Falathrim

The name Falathrim is Sindarin and describes this people by where they lived rather than by descent. Its first element is falas, the word for a shore or a line of breaking surf, which also names the coastal region of western Beleriand where they settled. The ending -rim is a collective plural that marks a whole people, as it does in other Sindarin group names. Read literally, the name means something like 'the folk of the coast'. It therefore sets them apart from the inland Elves of the same stock, who were named after their forests and their king.1

The Falathrim descended from the Teleri, the third and largest of the three hosts of the Eldar. The Teleri followed the brothers Elwë and Olwë on the long westward march from Cuiviénen. Once the Teleri reached the western shores of Beleriand, many of them lingered near the sea. There Ossë, a Maia in the service of Ulmo, came to them and taught them the lore of waves and waters, and their lasting love of the sea began at this time. When Ulmo later returned to take the Teleri over the ocean, some of Olwë's people chose to stay on the coast. This choice separated them from their kin who departed and from those who stayed behind for other reasons.2

Other names applied to the Falathrim placed them within wider groupings. Because they never reached Aman, they were among the Úmanyar, the Elves who set out on the Great Journey but did not complete it. They are also distinct from the Eglath, the Forsaken, who remained in Beleriand because they were searching for the lost Elwë. The Falathrim stayed for love of the sea and not out of loyalty to a missing lord. When the Noldor later returned to Middle-earth, they called all Telerin Elves in Beleriand, except the Green-elves of Ossiriand, the Sindar, or Grey-elves. Under that broader name the people of the coast were counted among the Elves of Thingol's realm, even though they kept their own lord and their own havens.3

After the departure of their kin over the sea, the coastal Teleri who remained in the west of Beleriand gathered at two sheltered harbours, Brithombar at the mouth of the Brithon and Eglarest at the mouth of the Nenning. Under Círdan they became the first people of Middle-earth to build ships and put out upon the water, and their havens grew into towns. Although they governed themselves, they acknowledged Thingol as king over all the Elves of Beleriand, and in the long years of peace under the stars their realm formed the western edge of his wider dominion. Their craft and their devotion to the sea marked them out among the Grey-elves long before any outside power arrived to test them.1

That peace ended when Morgoth returned to Middle-earth and his Orcs spread across Beleriand. In the conflict later counted as the First Battle, Thingol's forces and the Green-elves fought in the east. In the west, the Falathrim were pressed hard and driven back behind the walls of their havens, where they endured a siege. When the Noldor came back from Aman, part of Fëanor's host under Celegorm came upon an Orc-army in the west that had been turned back from the Falas and destroyed it. This relieved the coast for a time. From then on the havens were walled strongholds as well as harbours.2

During the long Siege of Angband the Falas lay close to the realm of Finrod Felagund, whose lands reached westward to the coast. Finrod was a friend of Círdan and his people, and on the headland west of Eglarest he raised the tower of Barad Nimras to keep watch over the western sea. This was a watch the Falathrim shared. Their havens stayed outside the Noldorin kingdoms and never passed under Noldorin lordship. They became one of the few places in Beleriand where the arts of the sea were practised, and later refugees from other lands would depend on this skill.3

The havens fell after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. In the year after that defeat, Morgoth sent great forces through Hithlum and Nevrast to the coast. They besieged Brithombar and Eglarest, broke down their walls, and left the towns in ruins. Those of the Falathrim who escaped went by ship with Círdan to the Isle of Balar, and some settled at the Mouths of Sirion. Ereinion Gil-galad, sent from the north as a child, lived among them there. At Turgon's request Círdan built seven ships to seek a way into the West, but none of them reached Valinor, and only Voronwë came back.4

In the last years of the First Age the remnant of the Falathrim on Balar stood close to the refugee settlement at the Havens of Sirion, where Eärendil became lord. Círdan was his friend and helped him build Vingilot, the ship on which he made his final voyage. When the sons of Fëanor attacked the Havens of Sirion, Círdan and Gil-galad came to help too late. They took in those who survived, and after that the mariners of Balar were one of the last free Elven peoples left in the drowned and ruined west.5

Beleriand was destroyed in the War of Wrath, but Círdan's line of shipwrights did not end. In the Second Age he dwelt at the Grey Havens on the Gulf of Lhûn in Lindon, which was part of Gil-galad's realm. There the craft of the Falas continued, and ships were built for all Elves who wished to leave Middle-earth. Círdan was still lord of the Havens throughout the Third Age. He gave the Ring of Fire to Gandalf, and it was intended that he would stay until the last ship sailed. The people of the coast were no longer known by their old regional name, but their work continued in the harbours of the Grey Havens.6

Unlike the Elves of Doriath and the forests, the people of the Falas lived facing the sea, and water shaped their whole manner of life. The Teleri as a kindred were fond of water and of singing, and the coastal branch kept both of these traits in their strongest form. Ossë's instruction was not a single lesson. It stayed with them as a body of knowledge about tides, weather and the sounds of the sea. Their decision to remain says something about their temperament as well. They were content with the waters of Middle-earth and felt no need to see the light of a land they knew only by report.1

Their skills set them apart even within Thingol's realm. The inland Grey-elves lived in woods and in the halls of Menegroth, but the Falathrim built harbours, raised walls and made ships. No other Elves of Beleriand practised these arts before the Noldor came. They spoke the Grey-elven tongue like the rest of Thingol's people, and their havens had Sindarin names. Their lord's name, Círdan, means 'shipwright'. It names him by a craft and not by descent, which suits a people who were themselves named after a coast. Their knowledge was valued outside their own lands, and when the princes of the Noldor needed seaworthy vessels they had to rely on these mariners.2

Because they never reached Aman, they were among the Úmanyar, the Elves who set out on the Great Journey but did not complete it.

The Falathrim, like all the Eldar, were bound to the world for as long as it lasted, and the sea shaped how they experienced that long span of time. For them the ocean was a home and also the road into the West that their ancestors had chosen not to take. Over time the craft of the people who stayed became the means by which others left, so the descendants of those who refused the crossing ended up tending the crossing for others. Círdan embodied this long patience. One account says that in the Third Age he saw further and more deeply than anyone else in Middle-earth. He gave up the ring he held to the grey wanderer because he judged that a world growing cold would need it more than a harbour would.3

In the Silmarillion the people of the Falas are seldom at the centre of events. They are more often present as a steady background against which the stories of others unfold. Their narrative weight comes from contrast. The Noldor are driven by oath, jewel and pride. The Falathrim have a quieter story of staying, building and enduring, and no great deed or grievance defines them. They also show the other side of the Telerin division. Their kin across the sea are drawn into the quarrels of Aman, while those who remained in Beleriand keep the older, simpler bond with the waters that Ossë first gave them. Through them the text keeps before the reader a kind of Elvish life that asks for nothing beyond its own shore.1

They also carry one of the legendarium's lasting themes, the sea as both home and threshold. The Falas is where the longing for the West enters the landlocked politics of Beleriand. It is also where that longing is repeatedly frustrated, because vessels set out from their shores and do not arrive. The story uses the mariners to show that the way into the West is closed, and that skill alone cannot open it. Only a later voyage, undertaken for the sake of both kindreds, succeeds. In this sense the Falathrim prepare the ground for the ending of the First Age. Their craft is necessary to that ending, but it is not enough to bring it about.2

By the time of The Lord of the Rings the people have no name of their own in the text. Their inheritance still frames its close. The last chapter ends at the harbour of their lord, and Círdan himself receives the travellers who are leaving Middle-earth. The departure of the Ring-bearer therefore passes through the tradition that began on the Falas. For the reader this ties the end of the later tale to one of the oldest Elvish choices in the history, the decision of those who stayed behind and became keepers of the crossing.3

In the drafts, the people of the Falas were fitted into an annalistic chronology before the published narrative took shape. The Grey Annals, written after The Lord of the Rings, treat the coastal Elves under Círdan as a distinct branch of the Telerin stock, separate both from Thingol's people inland and from the Green-elves. Much of what the published text later says about the havens and their troubles in the early wars derives from this annal tradition. In his late philological essay on the names of the Elvish kindreds, Tolkien linked the Telerin love of the sea to a wider group of names. The Quenya name for the Teleri who did reach Aman is built on a word for a breaking wave, while the Sindarin name of the Falathrim rests on the word for the surf-line itself.1

The most significant variant concerns why Círdan and his people stayed at all. In notes from the last years of his life, Tolkien gave Círdan a different motive. There Círdan is a kinsman of the Telerin kings who wished to cross the sea. He fell behind because he was searching for the lost Elwë, and he later accepted a counsel of Ulmo that he should remain in Middle-earth, where he would one day have a task to fulfil. This account sits uneasily beside the published version, in which Ossë persuades the Elves of the coast to stay out of love for the shore. It also blurs the line that the published text draws between the mariners and the Elves who waited for their missing lord. Tolkien did not reconcile the two explanations.2