Men

Among the Eldar, Men were known by several names that reflected how the Elves understood them in relation to themselves rather than any name Men used for their own kind. The most formal of these, Atani, "the Second People," marked Men as the second of Ilúvatar's Children to appear in the world; the same root later narrowed, among the Elves of Beleriand, into Edain, a term applied specifically to those Men who crossed the mountains into the west and befriended the Eldar. The Elves also called Men Hildor, "the Followers," since they woke into a world the Elves already inhabited, and used other, less flattering epithets besides: Apanónar, "the After-born," Engwar, "the Sickly," and Fírimar, "the Mortals" or "the Death-doomed," names that dwelt on the frailty and brief span the Elves observed in the newcomers. What Men called themselves in their own earliest speech is not preserved in any surviving lore; nearly every name by which they are known descends from Elvish tongues rather than from a Mannish word of that first age.

Men awoke far in the east of Middle-earth, in a land afterward called Hildórien, at the first rising of the Sun, a beginning set apart from that of the Elves, who had stirred long before under starlight alone at Cuiviénen. When the eastern peoples eventually wandered westward and came at last to Beleriand and the notice of the Eldar, their own loremasters proved strangely unwilling to speak of that first age, treating it as a memory clouded and fearful rather than something to recall freely. The Elves who listened to them sensed that some shadow already lay upon Men before ever they entered the west, though its cause was never plainly told to Elvish ears.

Unlike the Elves, whose many tongues Elvish loremasters traced to a single origin at Cuiviénen, Men from the beginning spoke a multitude of unrelated languages, and no single primitive Mannish speech was ever identified by Elvish or later scholarship. The peoples who reached Beleriand each brought a distinct tongue, and further east and south other nations of Men spoke languages stranger still, of which little was ever recorded. Only later, chiefly through Adûnaic among the Númenóreans and its descendant Westron, did any Mannish speech come to be set down and studied in real detail.

The peoples of Men who eventually crossed the Blue Mountains into Beleriand did so in successive waves during the four-hundred-year span of the Siege of Angband, long after their first stirring in the east. There they encountered the Noldor and Sindar, and Finrod Felagund is remembered as the first of the Eldar to meet and befriend them, learning their speech and teaching them in turn. Three peoples among these newcomers grew especially close to the Elves and came to be called the Edain: the followers of Bëor, of Haleth, and of Hador, who settled within or near the realms of the Noldorin kings and, over generations, took up the Elvish tongue of Beleriand alongside their own.

The Edain fought and died beside the Noldor and Sindar through the long Wars of Beleriand, most grievously at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, where the treachery of Men newly arrived from the east turned the battle and where the House of Hador in particular was nearly destroyed. Other Mannish peoples, the so-called Easterlings, entered Beleriand during this same period and largely allied themselves with Morgoth, so that the Wars of Beleriand set kindred against kindred among Men as much as against Elves. By the time Beleriand was broken and drowned at the end of the First Age, the surviving Edain had dwindled to a remnant, and it was this remnant whom the Valar rewarded for their loyalty with a new land in the sea, the star-shaped isle of Númenor.

In Númenor the descendants of the Edain rose to a might no other nation of Men would equal, ruled by the line of Elros and long preserving friendship with the Eldar and the Valar under the Ban that forbade them the Undying Lands. Over more than three thousand years that friendship soured into envy of Elvish and Valarin immortality, and the Númenóreans turned to conquest and, under later kings, to worship of Morgoth counselled by the captive Sauron. The Downfall of Númenor followed when Ar-Pharazôn broke the Ban outright, and the island was drowned beneath the sea, so that the great western realm of Men ended within a single age of its founding.

Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anárion escaped the drowning of Númenor with a handful of ships and the surviving loyal remnant of their people, called the Faithful, and founded the exile-realms of Arnor in the north and Gondor in the south of Middle-earth. These Dúnedain kingdoms led the Last Alliance of Elves and Men against Sauron at the end of the Second Age, a war that cost Elendil and Anárion their lives and left Isildur to take the One Ring rather than destroy it, a choice whose consequences shaped the ages that followed. In the centuries after, Arnor split into lesser, quarreling kingdoms that were eventually overrun, while Gondor endured as the chief realm of Men in the west, though its own line of kings later failed and passed to the rule of Stewards.

Through the Third Age other nations of Men rose alongside Gondor's slow decline: the Rohirrim, granted the land of Calenardhon as Rohan for their aid at the Battle of the Field of Celebrant, became Gondor's steadfast ally and horse-warriors of the north-marches, while Easterlings and the Haradrim of the south were repeatedly drawn into Sauron's wars against Gondor. Sauron's corruption of Men reached its darkest expression in the nine mortal kings who accepted his Rings of Power and were reduced over time to the Nazgûl, his most feared servants, themselves once great among the race of Men. By the close of the age Gondor and Rohan stood as the last strongholds of the Free Peoples of Men in the west, besieged on multiple fronts by forces drawn from the Men of the east and south whom Sauron had subdued to his will.

The War of the Ring brought these threads together at the Pelennor Fields and the Battle of the Morannon, where Men of Gondor and Rohan, aided by Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits, broke Sauron's armies and ended his power. With Aragorn's crowning as King Elessar, Arnor and Gondor were reunited under a single line descended from Elendil, and the Fourth Age that followed came to be reckoned by later loremasters as the Dominion of Men, the age in which the Elves faded and departed over the Sea and rule of Middle-earth passed decisively to the Second-born.

Among all differences between Elves and Men, none runs deeper than their relationship to death and time. In the Ainulindalë, Ilúvatar declares that Men, unlike the Elves who remain bound to Arda until its ending, are given a fate that lies outside the Music itself, free to shape the course of their days beyond the ordering of the Powers. What becomes of a Man's spirit once life ends was never disclosed to Elves or Valar, and this apartness came to be called the Gift of Ilúvatar to his Second Children, though Men themselves, under the shadow that fell early upon their kind, learned to dread it as loss rather than welcome it as freedom.

The three peoples who became the Edain differed in custom as much as in tongue: the Folk of Bëor and the Folk of Hador followed patriarchal chieftains, while the Haladin were for a time led by a woman, Haleth, and kept ways that set them apart even from their nearest kin. Such variety was typical of Men at large, whose scattered nations developed divergent laws, crafts, and beliefs far more readily than the more uniform culture of the Eldar. Nowhere did the Mannish dread of death find stranger expression than in later Númenor, where plain burial gave way to costly embalming and the raising of vast tombs, as Dúnedain kings sought through art and hoarded wealth to soften an end their forebears had once accepted with greater equanimity.

Because their lives were brief beside the Eldar's age-spanning memory, Men set unusual store by the written record and the measured year: the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor kept calendars descended from Númenórean reckoning, periodically adjusted to hold faith with the turning seasons, and the same unease before impermanence drove them to raise lasting works in stone and mortar. Men also proved quick to borrow and reshape what they needed from other peoples, taking up the Cirth and later the Tengwar from the Elves and adapting both to their own tongues, much as they took Elvish crafts of smithing and shipbuilding wherever contact allowed. This readiness to change and remake their own works, generation upon generation, marked Men apart from the more settled, preservative ways of the Elves.

Within the wider mass of Men, the sources single out named subdivisions chiefly among the Edain of Beleriand, where three distinct houses are recorded under their own chieftains rather than treated as a single people. The House of Bëor took its name from Bëor the Old, first of the Edain to swear fealty to Finrod Felagund; the House of Hador traced itself to the Folk of Marach, whose leadership passed to Marach's descendant Hador Lórindol, from whom the house afterward took its name; and the People of Haleth formed a third and smaller house, kept apart from the other two by custom as well as settlement. Each house held its own lands under the protection of the Noldorin realms — Bëor's folk in Dorthonion, Hador's in Dor-lómin, Haleth's people in the forest of Brethil — and each kept a separate line of chieftains even as alliances bound the three together against Morgoth.

The houses of Bëor and Hador became joined in descent rather than remaining wholly separate. Beren of the House of Bëor and Tuor of the House of Hador each married an Elf-woman of royal blood, and their children, through Dior and then Eärendil, brought the two Mannish houses together with the lines of Elu Thingol and the house of Finwë. Later loremasters traced the ancestry of Elros, and through him of the Númenórean kings and all the Dúnedain who followed, back explicitly through this combined descent of the two houses, so that the House of Bëor and the House of Hador, rather than the smaller People of Haleth, became the houses most remembered in the genealogies of the Second and Third Ages.

In later ages the same explicit naming of ruling houses recurs among particular nations of Men. Gondor's line of Ruling Stewards is recorded as the House of Húrin, a line distinct from the royal House of Elendil it served and, after the kings failed, effectively replaced in day-to-day rule. In the North, the scattered remnant of the Dúnedain of Arnor was led, after the kingdom's fall, by an unbroken line called the Chieftains of the Dúnedain, heirs of Isildur, a line that ended only when Aragorn restored the crown. Rohan's ruling line is likewise named directly as the House of Eorl, after Eorl the Young, whose descendants held the kingship of the Mark down to the War of the Ring.

Within the legendarium's design, Men supply most of its moral drama, since their choices, unlike the settled nobility of the Elves or the steady loyalty of Hobbits, remain genuinely open to failure. Boromir's attempt to seize the Ring from Frodo, born of desperation for his city rather than simple malice, and Denethor's slide from stewardship into despair and self-destruction, both dramatize a susceptibility to pride, fear, and the lure of power that the narrative treats as characteristic of Men rather than of any other people. The same openness cuts the other way: Aragorn's long, unglamorous discipline in exile, and the willingness of ordinary captains and soldiers of Gondor and Rohan to hold a losing line, give Men's part in the story its recurring note of hard-won, unassured courage, won rather than simply possessed.

Mortality, treated elsewhere in this article as a matter of doctrine, functions in the narrative itself as a source of plot and pathos rather than explanation. Arwen's choice to forsake the immortality of her kin for love of Aragorn, and the account of his own chosen death once his work as king is done, stage the parting of Elves and Men as a personal loss rather than an abstraction, giving the theme of the Gift of Men its sharpest expression late in the story. Where Númenor's downfall had shown a people corrupted by refusing their mortality, Aragorn's ending shows the same fact accepted, and the contrast frames much of the emotional close of the tale.

More broadly, Men serve as the hinge by which the legendarium's mythic early ages give way to something closer to history, a shift Tolkien himself described as central to the work's design, since Men's affairs are told with the texture of chronicle and genealogy rather than of myth, so that by the story's end the age of Elves and Valar recedes and the age of Men, fallible and unaided, becomes the one in which the tale's audience is implicitly asked to recognize its own.

In the earliest layer of the legendarium, the Book of Lost Tales, Men's presence in the mythology was inseparable from its narrative frame: the tales were represented as told to a Man, the mariner Eriol, later renamed Ælfwine, who sailed to the Elvish isle of Tol Eressëa and there heard the history of the Elder Days from its own participants. This device cast Men explicitly as the audience and eventual inheritors of a lore originally kept by the Elves, and it was bound up with an early, more literal version of the Elves' diminishment: as Men multiplied across Middle-earth, the Elves were conceived as fading from mortal sight and passing into invisibility rather than merely departing over the Sea, an explanation offered for why later ages of Men no longer perceive fairies openly. Both the frame story and this mechanical account of fading were abandoned as the legendarium matured, leaving only echoes of Elvish fading in the later, published conception.

Two further strands of unpublished material touch on Men's origin and destiny in ways the printed Silmarillion leaves unresolved. The late dialogue Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, together with the appended Mannish legend called the Tale of Adanel, gives an explicit account of a primeval Fall: Men, tempted by Melkor before ever they came into the sunlight of the world, surrendered their allegiance to him and so brought upon themselves the shortened lifespan and the fear of death that Elves later observed as a shadow on their kind. Separately, an early and recurring text known as the Prophecy of Mandos foretold that Men, not only Elves, would take part in the Last Battle at the end of days, with Túrin Turambar returning from death to strike down Morgoth himself; this eschatological role for Men and for Túrin persisted through later revisions but was never carried into the published narrative.