Alqualondë

Alqualondë is a Quenya name, and its sense is carried directly in the two elements that form it. The first part is the word for a swan. The second is londë, a term for a harbour enclosed by land, as opposed to open anchorage along a coast. Rendered plainly, the compound means the Haven of the Swans, and the narrative of the Silmarillion uses that English rendering beside the Elvish form. The same element for an enclosed haven appears in Sindarin guise as lond, most familiar from Mithlond, the Grey Havens of Middle-earth, so the word belongs to the shared inheritance of the Elvish tongues and not to a single dialect.1

The choice of name reflects both the shape of the harbour and the history of the people who made it. The Teleri came to Aman later than the other Eldar and reached Eldamar by sea. The accounts connect their passage over the water with swans, and their ships were built to resemble those birds, with gilded beaks and eyes set with gold and jet. The harbour itself was closed in by an arch of living rock through which the ships passed, and this enclosure corresponds exactly to the kind of haven that londë denotes. The name therefore names the place as a sheltered port of swan-ships, and it identifies the Teleri as a seafaring people for whom their ships were the defining possession.2

In English texts the final vowel carries a diaeresis. This mark signals that the closing e is pronounced as a syllable of its own and is not silent, a convention that Tolkien applied throughout his Elvish names. German editions of the work have customarily omitted the mark and print the name as Alqualonde, while the form with the diaeresis survives as a recognised variant. Beside the Quenya name, the descriptive English equivalent Swan-haven occurs in translation and in reference works. It is a rendering of the same idea and does not reflect a separate Elvish tradition of naming.3

Alqualondë lay on the eastern shore of Aman, in the coastal land of Eldamar, or Elvenhome, which the Eldar settled between the sea and the mountain wall of the Pelóri. It stood at the northern edge of that country, north of the Calacirya, the single deep pass through which the light of the Two Trees flowed out of Valinor toward the sea. The city therefore sat just beyond the reach of that light, on a stretch of coast where the stars were still seen clearly. This suited the Teleri, who loved the sea and the starlit night more than the radiance of the Trees. Their kin the Noldor dwelt nearby in Tirion upon the hill of Túna, within the mouth of the pass, and the two peoples could pass freely between the city on the shore and the city on the height.1

Before the city existed, the Teleri had lived for a long age on Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, which had been anchored in the Bay of Eldamar within sight of the mainland. When they finally crossed the last water to the shore, they built their chief dwelling facing that bay, so that the island remained part of their view from the harbour. The mansions of the city were described as made of pearl, a material the sea-loving Teleri drew from their own element. The Noldor, who had gems in great abundance, gave them many stones, and these were scattered along the beaches and in the pools of the shore, so that the strand itself glittered. Together with the rock-enclosed harbour mentioned above, these features gave the place its distinctive look: a city of sea-wealth and jewels laid out along the tideline.2

The haven was above all the place where the Telerin fleet lay at mooring. This made it the one site in Eldamar where ships could be found in number, and so it acquired an importance beyond its beauty when the Noldor later sought a way to leave Aman. The city was the seat of Olwë, lord of the Teleri in the West, and it was to him and his harbour that Fëanor turned. Its position on the coast, north of the pass and on the route that the departing Noldor followed along the shore, placed it directly in their path.3

The city was founded in the Years of the Trees. The Silmarillion gives no year numbers for these events, so its history can be told only in order. The Teleri had lingered long on Tol Eressëa, as the previous section describes, and over time a longing for the light of the Trees grew among them. Ulmo gave way to the wish of the Valar and sent Ossë to them. Ossë, though sorrowful at their going, taught them how to build ships, and when the fleet was ready he gave them swans to draw it over the water. In this way the Teleri of Olwë came at last to the shore of Eldamar and settled there. Olwë had assumed the lordship of those Teleri who went into the West after his brother Elwë remained behind in Middle-earth.1

A long period of peace followed, and in that time the haven was bound closely to the Noldor of Tirion by kinship as well as by neighbourhood. Eärwen, the daughter of Olwë, married Finarfin, the youngest son of Finwë. Her children were therefore of Telerin blood through their mother. This marriage later became significant, because it gave the house of Finarfin a standing among the Teleri that none of the other Noldorin princes held. When Melkor, after his release, moved among the Eldar sowing mistrust, the Teleri gave him little heed. Olwë afterwards declared that he had never listened to Morgoth nor admitted him to his house.2

The peace came to an end after the Darkening of Valinor. Fëanor led the Noldor out of Tirion and marched north along the coast. He saw that no road on foot could bring his host to Middle-earth, so he went to Olwë and asked for the Telerin ships. Olwë refused. He would not hand over the fleet, and he would not help the Noldor build ships of their own against the will of the Valar. He counselled them instead to stay, and he said that he trusted Ulmo and the other Powers to heal the harm that had been done. Fëanor left angry. Soon afterwards the Noldor began to take the ships by force, and the Teleri resisted, throwing many of the attackers into the water.3

Weapons were then drawn, and fighting spread across the ships, the quays and the lamplit wharves of the harbour. The Teleri were lightly armed, carrying mostly slender bows, and they could not withstand the Noldor for long. The balance was tipped by the vanguard of Fingolfin's host, led by Fingon. These Noldor arrived in the middle of the struggle, did not know how it had started, and believed that their own people were under attack, so they joined the fight. Many of the Teleri were killed, the ships were carried off, and the Noldor rowed them northward along the coast. This slaying of kin by kin, the first among the Eldar, became known as the Kinslaying at Alqualondë.4

The consequences reached far beyond the harbour. Uinen, the Maia of the sea, grieved for the slain mariners, and a storm rose that wrecked a number of the captured ships along with those aboard them. Soon after, the Doom of the Noldor was pronounced, and the Kinslaying stood among the deeds for which it was laid on them. Finarfin had taken no part in the killing. He turned back, received pardon from the Valar, and later ruled the Noldor who remained in Tirion. The stolen ships never returned to Alqualondë. After crossing to Middle-earth, Fëanor had them burned at Losgar and left the rest of the host behind on the far shore.5

The memory of that day affected the conduct of the Teleri at the end of the First Age. When the Valar made war on Morgoth, the Teleri refused to march with them, because they remembered the slaying at their haven and the theft of their ships. They did listen to Eärwen, their kinswoman, and they provided crews for the vessels that bore the host of the Valar eastward, though they did not go ashore to fight. The accounts record no destruction of the city after this. Alqualondë remained the home of the Teleri of Olwë, and the Silmarillion tells of no later siege or ruin of the haven.6

The people of Alqualondë were the Teleri, or more precisely the part of that kindred that completed the Great Journey to the West. At the setting out from Cuiviénen they were the largest of the three hosts of the Eldar, and also the slowest and least certain in their purpose, so that many of them remained behind at various stages of the road. In Aman those who had come over the sea were also known as the Falmari, the Sea-elves, a name that marks them off from their kin who stayed in Middle-earth. Their lives were given to the shore and the water. Ossë remained their friend and teacher long after he had brought them to Eldamar, and in lore and craft they looked to the powers of the sea more than to any other of the Valar.1

Rule over the haven lay with Olwë alone. The texts name no council and no successor, and no change of lordship is recorded in the ages that follow, so that he appears as the lord of the city through its whole recorded history. Among the neighbouring kindreds of Aman, the Vanyar lived further within Valinor and had little part in the affairs of the coast. The Noldor of Tirion were the Teleri's closest companions, and Olwë's authority over his people shows most clearly in the refusal he gave to Fëanor. The Teleri did not decide as individuals whether to help the Noldor. They acted as one people behind their lord.2

It shows that the curse on the Noldor does not arrive from outside, but grows out of their own choices and repeats itself.

The kinship of Alqualondë reached as far as Beleriand. Thingol of Doriath was Olwë's brother, and when the Noldor returned to Middle-earth he admitted the children of Finarfin to his realm as his own kin through their mother. That tie turned against the exiles once he learned what had been done at the haven. In his anger at the slaying of his brother's people, Thingol forbade the Noldorin speech throughout his land. The injury at Alqualondë therefore shaped relations between Noldor and Sindar on the other side of the sea.3

In the narrative of the Silmarillion, Alqualondë is the point at which the rebellion of the Noldor turns into a crime. Until Fëanor reaches the haven, his revolt consists of oaths, speeches and a march. At the harbour it becomes an act against other Elves, and the story is never again able to treat his cause as a simple quarrel with the Valar. The haven is set up for this role through its earlier peacefulness. It is the most sheltered and least warlike place in Eldamar, so the violence done there reads as a violation of the Blessed Realm itself and not as an ordinary battle.1

The meeting between Olwë and Fëanor also frames a moral parallel. Olwë answers the demand for ships by comparing them to the jewels of the Noldor: they are the work of Telerin hearts and hands, and his people could not make their like a second time. The comparison turns Fëanor's own argument against him. He had refused to give up the Silmarils even to heal the Trees, and at the haven he takes by force the treasure that another people valued in the same way. The episode thus shows the possessiveness behind his oath as it acts on others. The Unfinished Tales add a further perspective in one account of Galadriel, who is said there to have fought against Fëanor's followers in defence of her mother's people.2

Within the wider structure of the book, the haven marks the first of a series. The sons of Fëanor later shed Elvish blood again in Doriath and at the Havens of Sirion, each time driven by the same oath. Alqualondë is therefore the pattern against which these later killings are measured. It shows that the curse on the Noldor does not arrive from outside, but grows out of their own choices and repeats itself.3

The haven is present from the earliest layer of the legendarium, though under a different name and among a differently named people. In The Book of Lost Tales, written in the years around the First World War, the city of the sea-elves appears as Kópas Alqaluntë, which Christopher Tolkien's commentary glosses as the Haven of the Swanships. The element for the swan-ships thus stood from the start, while the first word, kópas for haven, was later dropped in favour of the single compound. The people of the shore were then not yet the Teleri. In this early scheme they were the Solosimpi, the Shoreland Pipers, and the name Teleri belonged to the first and fairest kindred, the one later called the Vanyar. Only in later revisions did the name pass to the seafaring third host. The core of the later story is already present in these tales: the departing Noldoli, called Gnomes in the English of the time, need the ships of the Solosimpi, are refused, and take the swan-ships by force with bloodshed on the shore. The early haven is therefore not a later addition to the tale of the Noldorin flight but one of its original fixed points, and the revisions changed the names around it more than the event itself.1