Angband

The fortress carries a Sindarin name built from two plain elements: anga, iron, and band, meaning prison or duress. Taken literally it says iron prison, and that is how it is usually glossed; the narrative of The Silmarillion also renders it, more freely, as the Hells of Iron. The first element is widespread in Elvish naming and turns up wherever the metal matters, in Angainor, the chain forged to bind Melkor, and in blades such as Angrist and Anglachel. The second is far rarer, and the compound preserves it almost alone. What the name does not do is describe a site, a founder, or a shape: it names a function, and the function it names is confinement.

That the name is Sindarin is itself a piece of evidence, for Sindarin was the speech of the Elves who dwelt in Beleriand within sight of the northern smokes. The stronghold is therefore known to the histories by the word its enemies used for it, not by whatever its master or his servants called it. The naming is also older than the reputation: the place was delved in the Years of the Trees as an armoury and western outwork of the deeper Utumno, prepared against assault from the West, and Sauron was set over it as commander. Two neighbouring names complete the picture. Thangorodrim, the peaks heaped above its gates, joins thang, oppression, to orod, mountain, and the collective ending rim; and the waste that lay about it was called Dor Daedeloth, the land of the shadow of dread.

The pronunciation follows the general rules Tolkien set out for Elvish names in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. The medial consonant group is not the sound heard at the end of English sing but the fuller one heard in the middle of finger, so that the first syllable ends in a nasal and the g is still audible before the b. The vowel of both syllables is the open a of father, though shorter than English speakers tend to make it, and it is never reduced in the second syllable. As the word has two syllables, the stress falls on the first.

Angband was less a built thing than an excavation. Its substance was a system of tunnels, halls, shafts and dungeons driven down beneath the mountain wall that closes the north-west of Middle-earth, and its lowest levels lay so far under the roots of that range that no assault from above ever reached them. What could be seen from outside was the spoil of the digging rather than any work of masonry: Morgoth piled the slag and ash raised out of the deeps into three joined peaks, Thangorodrim, which stood over the gates and smoked without ceasing, so that the fortress announced itself to the countries southward as a stain of vapour on the northern sky long before any traveller came in sight of its walls. Below lay forges and furnaces, armouries, and the pits in which the armies of the north were bred and kept, dragons among them; and the same depths served for the keeping of prisoners, since a place delved for confinement needs no separate dungeon.

The gates faced south, away from the trackless wastes behind the mountains and towards the lands the Elves held. Immediately before them stretched Ard-galen, a broad grass plain that filled the space between the fortress and the long highland of Dorthonion to the south; and beyond Dorthonion's western end the Mountains of Shadow bent away to fence Hithlum, so that the two upland barriers together left one open road between them, the vale of Sirion, with the fens of Serech at its head. That gap was the way armies went in either direction, which is why the fortress could threaten Beleriand at all despite the mountains standing between. Ard-galen did not stay green: the fires that came out of Angband when the long siege was broken scorched the plain into a waste of dust and cinders, afterwards called Anfauglith, and the ground before the gates was thereafter bare.

The approach to the gate itself was narrow. It stood at the inner end of a deep ravine walled by precipices, and it was watched: when Beren and Lúthien came there they found a guard set before it that had to be passed rather than fought around. The stronghold's boundary was in this sense a single point, but its perimeter was never truly sealed, for the mountains ran on eastward and the empty north could not be kept under watch, and the Noldor who invested it for centuries were able to hold the plain and the gates without ever closing it. The place ended only when it was broken from without in the war that closed the Age; the northern country was shattered in the fighting, and the lands about it went afterwards under the sea, so that neither the fortress nor the peaks above it appear on any map of the later world.

Angband belongs to the Years of the Trees in its origin, and it was from the first a subordinate work. When the Valar had made their dwelling in Aman and Melkor had built Utumno in the north of Middle-earth, he delved a second stronghold westward of it as an armoury and a defence against any attack that might come out of the West, and he set his chief servant Sauron to hold it. That precaution proved justified but insufficient. In the war the Valar made upon Melkor for the sake of the newly awakened Elves, Utumno was broken open and its master taken in chains to Valinor, and Angband too was assailed and ruined; but the Valar did not search its lowest deeps, and much that had been bred and made there survived under the rubble, together with the Balrogs, who lay hidden and waited.

Melkor returned to Middle-earth after the darkening of Valinor and the theft of the Silmarils, now called Morgoth, and he came north to the ruin and raised it again far greater than before. The three peaks were heaped above the gates in this second building, and the smoke of them was seen from Beleriand. His first act from the rebuilt fortress was an assault southward that has been reckoned the first of the great battles of Beleriand, in which the Grey-elves of Thingol's realm were driven back and Denethor of the Green-elves was killed on Amon Ereb; the siege that followed against Menegroth was only lifted when the host of the Noldor landed at Losgar and marched east, and Morgoth's armies caught between them were destroyed. Fëanor pressed on towards the gates themselves and was overtaken by Balrogs in the sight of Angband, and died of his wounds within days without ever passing within. In the years immediately after, Morgoth used a parley to take Maedhros captive and hung him from a precipice of the peaks by his right hand, until Fingon found and freed him at the cost of the hand.

The long central period of the fortress's history was a blockade. After the Dagor Aglareb, the third battle, in which an Orc-army issuing from the gates was destroyed utterly, the Noldor set a watch upon Angband that lasted close to four hundred years of the Sun, holding the plain before it, though the mountain flanks to east and west were impassable to them. It was never a true encirclement, and Morgoth was able to send out probing forces by the north and along the coasts, and to loose the first of the dragons, Glaurung, while he was still half-grown, before his own strength was ready; that sortie was driven back by Fingon's horse-archers. The siege was broken in the year 455 of the First Age, when fire came out of the gates without warning in the Dagor Bragollach and ran across the plain before it, and the leaguer was ended in a night. Fingolfin rode alone to the gates afterwards and challenged Morgoth to single combat, and Morgoth came out and killed him, though not without lasting hurt; the body was carried away by Thorondor.

Once the plain was lost, the fortress dealt with its enemies singly rather than in one campaign. Beren and Lúthien reached its innermost hall and took a Silmaril from the Iron Crown, the only theft ever accomplished there, and Carcharoth, the wolf bred at the gates, pursued them out. The Union of Maedhros marched north to assault the gates in 472 and was destroyed on the plain before them in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, betrayed on the field; Húrin was taken alive from that battle and brought before Morgoth, and, refusing to give up what he knew of Turgon's hidden city, was set in a high seat upon the peaks and held there for twenty-eight years, watching the working out of the curse laid upon his kin. Glaurung, full-grown by then, went out from Angband to hold Nargothrond and afterwards to compass the ruin of Húrin's children, and Gondolin fell at last in 510 to a host of orcs, Balrogs and dragons sent from the north once its position had been learned.

For the last decades of the Age, Morgoth held Beleriand almost entire, and there was no power in Middle-earth that could come against the fortress. The change came from outside it: Eärendil passed into the West and won the aid of the Valar, and a host came out of Aman into the northern lands. In the War of Wrath, Morgoth emptied Angband of everything he had made, and when his armies were failing he loosed the winged dragons, which had never been seen before, and drove the assault back for a time until Eärendil came against them out of the sky. In the end the pits were opened and the fortress was pulled apart from above, the peaks torn down, and Morgoth himself dragged out of the deepest place and bound and thrust out of the world through the Door of Night. The two Silmarils remaining in his crown were taken from him, and the northern country was so broken in the fighting that the sea came in over Beleriand, and Angband was not merely destroyed but unmade with the land that had held it.

Angband had one lord and no dynasty. Melkor delved it and held it through a deputy in the Years of the Trees, and after his return under the name Morgoth he governed it in person from a throne in its deepest hall, without heir, council or successor; when the fortress fell there was no one to inherit it. Beneath him stood a small order of captains rather than a court. Sauron was the greatest of his servants and the first commander of the place, though his seat afterwards moved south to the island tower he took from Orodreth in the pass of Sirion, whence it was named the Isle of Werewolves. Gothmog, lord of the Balrogs, is named the high captain of Angband and led its armies in the field, and Glaurung, first of the dragons, was set over hosts in later campaigns. Authority ran downward by fear alone.

Those who dwelt there were bred there or brought there. The Balrogs were spirits of Melkor's ancient following and the oldest of his household; the Orcs were multiplied in the deeps in mockery of the Elves, since Morgoth could make nothing of his own; wolves and werewolves came of the same breeding, Draugluin being reckoned their sire, and dragons were raised in the pits as a later work. Beside these were the thralls: Elves of the Noldor taken in battle and set to labour underground. Morgoth sometimes let such captives go free, judging that men who had been in his hands would carry his lies outward more usefully than they served him within, and the suspicion this bred among the exiled Noldor did him more good than their work in the mines.

The fortress had no neighbours in any settled sense, only enemies and instruments. Its relations with the realms to the south were war, truce-breaking and espionage: Morgoth treated with the Noldor only in order to entrap them, and he dealt with Men chiefly by purchase. The Easterling houses that followed Ulfang were bound to him before the Union of Maedhros ever marched, and Uldor's treachery on the field was the fruit of that arrangement; Hithlum was afterwards given over to such folk as payment. The same method was used on Maeglin of Gondolin, who was taken and released with the promise of lordship over the city he betrayed. What Angband exported to the lands about it was not trade or embassy but rumour, bribery and the fear of its smoke.

In the narrative of the First Age, Angband functions less as a location than as a direction. The histories of Beleriand are told from the south looking north, and almost nothing in them is set within the fortress itself; its presence is registered instead by signs at a distance — vapour standing over the horizon, tidings carried south by messengers, and armies that appear at the head of the Sirion vale. Kings shape their policy by it without ever seeing it: realms are founded where they are because of it, marriages and alliances are argued over in its shadow, and the decision to hide a city or to leave it open is in every case a decision about the north. Even during the long leaguer, when the Noldor sat before the gates for centuries, the story keeps to the besiegers' side of the wall. The fortress is a permanent offstage cause, and the reader learns it chiefly through its effects.

The narration goes inside only under duress, and only twice at length: once with an intruder and once with a prisoner. The road Beren and Lúthien take is the single journey through the gate that is followed step by step, and it is told as a passage through disguise, spell and sleep rather than as a description of halls; even there the place is characterised by what must be got past, not by what it looks like. Húrin's years are the only long stay recounted, and they are recounted from a chair set on the heights, so that the fortress is again observed from its outer surface while its interior stays shut. What issues from Angband matters more to the plot than what occurs within it. Morgoth's most effective weapons are exported ones — released thralls, purchased allies, and the suspicion that spreads among the exiles because no one can be certain who has been in his hands.

As an emblem the fortress works by contrast with the realms opposed to it, for these are also delvings: Menegroth, Nargothrond and the ring of mountains about Gondolin are all strengths that keep their people out of sight. The difference lies in what each is built to hold. Angband keeps the Silmarils, and so becomes the object toward which oaths, quests and campaigns all point; yet every host that marches against it is broken, and the one theft accomplished there costs the thieves everything they have. Its ending is therefore placed outside the frame of the Beleriand story: it is not overthrown by any power that grew up facing it, but by a host from over the Sea, summoned by a mariner who left the wars behind him. The fortress stands, in the shape of the tale, for the limit of what the exiles could do for themselves.

In the earliest stratum of the legendarium the fortress bears a different name and a different shape. The Lost Tales call it Angamandi, a plural form usually rendered as the Hells of Iron, and set it beneath the Iron Mountains of that first, quite un-Beleriandic geography; the peaks that later stand over the gates are not yet present. Melko's first dwelling there is Utumna, assailed and broken by the Valar in the tale of his chaining, and the iron halls belong to the period after his return, so that the two strongholds are successive rather than the master-fortress and outwork of the later account. The essential scene is nevertheless already written. In the tale of Tinúviel the hall is entered by disguise and enchantment, Melko is cast into sleep by the dancing of Tinúviel, and Beren, who is there an Elf and not a Man, cuts a Silmaril from the crown with a knife; when the blade snaps at a second attempt the noise wakes the host, and the wolf Karkaras takes his hand at the gates.

The name Angband replaces Angamandi in the prose summaries of the later 1920s and 1930s, and from the Sketch of the Mythology and the Quenta onward the place holds the position it keeps in the finished work. The alliterative verse of the Leeds years, particularly the unfinished Lay of the Children of Húrin, gives the fullest early treatment of the captive brought before the throne, in a manner closer to heroic poetry than to chronicle. The annalistic writings then supply what the narratives leave loose: the Grey Annals set out the leaguer and its breaking year by year, and the Annals of Aman do the same for the earlier ages, so that the chronology of the northern war reaches the published text from these tables rather than from the tales. The late essays gathered under Myths Transformed disturb the picture again, since Tolkien there reconsiders the origin of the Orcs bred in the pits and the nature of Melkor's diminishing power, without settling either question.