Haladin

The Haladin were one of the peoples of Men who had woken in the far East and, in the course of long wanderings, came westward over the Blue Mountains into Beleriand in the First Age. Among the three kindreds later reckoned as the Edain, the Elves' name for the Men who befriended them, they were the second to arrive. They came after the followers of Bëor and before the folk of Marach, from whom the House of Hador descended. Their first settlements lay in Thargelion, the land under the lordship of Caranthir, and not in the western country where they later made their home.1

Already at the first meeting of Elves and Men the Haladin appear as a separate people. When Finrod Felagund questioned Bëor about the kindreds that had followed him, Bëor spoke of the Haladin as a folk whose tongue his own people did not share. The account portrays them as a people of their own habits: they preferred to keep to themselves, cared less than the other Edain for Elvish lore, and were loath to accept lordship from outside their own kin. They also had particularly close ties to the Drúedain. The Unfinished Tales records that these Woses lived among the Haladin, and that some of them came west with them and settled beside them in the forest.2

The people's names record stages of its history rather than a single fixed identity. Haladin is the oldest form attested in the published texts, and those texts do not explain what it means. After Haleth, the daughter of Haldad, had led the people through a time of grave danger, they chose to remain apart from the other houses. From then on Elves and Men called them after her, the People of Haleth. The designation Men of Brethil belongs to a later period, when King Thingol allowed them to dwell in that forest between the Teiglin and the Sirion. The expression house of Haleth, used in parallel with the Houses of Bëor and Hador, occurs chiefly where the narrative is concerned with the line of their chieftains.3

The first chapter of the Haladin's history in Beleriand was one of violence rather than settlement. Morgoth, displeased that Men had found their way to the Eldar, sent Orcs against the Haladin in Thargelion. Under their chieftain Haldad the people withdrew into the angle of land where the Ascar flows into the Gelion and fortified it with a stockade. Haldad fell in a sally against the besiegers. His son Haldar went out to recover his father's body and was slain as well. Command then passed to Haldad's daughter Haleth, who held the enclosure for seven days until Caranthir came with his host and scattered the Orcs.1

Caranthir, whose regard for Men had grown after this defence, offered Haleth land in his own realm and the protection of the Noldor. She thanked him but declined, since she would not hold her people's safety as a gift from an Elvish lord. She gathered the survivors and led them westward, and the journey cost many lives. In the end they reached the woods beyond the Sirion. The leave to remain there, already noted above, came from Thingol through the intercession of Finrod. It carried a duty: the Haladin were to keep watch over the Crossings of Teiglin and stop Orcs from passing that way. Haleth lived out her days in Brethil. After her death her people raised a green mound over her in the forest. Leadership then passed to Haldan, the son of her fallen brother Haldar.2

In the generations that followed, the Haladin became bound to the other Edain by marriage. Haldan's son Halmir had a son, Haldir, and a daughter, Hareth. Haldir wedded Glóredhel, daughter of Hador. Hareth married Glóredhel's brother Galdor, and from that union came Húrin and Huor. Through Hareth, therefore, the most prominent line of the House of Hador in the later wars also descended from Haleth's people. While still boys, Húrin and Huor were fostered in Brethil with their kin, following a custom of the Edain. During that fosterage they became separated from their companions during a fight with Orcs, and it was then that they were brought to Gondolin.3

Morgoth broke the Siege of Angband, and soon afterwards Orcs came down through the Pass of Sirion. This tested the charge Thingol had placed on the Haladin. Halmir, then lord of the People of Haleth, received warning from Doriath. Together with Beleg and a company of Elvish archers, he ambushed an Orc host that tried to cross the Teiglin and destroyed it. For a while this victory kept the western approaches to Doriath closed. In the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, however, the Men of Brethil marched with the host of the West, and it cost them heavily. Haldir fell in that battle, and with him the greater part of the warriors he had led out of the forest.4

After the defeat the Haladin lived on as a smaller people, sheltered by their woods and increasingly surrounded by enemies. Haldir's son Handir became chieftain and was later killed while fighting Orcs who had entered Brethil. The lordship then fell to his son Brandir, a lame and gentle man with skill in healing. His people respected him less than a chieftain of war. When Túrin came to Brethil and took the name Turambar, he became their leader in fact, and the rivalry that followed ended in disaster. Glaurung came into the region, Túrin killed Brandir in a rage, and Túrin himself died soon afterwards. These events stripped the people of both their hereditary lord and their champion.5

After the deaths of Túrin and Brandir, the Haladin largely drop out of the narrative. The published accounts describe no later wars led by a chieftain of their line. They also say nothing specific about how the people ended. Unlike the Houses of Bëor and Hador, the People of Haleth have no clear continuation in the story of the Edain after the First Age. Their principal lasting legacy in the record is their share in the ancestry of Húrin.6

In Brethil the Haladin lived as a people of the forest, and the texts show them adapting their life to it. Their chief dwelling stood on Amon Obel, the hill rising from the middle of the woods, where a fenced settlement later called Ephel Brandir gathered the households of their lord. They did not guard their charge at the Teiglin with walls or open battle. They relied on knowledge of their own ground, watching the paths and falling on Orc-bands from cover, and in the account of Túrin they appear chiefly as woodmen who move unseen among the trees. Authority among them rested on the hereditary line of Haleth, but the story of Brandir shows that his people also judged a leader by his skill in war, and they were ready to follow a stronger man where their lord seemed weak.1

Their separateness from the other Edain showed in their customs as well as their speech, and nothing in their daily life marks it more clearly than their bond with the Drúedain. The Unfinished Tales presents this as a partnership of trust between two unlike peoples. The Woses were skilled carvers of stone, and among the Haladin they set up figures of their own making at the doors of dwellings as watch-stones, which were held to carry something of their maker's power. The tale of the Faithful Stone, told among the Folk of Haleth, concerns a Drû named Aghan and his friend Barach, a forester of Brethil, and describes how such a stone kept watch over a household in its master's absence. Nothing comparable is told of the Houses of Bëor or Hador, and the tradition belongs to Brethil alone.2

The record says little about what the Haladin believed concerning death, and it attributes no doctrine to them beyond the mortal lot they shared with other Men. Their practice is better attested than their thought. Besides the mound raised for Haleth, the woodmen of Brethil buried Finduilas of Nargothrond, who had been slain near the Crossings of Teiglin, and they raised a mound over her there that became known as Haudh-en-Elleth. In this way the Haladin marked the dead within their own land with earth and memory and not with stone or inscription, and they honoured a stranger of the Elves with the same kind of burial they gave their own.3

The texts do not divide the Haladin into separate clans or tribes. The one distinction they draw is between the people as a whole and the ruling line within it. The people were named after Haleth, but the chieftainship did not pass through her. It stayed with the kin of Haldad and went to the descendants of her brother Haldar. This is why the narrative speaks of a house of Haleth mainly in matters of succession, and says a people or a folk everywhere else. The Haladin also stand apart from the other two kindreds of the Edain in how they held their land. The Houses of Bëor and Hador took service with Noldorin princes and received their territories from them. The Haladin, by contrast, lived in Brethil by Thingol's leave, on the condition that they guard the Crossings of Teiglin, and they kept chieftains of their own blood.1

In Túrin's time, the gap between inherited rank and actual standing among the Haladin becomes a theme of the story in its own right. Brandir held the lordship by descent, but many of the woodmen were more willing to follow Túrin. Túrin was himself partly of Haleth's blood through his grandmother Hareth, but he was not of the chieftains' line. The account makes this rivalry a clash between the rightful lord and a leader chosen in practice by the people. Besides the chieftains, the account names only a few men of Brethil. Among them are Dorlas, who went with Túrin against Glaurung but turned back in fear, and Hunthor, who belonged to Brandir's kin and died at the ravine of Cabed-en-Aras while trying to help Túrin. Neither figure represents a separate branch of the people. Both appear as members of a single forest folk held together by one hereditary house.2

It carried a duty: the Haladin were to keep watch over the Crossings of Teiglin and stop Orcs from passing that way.

In the chapter on the coming of Men, the Haladin supply the narrative's counter-voice. The followers of Bëor and Marach enter Beleriand as Men who seek out the Eldar, learn from them and take service under their princes. The Haladin show another answer to the same encounter: friendship with the Elves without lordship from them. Haleth's refusal of Caranthir's offer is the story's clearest statement of this choice. It makes the service of the other two houses a decision rather than the only path open to Men. The people's distance from Elvish lore works in the same direction, and through them the book shows mortals keeping a way of life of their own in a land shaped by the Noldor.1

In the tale of Túrin, Brethil becomes the setting for the hero's last attempt to begin anew. He takes a new name among its woodmen, and on the grave-mound of Finduilas he finds the nameless woman whom he calls Níniel. The people's inner division does more than supply background, since it drives the plot. Brandir serves as a foil to Túrin. He heals where Túrin fights, he keeps to concealment where Túrin seeks open war, and he sees clearly the danger that others brush aside. Because his people are drawn to the stronger man, Brandir's foresight goes unheeded, and the community that shelters Túrin becomes part of the mechanism of his ruin.2

Read alongside the hidden realms of the Elves, Brethil follows a pattern that runs through the later chapters of the book. A people survives for as long as it remains unseen, and its safety wears away once a renowned warrior draws it into open conflict. The same sequence occurs at Nargothrond, and among the Haladin it is repeated on the smaller scale of a mortal folk. Their story thus carries one of the book's recurring concerns: whether a small people can endure through restraint and secrecy in a world where Morgoth's malice seeks out every refuge.3

Haleth as the leader of this people is a comparatively late conception. In the earlier forms of the legend of the Edain, the house bore the name of Haleth, but Haleth there was a man, a chieftain remembered as a hunter. No story was yet told of a daughter who held a stockade after her father and brother had fallen. The Grey Annals still follow that older pattern. The name Haladin, the story of Haldad's death in Thargelion, and Haleth as a woman who refused Caranthir's protection belong to the expanded account of the coming of Men that Tolkien wrote in the later phase of his work on the First Age. It was this later account that shaped the published chapter. Much of what the finished book presents as the settled character of the people therefore came from revision, not from the original conception.1

The drafts also go further than the published text in the history of Brethil after Túrin. In the unfinished narrative of Húrin's wanderings after his release by Morgoth, Húrin comes to the forest, which is then ruled by Hardang, a chieftain hostile to him who held power after Brandir. The people are divided between Hardang and his kinsman Manthor, who takes Húrin's part. The quarrel ends in violence at Obel Halad, the chieftain's hall, and costs the lives of both leaders, and Brethil is left in disorder. Tolkien never brought this story into a finished form. It therefore explains why the published accounts fall silent about the Haladin, since the material that would have told their later decline stayed in draft.2