The House of Bëor

The house takes its name from its first chieftain, whose own name among his people had been Balan. When he bound himself to the service of Finrod Felagund and went with him westward, he was known from then on as Bëor, a word that in the speech of his kindred meant vassal. The name thus records an act rather than a lineage: it marks the moment at which a wandering folk of Men first pledged themselves to a lord of the Eldar. The epithet the Old was added only later, and the house as a whole was named after him as its progenitor. Among the Eldar, and in the memory of the Edain themselves, it was ranked as the Eldest House of Men and the First House of the Edain, since its people were the first of their race to cross into Beleriand.1

Bëor's people came over the Blue Mountains into Ossiriand, and it was there, in the eastern reaches of Beleriand, that Finrod came upon them encamped. They had journeyed out of the East over many years, drawn by rumour of a light in the West, and they would say little of what lay behind them beyond that it was a darkness they had deliberately turned from. Their language bore traces of long contact with the Dark Elves they had met on the way, so that Finrod was able to learn it quickly. The newcomers in turn gave him a name of their own, Nóm, meaning wisdom, and called his folk the Nómin, the Wise.2

As a people, Bëor's kindred belonged to the Men whom the Eldar called Atani, the Second People; in the Sindarin speech of Beleriand this became Edain, a name that came to be applied chiefly to the three houses of Elf-friends, of which this was the earliest. From Bëor the chieftainship passed through his descendants, and it is from this line that Barahir and his son Beren came. The house therefore stands at the head of the Edain both in time and in the reckoning of the Elves, and its names, whether given by itself or by others, all turn on that first allegiance.3

After Finrod had found them, Bëor's people did not stay long in Ossiriand, where the Green-elves were uneasy at their presence. They moved westward into East Beleriand and made their dwellings in the region later called Estolad, the Encampment, and the kindred of Marach, the second of the three houses, arrived and settled there after them. Bëor himself did not remain among his folk. He went with Finrod to Nargothrond and stayed in the king's service there for the rest of his life. When he died it was of age alone, without wound or sickness, and the Eldar watched with grief and wonder as a Man passed away from weariness, something they had not seen before.1

The years in Estolad were not without strife. Some among the Edain resented the rule of the Elves and listened to doubts that the Eldar held to have been sown by Morgoth. In the house of Bëor this unrest was voiced by Bereg, a descendant of Bëor's elder son Baran, who argued against the war and the lordship of the West. When the dispute had run its course, a part of the people went with Bereg and turned back southward and eastward out of Beleriand, and the record says nothing further of them. The division was the first loss the house suffered, and it came from within, not from open war.2

Those who stayed in Beleriand were given a home further north. Most of the people of Bëor settled in Ladros, in the north-eastern part of the highland of Dorthonion, where the sons of Finarfin, Angrod and Aegnor, held the land against Angband. The chieftainship passed down Bëor's line from Baran to Boromir and then to Bregor, whose sons were Bregolas and Barahir. Under this line the house lived as a frontier people under Noldorin lordship, bound to the defence of the north. Its daughters also married into the other houses of the Edain, so that its blood came to be shared well beyond Ladros.3

The Long Peace ended with the Dagor Bragollach, when fire poured over Ard-galen and Dorthonion fell to the enemy. Angrod and Aegnor were killed, and so was Bregolas, together with a large part of the fighting men of the house. Barahir, with those who remained, came to the aid of Finrod in the fens of Serech and cut a way out for him, and in return Finrod gave him his ring and swore to help his kin in any time of need. Barahir did not abandon Dorthonion. He sent away the women and children under his wife Emeldir, who led them over the mountains to Brethil, and he stayed on with twelve companions as outlaws in the conquered highland. They were eventually betrayed through one of their own number, Gorlim, and all were slain except Barahir's son Beren, who later escaped southward toward Doriath.4

With the loss of Dorthonion, the house of Bëor no longer existed as a people with its own land and its own ruler. Its line continued instead through marriages and through individual lives. Morwen, granddaughter of Bregolas, married Húrin of the house of Hador and bore Túrin and Nienor. Her kinswoman Rían married Huor and became the mother of Tuor. Beren's union with Lúthien produced Dior, and through Dior and Elwing the blood of Bëor passed to Elros. When the Edain who remained faithful were rewarded after the War of Wrath and given the island of Númenor, the descendants of the First House were among those who crossed the sea. Elros, the first king there, was himself of Bëor's line.5

What most set the people of Bëor apart was the closeness of their tutelage under the Eldar. Other kindreds of Men came to know the Elves through treaty, rumour or chance meetings. This house had Finrod himself living among them in their first days in Beleriand, and he taught them directly. The instruction ran both ways: Finrod learned their speech, and they learned from him a truer knowledge of the world than they had brought out of the East. The allegiance their first chieftain had pledged held through the following generations. The house remained bound to the princes of Finarfin's line, whereas the later-come people of Hador looked above all to Fingolfin. This sense of belonging to one Elvish house, not only to the Eldar at large, runs through its whole history.1

In language the Edain were quick to adapt. They took up the Sindarin tongue of Beleriand for dealings with the Elves and used it widely, but among themselves they kept their own speech, so that two languages lived side by side in their households. That native speech was not lost, since it was among the roots of the later tongue of Númenor. In the Long Peace the Edain learned lore and many crafts from the Noldor, and they were counted among the most apt pupils the Eldar ever had among Men. Their way of life in the north was nonetheless that of a border people. It combined farming and settled dwelling with the steady obligation of watch and war.2

Their relation to death and time was the deepest difference between them and those who taught them. As Men they were short-lived beside the Eldar, and when their span ended they left the circles of the world for a destiny the Elves did not share and could not explain. The death of Bëor, already told, first made this difference plain to the Eldar. It is recorded as the beginning of their long wondering at the fate of Men. The house carried the same reticence about its own beginnings that its first chieftain had shown. It looked forward to its service in the West and was unwilling to dwell on the shadow it had left behind.3

The Eldar counted three houses among the Edain and told them apart by bearing as well as by descent. The people of Bëor came first, and they were fewer in number than the kindred of Marach that followed them. Most of them were grey-eyed, their hair dark or brown — a look that set them apart from Hador's tall, golden-haired folk. They were also unlike the Haladin, a smaller people who kept to themselves. In temperament the Elves thought them the Men most like the Noldor, and loved them accordingly: quick to learn, skilful with their hands, long in remembering, and more readily moved to compassion than to mirth. The Eldar judged this likeness of mind to be the natural ground of the house's close bond with Finarfin's kin.1

Within the house itself the chronicles distinguish lines of descent more than separate clans. Bëor had two sons, Baran and Belen. The ruling line ran through the elder, and the tale follows it most closely. In the generation after Bregor that line split in two. Bregolas, the elder brother, had two sons, Baragund and Belegund, and their daughters were Morwen and Rían. Barahir's only son was Beren. The two branches were bound together in the house's last stand in Dorthonion, since both sons of Bregolas were among the dozen who shared their uncle's outlawry. Afterwards the lineage of the First House survived in the women of Bregolas's branch and in Beren alone of Barahir's, and no separate lordship of Bëor was ever raised again in Beleriand.2

In the earliest form of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, among the Lost Tales, Beren was not a Man at all but one of the Gnomes, as the Noldor were then called.

Within the design of The Silmarillion, the First House serves as the doorway through which Men enter a story that until then has belonged to the Eldar. The chapter on the coming of Men is told from Finrod's side of the encounter. Readers meet the Second People as the Elves first saw them: strangers by a fire, unguarded and teachable, carrying a past they chose not to speak of. Because this house arrives first, its early chapters set out the terms on which every later kindred of Men is judged. Those terms are allegiance freely given, a willingness to learn, and a mortality that the immortal narrators cannot fully understand.1

The house's narrative weight lies less in its deeds as a people than in the obligations that pass through it. The debt Finrod accepts from Barahir becomes the hinge of the tale of Beren and Lúthien. When the son claims that promise, the Elven-king keeps it at the cost of his own life. A bond made between lords is thus turned into a personal sacrifice. The story also makes Beren the one through whom the paths of Elves and Men are first joined, and the one mortal permitted to return briefly from death. Tolkien himself regarded this tale as the core of the whole legendarium.2

After Dorthonion is lost, the house carries on in the book as a bloodline running through other people's stories. Through Morwen, its temper of pride and endurance enters the tragedy of Húrin's children and shapes how that tale unfolds. Read as a whole, the First House stands for the hope that runs through the Elder Days. Mortal Men, though frail and briefly lived, can bind themselves to the light in the West and, through a few lives, alter the fate of the world.3

The house as a lineage of Men is a comparatively late element of the legendarium. In the earliest form of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, among the Lost Tales, Beren was not a Man at all but one of the Gnomes, as the Noldor were then called. The later conception, in which the house of Bëor gives the First House its central place in the story, therefore did not exist at that stage. Only when Tolkien reworked the story in verse did Beren become the mortal son of Barahir. From then on the fortunes of Dorthonion and the tale of the Silmaril were tied together through this kindred, and the later prose Silmarillion versions kept that link.1

Tolkien's late writings added material about the house that never entered the published narrative. The dialogue known as the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth presents Andreth, a wise-woman of Bëor's people, debating with Finrod the nature of death and the hope of Men. In it she speaks of a darkness in her people's past, and her grief over her love for Aegnor gives the discussion a personal weight. In the essay on the languages of Men, the Bëorians are described as having largely taken up Sindarin. The later tongue of Númenor is traced chiefly to the speech of the house of Hador, so the essay weighs the two houses differently in the history of Adûnaic.2