Adurant

The name Adurant belongs to the Sindarin tongue and is descriptive rather than commemorative: it renders, in effect, "double stream." The published etymological notes to The Silmarillion trace the second element to a word meaning "course" — the same element that stands in Celebrant, the Silverlode of later ages — while the first element carries the sense of doubling. The name therefore fixes the single most conspicuous feature of the river's bed. Somewhere along its westward run the water divided into two arms and closed again below, and between those arms lay the island called Tol Galen, the Green Isle. The river was named for what it did to itself, not for anything that befell beside it.

This manner of naming is consistent across the country to which the river belonged. Ossiriand itself was called for its waters, the land of seven rivers, counting Gelion together with the six streams that came down out of the Ered Luin to meet it; Adurant closed that reckoning as the last and most southerly. Its companions bear names of the same descriptive cast — the impetuous Ascar, the glittering Brilthor — so that the roll of tributaries reads as a series of observations about swiftness, sound, and light rather than as a list of honorands. Only one of the six was ever renamed, and that for an event rather than for its nature; Adurant kept the name it had been given.

Who first spoke the name is not recorded, and the histories do not attribute it to any single namer. The form that survives is Sindarin, which is the language in which the annals of Beleriand were set down and in which the Noldor and the Grey-elves knew the region. The folk who actually dwelt among these waters, however, were the Green-elves who had come over the mountains out of the east and settled in Ossiriand, and their speech was not the same. What is preserved, then, is the name as the chroniclers of Beleriand used it, a plain topographical label whose meaning would have been evident to anyone standing where the stream parted.

Adurant was a mountain stream of eastern Beleriand, one of the six that came down out of the Ered Lindon and ran westward across Ossiriand to enter Gelion from its eastern side. Like its companions it fell steeply from the highlands and ran swift and broken over its bed, cold water carried quickly down from the mountain wall that closed Beleriand off from the lands beyond. Its immediate neighbour to the north was Duilwen; below the point where Adurant came in, Gelion received no further waters, but ran on alone through empty country toward the Sea in the far south. In the ordering of the tributaries from north to south — Ascar, Thalos, Legolin, Brilthor, Duilwen, Adurant — it was the last, and so it marked the lower limit of the whole watered region.

What set Adurant apart from the other five was the parting of its course. Somewhere along its westward run the stream split into two arms and then closed again into a single channel, and the ground enclosed between them was an island: Tol Galen, the Green Isle, ringed entirely by the river's own water. Nothing in the accounts suggests a great width of water or a formidable barrier; what is described is a small green place made defensible only by the fact of being encircled. It was on this island that Beren and Lúthien lived after their return to Middle-earth, and the surrounding country took from that dwelling the name Dor Firn-i-Guinar, the Land of the Dead that Live.

The country through which Adurant ran lay wholly between Gelion in the west and the mountains in the east, a green and well-watered land whose folk, the Green-elves, kept no strongholds and preferred to remain unseen among their woods. No fortress, bridge, or highway is recorded upon Adurant. The traffic that crossed Ossiriand — the Dwarf-road from the cities in the mountains — passed far to the north, where Ascar was forded at Sarn Athrad; the southern reaches saw nothing comparable. Adurant was therefore the quietest edge of an already quiet country, remote alike from the fortified marches of the Noldor beyond Gelion and from the wars that consumed the western vales.

The country through which Adurant ran has no recorded history before the coming of the Green-elves, and the river itself enters the annals only with them. They were of the Nandor, that portion of the eastward host which had turned aside from the great westward march at the falls of the Anduin and lingered long in the lands beyond the mountains. Afterwards a part of that people was led by Denethor son of Lenwë over the Ered Lindon into Beleriand, drawn by report of Thingol's power; and Thingol, glad of any increase to his folk, gave them leave to dwell in the green and empty country between Gelion and the mountain wall. This took place in the ages before the Sun and Moon were made, and the published narrative attaches no reckoning of years to it. From that settlement onward the six streams, Adurant last among them, framed a dwelling rather than merely a watershed.

The single event that shaped the temper of the region came soon after. Morgoth, testing the strength of Beleriand, sent two armies south, and the eastern host was met by Thingol together with Denethor and the newly come people. The Orcs were broken, but the Green-elves were lightly armed, and Denethor was cut off upon the hill of Amon Ereb and there slain with the closest of his kindred before help could reach him. His folk took no lord in his place. Thereafter they would fight no open battle again: they withdrew into their woods, went clad in green in spring and summer, and were seldom seen by any who did not know how to look for them. This is the reason the southern rivers show no works of war in any later account. Adurant's quiet was not accident but policy, decided once and kept for the remainder of the Age.

Long afterwards, in the years of the Sun, the first Men to enter Beleriand came over the mountain passes and descended into this same land, and Finrod discovered them encamped in the valley of Thalos. Their presence was not welcome to its inhabitants. The Green-elves were disturbed by the felling of trees and the hunting of beasts, and sent word to Thingol asking that the strangers be removed; Thingol answered that Men should not settle among the seven rivers, but should pass west over Gelion and take the open lands beyond. So they did, and Ossiriand remained a threshold that Men crossed rather than a country they inhabited. Through all the campaigns that followed in the north — the long siege, its breaking, and the disaster of the Fifth Battle — no fighting is recorded upon any of the six streams. The war that consumed Beleriand did not reach as far south as Adurant.

The river's one period of consequence began with the return of Beren and Lúthien to Middle-earth and their settlement upon the island in its arms, an episode already noticed above. Their son Dior was born and grew up there, and out of that household came the only journey of note that Adurant ever sent forth. When the Dwarves of Nogrod withdrew from the sack of Menegroth bearing the Nauglamír and the Silmaril set in it, Beren went north with the Green-elves and waylaid them at the ford over Ascar; the Dwarf-host was destroyed, and the treasure of Doriath was thrown into the water, which took thereafter the name Rathlóriel. The necklace was carried back south, and Lúthien wore it while she lived, so that for a short while the southern reach of Ossiriand was reckoned the fairest place in Middle-earth. No years are given for any of this.

That period ended without violence. Dior had already gone north with Nimloth to raise up Doriath again, leaving his daughter Elwing to be born beside the waterfall of Lanthir Lamath in Ossiriand; and one night in Menegroth an Elf out of that country came to him bearing the Nauglamír, by which token he understood that his parents had passed away. From that moment the histories turn elsewhere, to the second ruin of Doriath, the fall of Gondolin, and the settlements at the mouths of Sirion. Neither Adurant nor its island is mentioned again. When at the end of the Age the hosts of the West overthrew Morgoth, the northern lands were broken and the sea came in, and the Ered Lindon were riven so that the Lune ran out through a great gulf. What survived west of the mountains was the coastland afterwards called Lindon, remembered as a remnant of Ossiriand and keeping one of that country's older names. Whether any arm of Adurant remained within it is nowhere stated, and the river is not named in any record of the Ages that followed.

The folk of the southernmost rivers were the Green-elves, called Laiquendi in the High-elven tongue, and their history as a people is largely the history of a diminishing. After the loss of their leader upon Amon Ereb a part of them abandoned Ossiriand altogether, passing north-west into Doriath, where they were received and in time became indistinguishable from Thingol's own subjects; those who remained about the seven streams were what was left. They took no king thereafter, and no captain, council, or successor of any kind is named for them in the annals. Such lordship as reached the country was Thingol's, and it was a claim rather than a government: he held himself lord of all Beleriand, he had given the Green-elves their leave to settle, and he ruled on who might and might not dwell among the rivers, but the Girdle that guarded his own woods did not extend across Gelion, and no officer of Menegroth is recorded upon Adurant. Authority in that quarter was occasional and personal, exerted once or twice by a man the Green-elves chose to follow, and never institutional.

The neighbours were near but not close. Beyond Gelion to the west lay the wide lands held by the youngest sons of Fëanor, Amrod and Amras, who kept the country south of the fortified march and hunted through it far and wide, coming north only seldom; farther up, above the first of the six streams, Caranthir's people held Thargelion. No compact, quarrel, or exchange between these princes and the Green-elves of the southern rivers is set down anywhere in the histories, and the silence is consistent with what is said of both parties: the one roving in the empty south, the other unwilling to be seen. East beyond the mountain wall stood the Dwarf-cities, whose merchants had used the country as a thoroughfare since before the Noldor came, but their road ran across the northernmost of the tributaries, so that the traffic of two peoples passed the region without touching its lower end.

One further inhabitant is attested from an unexpected quarter. In the Third Age the eldest of the Ents, recalling the four countries in which he had walked long before, set Ossiriand among them as his summer land and spoke of the light and the music he had known there beside the seven rivers and among its elm-woods. The older chronicles of Beleriand say nothing of Ents in that country, and no dealings between them and the Green-elves are recorded; the memory survives only in the reminiscence of one who had been there. It is, in its way, the last word on who lived along the southern streams — a people who kept no rule and left no monument, remembered by a wanderer who outlasted them all.

Adurant enters the narrative not through an episode but through a survey. It is named in the chapter that sets out the shape of Beleriand, where the six streams of Ossiriand are recited in order and the reader is carried from north to south until the list stops. Adurant is the word on which it stops. Nothing is said of anyone standing on its bank, and no action of any kind is attached to it there; its function in that passage is to mark where the described world gives out. Beyond it Gelion runs on through country the narrative does not describe, and the map, having been filled in with fortresses and marches and battle-fields further north, simply ends in water and empty land. A reader meets the river first as a boundary of the telling rather than as a place in it.

When the story does come to the island in its arms, it uses that remoteness deliberately. Two figures who had been at the centre of the longest tale in the book are set down there and then withdrawn from the narration: their years on the Green Isle are summarised in a few sentences, no scene is staged upon the island, and no traveller is described arriving at it or leaving. What is reported instead is the effect the place had on those who heard of it — that people came, and that word spread, and that the country round about took a new name from its inhabitants. Even the end of that household is conveyed obliquely, by an object carried north to a son who understood what its arrival meant. The island's whole narrative method is indirection; things are known there to have happened, and are not shown.

What Adurant stands for in the book, then, is the possibility of being outside the story. Everything the Quenta treats as consequential — oath, siege, ruin — happens north and west of it, and the southern water is the one place a character can reach and cease to be an actor. This is why the two journeys that do begin there both go outward and northward, and why the tale follows them rather than staying. That the river's own name describes a parting and a rejoining is an accident of topography, but it sits close to what the island was used for, and the account of Beleriand offers no comparable case of a place defined by the fact that its inhabitants had finished.

Neither the river nor the island in it belongs to the earliest stratum of the legendarium. In the tales written in the second decade of the century there is no Ossiriand of seven streams and no southern country beyond Gelion at all, and the returned lovers are not set in the south: after their second life is granted them they are said to dwell in Hisilómë, the land of shadow in the north-west, and their people are named with an early form of the phrase for the dead that live, i-Guilwarthon. The elements that would later gather about Adurant are thus present in the story before the geography that holds them exists. Even the ambush of the Dwarves is already told, at a stony ford written Sarnathrod, but it is not yet attached to any of the six tributaries, and the treasure-bearing river of that version is not the Ascar of the later maps.

The ordered roll of Gelion's tributaries, and with it the name Adurant in its final form, belongs to the reworking of the 1930s, where the chapter surveying the realms of Beleriand takes essentially the shape it keeps in the published text. The word-list compiled in the same years supports the sense the name carries: it records the element rant, a course or channel, deriving it from a stem for walking or going, and gives it in the river-name of the Silverlode as well. The doubling that stands in front of it belongs with the stem for the number two. Little of substance was afterwards changed; the later Beleriand material adjusts the account of the Green-elves and their losses more than it touches the water they lived beside, and the southernmost stream keeps both its position at the end of the list and the parting of its bed about the green island.