campaign that carried the armies of Elves and Men from Dagorlad to the gates of Barad-dûr and held the fortress under siege for seven years. It was in the final overthrow of Sauron at the end of that siege, in the year 3441 of the Second Age, that Elendil fell and Narsil broke beneath him, in the same hour that Gil-galad also perished; Sauron himself was cast down in the same encounter, brought low in part by the blade's last stroke in Isildur's hand.

Isildur kept the broken sword after his father's death and carried the shards north with him two years later, when he left Gondor for Arnor with his sons and was ambushed and slain by Orcs at the Gladden Fields. Of his household only a handful escaped that disaster, among them his esquire, who bore the shards of Elendil's sword away from the wreck and brought them safely to Rivendell, delivering them into the keeping of Isildur's young heir, who had been left there for safety and had thus survived his father and brothers.

From that day the shards of Narsil passed as an heirloom of the Northern line, first among the kings of Arnor and, after that kingdom broke into smaller realms and at last failed altogether, among the Chieftains of the Dúnedain who preserved its royal blood in secrecy. Through all the centuries of Arnor's decline and disappearance the shards themselves never left Elrond's keeping in Rivendell, where they were guarded alongside the other heirlooms of Isildur's house. Aragorn himself received them directly from Elrond as a young man of twenty, at the same time that he was told his true name and lineage and given the Ring of Barahir, though the blade was not yet made whole again.

The shards were reforged only many years later, in the days before the War of the Ring, when Elrond judged that Aragorn's hour to claim his inheritance openly was at hand. The smiths of Rivendell restored the blade to a single sword, marked now with a device of the sun and moon and seven stars and inscribed with a token of its lineage, and it was given to Aragorn under its new name, Andúril, shortly before he set out from Rivendell with the Company of the Ring in the last days of the year 3018 of the Third Age.

Within the story, Narsil functions less as a weapon in active use than as a promise held in reserve. For most of the tale it exists only as broken shards, first glimpsed by Frodo and his companions at the Council of Elrond, where Boromir's dismissive reaction to a relic he takes for useless underscores how easily the sign of Gondor's lost kingship can be mistaken for mere debris by those who no longer remember what it means. The object's very brokenness carries the story's argument: that the line of kings has been reduced, diminished, waiting out its long eclipse in fragments rather than extinguished outright.

The rhyme of Isildur's Bane, which reaches the reader before the sword itself does, ties Narsil's eventual mending to the reappearance of the Ring and to a nameless figure who will be known by his broken blade, so that the shards become a riddle pointing toward Aragorn's identity well before he is named king in the text. In this way the sword operates as a narrative device for delayed recognition: its wholeness is withheld exactly as Aragorn's authority is withheld, and both are released together only when Elrond judges the hour ripe.

Its reforging into Andúril at the moment of Aragorn's departure from Rivendell marks, within the story, the passage from concealed heir to open claimant, and thereafter the sword accompanies him through the war as a visible sign of that claim wherever he goes, from the Paths of the Dead to the Pelennor Fields. What Narsil stood for as a broken thing, then, was continuity under suppression, a kingship deferred but not undone, while what Andúril stands for once whole is that deferral ended.

Peter Jackson's film trilogy keeps the sword in the story but rearranges almost every stage of its history. In the prologue to the first film the breaking is staged as an act of Sauron rather than an accident of Elendil's fall: Elendil is struck down in single combat and the blade is destroyed underfoot by his enemy, after which Isildur takes up the remaining hilt-shard and strikes off the finger that bears the Ring. At Rivendell the shards are given a fixed setting as displayed relics on a stone table beneath a memorial painting, and a scene without any counterpart in the novel has Boromir take up the hilt out of curiosity, cut himself on the surviving edge and put it back carelessly, which serves to establish Gondor's neglect of its own inheritance well before the Council convenes.

The most consequential change is the postponement of the reforging. Where the book has the smiths of Rivendell restore the blade before the Company leaves, the theatrical films leave the shards unmended through the first two instalments, so that Aragorn fights at Amon Hen and Helm's Deep with an ordinary weapon and remains a reluctant heir for far longer than in the text. The reforging is moved to the third film and given a new motive, with Elrond commissioning the work at his daughter's urging and then carrying the finished sword himself to Aragorn's camp at Dunharrow, where its delivery becomes the immediate spur for the ride to the Paths of the Dead. Among the older adaptations the BBC Radio dramatisation, running to twenty-six parts, is the one that preserves the book's sequence, treating the shards as an heirloom made whole at Rivendell before the journey south begins.