Noldor

The Noldor begin with the awakening of the Quendi beside the water of Cuiviénen in the east of Middle-earth, in the long ages before Sun and Moon, when Oromë first came upon the Elves and brought them the summons of the Valar. Those who accepted that summons and set out westward were the Eldar, and they went in three hosts. The Noldor were the second of these, following Finwë, who was their lord upon the march and afterwards in Aman; before them went the smaller host of the Vanyar under Ingwë, and behind them came the Teleri, most numerous of the three, under Elwë and Olwë. From an early stage the kindreds were marked less by descent than by temper: where the Vanyar were drawn to song and to the light of the Valar, and the Teleri lingered by water, the Noldor turned to making and to enquiry, and they became the close friends of Aulë, from whom much of their craft was learned.

The name the people bore among themselves is drawn from the word-group of knowing: a Noldo is one who has knowledge, and the plural is commonly rendered as the Wise, though the wisdom meant is learning and skill of hand rather than counsel or foresight. In English narrative the kindred is called the Deep Elves, a phrase used already in the account of Bilbo's journey, where the Deep-elves are named beside kindreds of the light and of the sea; the depth intended is depth of lore, not of dwelling. The account of tongues appended to the tale of the Ring keeps the same distinction, treating the Noldor as those High Elves who returned out of the West into Middle-earth, whose own speech was by then preserved chiefly for lore and naming while the grey tongue of Beleriand served for daily use.

Among the Sindar the same name survived in altered shape, singular Golodh and plural Gelydh, worn down by the long divergence of the two tongues; it is preserved in place-names such as the Gate of the Noldor in the hills of Dor-lómin, which recalled the people who had passed that way. Tolkien himself glossed the sense plainly when writing of his legends: in earlier accounts he had called this kindred Gnomes, choosing the word for its association with knowledge rather than for any of its later and smaller meanings, and he came to think the choice misleading. The name, in whatever language, therefore says the same thing about the people who carried it, and it is the one point on which the Elvish and the English traditions agree without qualification.

In Aman the second host built their city upon the green hill of Túna in the cleft of the Calacirya and named it Tirion, and there Finwë ruled while the light of the Two Trees lay upon its white walls and stairs. Under the teaching of Aulë the Noldor went far beyond their earlier skill: they were the first of the Elves to cut and shape gems, and they gathered great hoards of them; Rúmil of Tirion devised the first written characters, and Fëanor afterwards made the script that came into general use. Fëanor's chief work was the three Silmarils, in which the blended light of the Trees was held fast. That peace was undone by Melkor, released from his long captivity, who moved among the Noldor with whispered grievances until the sons of Finwë grew suspicious of one another; Fëanor drew sword upon his half-brother Fingolfin before the King's house and was sent into banishment for twelve years to the stronghold of Formenos in the north. Thither Melkor came at the last, when the Trees had been poisoned and their light quenched, and he slew Finwë at the doors and carried off the jewels.

In the darkness that followed, Fëanor and his seven sons swore an oath to pursue with vengeance anyone who should withhold a Silmaril from them, and the greater part of the kindred was persuaded to abandon Aman and seek Morgoth in Middle-earth. Fingolfin's people went too, held by kinship rather than by zeal, while Finarfin turned back at last and was pardoned, and ruled thereafter over the remnant that stayed in Tirion. At Alqualondë the marchers demanded the white ships of the Teleri, were refused, and took them by force: the first slaying of Elf by Elf, and the ground of the doom pronounced upon them on the northern shore, which foretold that their oath would turn against them and that their works would come to little in the end. Fëanor sailed with his own following and burned the ships at Losgar, leaving the rest behind; Fingolfin's host crossed instead the grinding ice of the far north, losing many, and came into Middle-earth as the Moon first rose.

The first battle in Beleriand was won against the orcs that came down upon the newcomers, but Fëanor pressed too far ahead and was mortally wounded by Balrogs within sight of Angband. Maedhros his eldest son was taken at a false parley and hung by the wrist from a precipice of Thangorodrim until Fingon rescued him; afterwards he surrendered the kingship to Fingolfin's line for the sake of peace between the houses. There followed the division of the land into realms: Fingolfin and Fingon held Hithlum, Finrod founded the caverns of Nargothrond and Turgon the hidden city of Gondolin, Angrod and Aegnor watched the highlands of Dorthonion, and the sons of Fëanor took the eastern marches. After a third battle drove Morgoth's assault back, the Noldor set a siege about Angband that held for close on four hundred years, a period of building, exploring and alliance with Men and with the Dwarves of the mountains. In these years the exiles largely adopted the grey tongue of Beleriand for daily speech, the more so after Thingol learned of the slaying at Alqualondë and forbade the use of their own language within his borders.

The siege was broken by a sudden onslaught of fire out of the north, which cost the Noldor Dorthonion and much of their outer defence and ended with Fingolfin riding alone to the gates of Angband to his death. A generation later the great alliance mustered by Maedhros was betrayed on the field and shattered in the battle called Unnumbered Tears; Fingon fell, Hithlum was lost, and what remained of Noldorin power survived only in hidden places. Nargothrond was laid open and plundered with the help of the dragon Glaurung, and Gondolin at last was betrayed from within and destroyed, its survivors escaping to the settlements at the mouths of Sirion. The oath drove the sons of Fëanor to two further kinslayings, upon Doriath and upon those havens, so that the kindred did as much harm to its own as its enemy did. Deliverance came from outside the war, when Eärendil's voyage moved the Valar to send a host out of the West; Morgoth was overthrown, but the land itself was broken in the fighting and most of Beleriand sank beneath the sea.

Pardon was offered to the exiles, and many took ship at last for the West; those who would not go settled in the surviving coastlands, where Gil-galad held the high kingship in Lindon beyond the Blue Mountains. Inland, a company under Celebrimbor of Fëanor's house founded Eregion beside the western gate of Khazad-dûm, and the friendship between smiths of the two peoples there was closer than any before or since. Into that place came Sauron in fair form, offering instruction, and with his help the Noldorin smiths made the Rings of Power, though the three greatest were Celebrimbor's own work and untouched by him. When the deception was discovered war followed: Eregion was destroyed, Celebrimbor killed, and the refugees withdrew to the valley stronghold of Imladris. Long after, the Noldor of Lindon marched in the Last Alliance with the Men of the West, and Gil-galad was slain in the overthrow of Sauron, so that no high king of the kindred remained in Middle-earth.

Through the Third Age the kindred founded nothing new. Its remnant lived in Lindon and at Rivendell, and Galadriel bore one of the Three in the woods of Lórien; their part in events was counsel, refuge and the keeping of old knowledge rather than rule, as in the long deliberations of the White Council. Numbers fell steadily as ships went west from the Grey Havens, and the desire for the Sea grew on those who stayed. When the One Ring was destroyed the power of the Three ended with it, and the guardianship those rings had maintained could not be renewed. Elrond and Galadriel sailed soon afterwards, and the few Noldor left behind faded among the woods and shores of a Middle-earth that had passed to Men.

What marked the second kindred was less the extent of their knowledge than the use they insisted on making of it. Their bent was toward metal, stone and the shaping of things that had not existed before, and with that bent went a restlessness which no completed work altogether satisfied: they were forever seeking after new matters and new means, and the delight of discovery mattered to them as much as the thing discovered. The same energy went into song and verse, and Maglor was reckoned among the greatest of Elvish singers, whose lament over his own people's fall was still remembered ages later. Not all their works were understood by their makers: the seeing-stones that Fëanor wrought in Aman passed at length to Middle-earth, and served purposes in later ages that no one in Tirion could have foreseen.

Their love of words worked in the same restless way. Where the Vanyar kept their speech close to the form it had in the beginning, the Noldor altered theirs continually, inventing and reshaping because they wished for names that fitted more exactly what they knew or imagined; the making of language was for them a craft like any other. One consequence was a habit of multiple naming, so that a person or a place might carry several names of different origin and occasion, and the record of the kindred is thick with such doublets. In exile the habit served them well: rather than force their own tongue upon Beleriand, most of the princes took Sindarin forms of their names and were known by them ever after, which is why the histories of the First Age call them by names in a language that was not originally their own.

Toward death and time they stood as all Elves did, but felt it differently. They did not age or sicken, and their lives were bound to the life of the world itself; when slain or worn away by grief, their spirits went to the keeping of Mandos in the West, so that loss was separation rather than an ending. What wore upon them instead was duration: the accumulation of memory, and the sight of everything they had built being altered or undone while they remained. Out of this came the impulse that shaped their later history, a wish to arrest change and keep what they loved unspoiled — which is what the Three Rings were made to do, not for dominion or war but for preservation and healing. Tolkien himself judged this desire the characteristic error of the Elves, calling them embalmers in their longing to halt time rather than accept it, and among the Noldor, who had seen the light of Aman and given it up, the longing bit deepest.

The internal shape of the second kindred was, to an unusual degree, the shape of one family. Finwë married twice, a thing without precedent among the Eldar: Míriel bore him Fëanor and afterwards laid down her life, and Indis of the Vanyar bore him Fingolfin and Finarfin. From those three sons came the three princely houses by which the exiles are always reckoned, and the distance between Fëanor and the children of Indis was older than any dispute over jewels. One visible trace of the second marriage remained in the descendants: the Noldor were dark-haired as a people, and the golden hair of Finarfin and his children came to them from their Vanyarin grandmother.

In Beleriand the three houses kept separate followings. That of Fëanor was bound tightest, since his seven sons — Maedhros, Maglor, Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin, and the twins Amrod and Amras — were sworn with him; its last representative in Middle-earth was Celebrimbor son of Curufin. The house of Fingolfin held the high kingship, which passed from him to his son Fingon and then to his second son Turgon, and to it belonged also his daughter Aredhel, whose son Maeglin was of half-Sindarin descent. Finarfin's children — Finrod, Orodreth, Angrod, Aegnor and Galadriel — stood a little apart, for their mother was Eärwen daughter of Olwë, which made them kin to Thingol and won them a hearing in Doriath that no other house was given. Smaller divisions appear where a narrative has cause to name them: the people of Gondolin were ordered in houses under their own lords, among them Glorfindel of the Golden Flower and Ecthelion of the Fountain, who led their companies as distinct bodies in the city's last battle. In Eregion the smiths were grouped instead by their work, as the brotherhood of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain with Celebrimbor at its head.

In the writings published in Tolkien's own lifetime these divisions survive only as echoes, but they are exact echoes. The wandering company that Frodo met under the trees of the Shire described itself as belonging to the House of Finrod, exiles whose kin had for the most part already departed, and who kept no settled dwelling; Gandalf, speaking of Glorfindel, said no more than that he was an Elf-lord of a princely house. The reckoning by descent is preserved most plainly in the royal line of Númenor, where Elrond's mother Idril is named daughter of Turgon, so that the household at Rivendell continued, through her, the second of the three houses.

The tales of the Elder Days are organised around this kindred, and much of their shape follows from that choice. Other peoples enter the Quenta chiefly at the points where the exiles touch them: the hidden kingdom of Doriath matters because embassies and marriages cross its border, the Edain because they take service in the northern realms, the Dwarves because they build and trade for them. Even the frame in which the material reaches a reader runs the same way, since the lore of the First Age is presented as something preserved in an Elvish house of the West and turned into the common speech at Rivendell by a hobbit working from books that were not his own. The effect is that the reader sees the long war from inside the party that began it, and is given its self-account before any other.

What the kindred carries thematically is the fall of the maker. Their catastrophe does not come from weakness but from the same faculty that produced their finest work: the jewels are unmatched, and it is precisely their unmatchedness that makes an oath seem reasonable to those who swore it. Tolkien set this out in his own account of the legends, where the ruin of the Elves is described as a possessiveness toward the things they had made rather than an appetite for conquest. The narrative then declines the tidier arrangement in which an enemy is the sole author of harm; the worst wounds this people takes are dealt by its own hands, and the overthrow of Morgoth arrives from outside their war altogether, granted rather than won.

In the tale of the Ring their function is elegiac. They supply depth: the older story is not summarised for the reader but spoken by persons who were present at it, so that the council at Rivendell and the wood of Lórien open onto a past still inhabited rather than merely recorded. That presence also fixes the cost of the ending, since the same victory that saves the Shire empties the houses that sheltered it, and the departure from the Havens is written as loss for those who go and for the hobbit who watches them.

In the earliest layer of the legends the kindred appears as the Noldoli, and their arrangement among the Elvish peoples differs from the one later fixed. There the three hosts are the Teleri, the Noldoli and the Solosimpi, so that the name afterwards given to the third and largest kindred belonged at first to the foremost host, the people who would become the Vanyar; the shore-dwellers of the third host bore instead a name taken from their piping by the sea. Their lord upon the march is called Finwë Nólemë, a compound name of which only the first element survived into the finished work. Most striking is a conception later abandoned altogether: after the flight from Valinor great numbers of the Noldoli fell into bondage under Melko and laboured as thralls in his northern fortress, and escaped slaves of that sort serve as guides and informants in the early tale of Gondolin's fall. Nothing of this servitude remains in the later account, where the exiles meet Morgoth as besiegers rather than as captives.

The middle period reorganised the material without settling the terminology. The one complete prose history of the 1930s is titled for this people, being offered as the chronicle of the Gnomes, and the word was still in use throughout the writings of that decade. The etymological notes of the same years derive the name from a stem of wisdom and knowledge, giving both the Quenya and the Beleriandic forms. More consequential is a reassignment of languages: in that period the tongue called Noldorin was the speech the exiles developed in Middle-earth, and only later did Tolkien transfer that language wholesale to the Grey-elves as Sindarin, leaving the Noldor with Quenya as their own inheritance. Late essays add further refinements, among them the observation that the true form of the name began with a velar nasal, and an account of a sound-change from an older interdental to a sibilant which split opinion within the kindred and which Fëanor resisted for reasons bound up with his mother's name — a linguistic quarrel made to carry part of the weight of the family's estrangement.