Amon Obel

The name is Sindarin and transparent in its first element: amon denotes an isolated hill or steep-sided mount, and it recurs across Beleriand wherever a single height stands out from the land about it — the bare crown of Amon Rûdh in the wild country south of the Teiglin, the lonely rise of Amon Ereb in East Beleriand, Amon Darthir in the Ered Wethrin, Amon Gwareth in the guarded plain of Tumladen. In each case the word functions almost as a common noun placed before a distinguishing term, so that the compound reads less as a title than as a description that has hardened into a name. Amon Obel follows that pattern exactly, and its form alone tells the reader what kind of feature is meant before any account of the place is given.

The second element is not glossed in the published lists of name-elements, and no explanation of it is attached to the hill itself. It does, however, appear again within the same forest: in the fuller telling of Túrin's story the seat of the chieftain of the Folk of Haleth is called Obel Halad, the settled dwelling of the ruling house. The recurrence of the word in a name for an inhabited stead suggests a sense in the neighbourhood of an enclosed or walled dwelling-place, though this is an observation drawn from the two names side by side rather than a statement made anywhere in the sources.

That sense would suit the use later made of the height, for the Men of Brethil raised their fenced stockade upon it and called it Ephel Brandir after Brandir son of Handir, who ruled them; ephel means an encircling outer fence, from the same root that gives Ephel Dúath its name. The hill and the stead upon it thus carried separate names, the one for the ground and the other for what stood on it. It is worth noting that the dwellers there were Men of the House of Haleth, who kept a speech of their own, yet the names by which their forest and its central height come down are Grey-elven — the common condition of the geography of Beleriand as it was preserved.

The Forest of Brethil filled the wedge of country between the Teiglin and the Sirion, and Amon Obel rose in the middle of it, the one height of consequence in a land otherwise given over wholly to trees. The wood did not halt at its feet but went up its sides, so that from any distance the hill showed as a green swell in the roof of the forest rather than as bare rock, unlike the naked crown of Amon Rûdh away to the south. It was from that southern height, on the far side of the Teiglin above the moorlands, that Túrin first looked north and marked the forest climbing about it; on the same horizon, further round to the northwest and at the very edge of sight, he thought he could make out the grey line of the Ered Wethrin, and took it for the wall of the land he had come from.

The river gave the forest its western and southern march, and the places that mattered to the dwellers on the hill lay along it. To the northwest were the Crossings of Teiglin, where the old road out of the south passed over the water; nearer at hand the stream Celebros came down through the trees to meet the river, falling in a stair of water above a shelf of ground from which the country toward the Crossings could be watched, a spot afterwards called Nen Girith. Between that place and Amon Obel ran a path through the woods, so that word carried from the water's edge back to the height within a night's walk. Below the falls the Teiglin went in a gorge with sheer walls, so narrow at one point that a hunted deer might spring across it, and that place was named Cabed-en-Aras.

What set the hill apart was less its size than its use. Brethil lay outside the Girdle of Melian, a march that Thingol claimed and that the Folk of Haleth were suffered to hold, and they held it not with fortresses but with woodcraft, guarding the river-crossings against incursions out of the north. Amon Obel offered the single thing the level forest could not, a defensible seat with the trees for a screen and open sight above them, and it became the centre of that people's dwelling and the place where their chieftain kept his fenced stead. The forest about its slopes was where the Halethrim had their homes and their fields, and journeys within Brethil are reckoned in the sources as leading to or away from the hill.

No account gives the hill a beginning. The Folk of Haleth, one of the three kindreds of the Edain, were assailed in the east of Beleriand and afterwards led westward by Haleth their chieftain through country that cost them dearly, and they settled at last in the forest that came to bear their name for its trees rather than for their own. Haleth died there and was laid under a green mound raised in the wood, called Tûr Haretha, and her kin held the land after her through the lordships of Haldan and Halmir. For those generations the narrative names the forest, its chieftains and their wars, but never the height at the centre of it. Amon Obel enters the record late, in the last age of that people, when the wood had ceased to be a quiet march and had become a beleaguered one.

The change came with the breaking of the Siege of Angband. When the flame poured south out of Ard-galen and Morgoth's servants ranged as far as the Vale of Sirion, Halmir gathered his woodmen, and with a force of archers sent out of Doriath under Beleg they waylaid an Orc-host that had come down toward the river and destroyed it. That success held the northern approaches for a time, but it committed the Halethrim to the wider war. Haldir, Halmir's heir, afterwards led men of the woods out to the Fifth Battle and fell there with many of them, and the strength that had guarded the Teiglin was thinned in a single day far from home. Handir son of Haldir came back to a diminished people and a country now cut off from the Elven-realms that had shielded it.

Handir's rule ended as his father's had. Orcs came into Brethil in force, he gave them battle, and his men were beaten and driven back among the trees, and he himself was slain. The lordship fell to Brandir his son, who had been lame from childhood and had no love of arms, and under him the people changed their manner of holding the land: they gave up open war, kept to secret ways and hidden watch, and drew their dwelling together. It is at this point, and not before, that the stockade on Amon Obel appears in the narrative as the seat of the chieftain and the refuge of the folk. The finished texts count no years for any of this; time is marked by seasons, and by the fall of Nargothrond, which came in the same troubled span.

Into that guarded quiet came Túrin son of Húrin. Men of Brethil found him lying senseless by the mound at the Crossings and bore him back through the woods to the hill, where he lay long in sickness and was healed. He would not give his old name, calling himself Turambar instead, and he laid his black sword aside for a season and went out with bow and spear. His counsel ran against Brandir's in everything that mattered: he held that the woods could not be kept by stealth alone, and the younger men followed him rather than their lord, so that the folk of the stockade returned to open fighting on their borders. Brandir yielded the point without ever accepting it, and authority on the hill was divided in practice long before it broke.

The last chapter of the hill's history took two years to close. A woman was found on the same mound, naked and without memory, and was carried up to the stead and named Níniel; Brandir loved her and Turambar wedded her, and they dwelt in a house upon the height. Then word came that the Dragon of Angband had left the ruin of Nargothrond and was moving toward the Teiglin. Turambar's judgement was to meet him at the gorge below the falls rather than let him come up to the stockade, and the people went down to the watch-place above the water to wait on the outcome. What happened there undid them: the Dragon was slain and his slayer struck down beside him, Níniel learned from the dying Glaurung whose sister she was and cast herself into the ravine, Brandir was killed by Túrin on the false report he carried back, and Túrin died by his own sword at the water's edge. In a single night the stead on Amon Obel lost its lord, its lord's rival, and the household that had ruled it.

After that the record of the place simply stops. Húrin, released at last from Angband, passed through the land to the standing stone above the gorge and there met Morwen at her end, but the finished narrative does not follow him up to the hill or say what the leaderless people did, and no later chieftain of Brethil is named. Amon Obel is not mentioned again in the wars that closed the Elder Days, and the forest is not counted among the refuges that held out at the Mouths of Sirion. Whatever remained of the stockade went the way of the whole country when Beleriand was broken in the Great Battle and the sea came in over it, so that the hill and the wood about it survived only as names in what was written down afterwards.

The dwellers on the hill and in the wood about it were the Folk of Haleth, called also the Haladin, the least numerous of the three houses of the Edain and in most respects the one that stood apart. They had come into Beleriand by their own road and kept a speech of their own, which they did not exchange for the tongue used by the other Men of the West, and their manner of living was likewise unlike that of their neighbours: they did not gather in townships but held to scattered homesteads set among the trees, each household much to itself. They took no king. Their ruler bore the style of chieftain, and the narrative shows that office as one of leadership in war and counsel rather than of command over daily life, so that the drawing of the whole folk together behind a single fence upon Amon Obel was a departure from what they had been, made under pressure and late in their history.

The succession is set out plainly enough. Haleth neither wed nor left a child, and at her death the rule passed to Haldan, the son of her twin brother Haldar, who had been killed in the east before the people ever came west; thereafter it descended from father to son in that single house, and no source records any choosing, division or dispute over the title until the last chieftain's authority was undermined from within by the stranger his people had taken in.

Outward, their position rested on two things. Brethil lay within the bounds that Thingol claimed, and he was slow to allow Men in it; what he granted at last was leave to dwell there as a free people owing no tribute, on the terms that they hold the Crossings of Teiglin against his enemies and let no Orc into the wood. Within those terms they governed themselves and answered to no Elven-king, which is why their part in the wars of Beleriand always reads as a thing they chose rather than a summons they obeyed. Northward their tie was of blood rather than of oath: Hareth, daughter of Halmir, was wedded to Galdor of Dor-lómin, and Haldir who ruled after Halmir took to wife Glóredhel of the House of Hador, so that the chieftains of Brethil and the lords of Dor-lómin were kin by marriage. It was for that reason that Húrin and Huor were fostered among the woodmen in their boyhood, after the custom of Men of that age, and rode out with them; the two houses were bound to one another well before the battle that cost them both so much.

Amon Obel enters the narrative as something looked at from a distance long before anyone reaches it. Túrin, penned on a bare crown of rock in the wild country south of the river, turns his eyes north and finds the green rise in the forest, and the telling notes that his gaze goes back to it more than once; yet in the same sweep of horizon he searches out the grey line to the northwest and thinks of home instead. The hill is thus introduced as an alternative that is seen and not chosen, set beside a homeland that is remembered and unreachable. Nothing in the passage marks it as a place of consequence, and that is part of its effect: the reader is shown the ground of the last chapter of the story while the man who will die below it is still looking past it.

Once the tale settles there, the hill works chiefly as a place of arrival, of counsel and of waiting, while the deeds themselves happen elsewhere. Men are carried up to it hurt or nameless and are made whole again; the chieftain's hall on it is where the folk argue their course, and where the counsel of their lord is heard and set aside; from it messengers go out and to it word comes back. Almost every decisive act of the Brethil chapters occurs down at the water — the fords, the falls, the ravine — and the height serves as the vantage the actors are trying to protect and the seat to which they intend to return. At the last crisis the story empties it, drawing the people away to the shelf above the falls to watch, so that the stockade stands with scarcely anyone in it when the household that ruled it is destroyed.

What the hill stands for in the design of the story is the last of Túrin's refuges. He has been sheltered before — by an Elven-king, by outlaws, by a dwarf on a stony summit, by a hidden city — and each shelter has been undone by the fact of his presence in it. Brethil is the fourth and quietest of these, a fenced stead among trees where he takes a new name and lays his sword by, and the pattern holds there as it held elsewhere. His judgement even succeeds in its immediate aim: the Dragon never comes up the slopes, and the fence is never broken. The ruin arrives instead as knowledge carried home, and the place survives its own defence with nothing left in it worth defending. After that the narrative simply looks away, which is itself the point — the hill mattered only for as long as the story of one man was being told upon it.

The hill has no counterpart in the earliest form of the tale. In the version told in the Lost Tales, Túrin's years among the woodmen are set in a forest whose dwellings are described without any named height at their centre; there is no fenced stead upon a rise, no chieftain's seat above the trees, and the lame rival for the woman found in the wood bears a different name and a different parentage from Brandir. The geography that later gives the Brethil chapters their shape — a single wooded hill in the angle between two rivers, with the crossings and the gorge below it — was not yet in place, and the elements of the story that would afterwards be fixed to particular ground still float free of it. The name Amon Obel belongs to the later stratum of the legendarium, when the Folk of Haleth had been worked out as a distinct kindred and their country given its bounds.

By far the fullest treatment of the place stands in the late and unfinished narrative known as The Wanderings of Húrin, which takes up the thread where the published compilation lets it fall. There the stead on the hill is central: Húrin, coming into Brethil after his release, is taken up to it and held there, and the text sets out the governance of the woodmen in a detail found nowhere else — the style of the chieftain, the assembly at which matters were judged, and a ruling house continued past Brandir through a collateral line, with Hardang holding the seat and his kinsman Manthor set against him. The account ends in the burning of the chieftain's hall and the ruin of the settlement, an ending the finished texts never give. Christopher Tolkien did not draw on this material when the Brethil chapters were assembled for publication, so the hill's later history exists only in draft and stands somewhat apart from the version generally read.