Ard-galen

Ard-galen is a Sindarin name, belonging to the tongue of the Grey-elves that was spoken across Beleriand in the First Age. It is built from two elements that the published Silmarillion explains in its appendix on Quenya and Sindarin names. The first, ar(d), denotes a region or tract of land. The second, galen, is the mutated form of calen, the ordinary word for green. Read together, the name describes the plain simply as a green region. It records nothing of battle or lordship; it names the land by the colour it wore. That sense matches the account of the plain in the chapter on the realms of Beleriand, where grass spreads over ground once fouled from the north.1

The element galen recurs well beyond this plain, and the appendix draws the comparisons itself. The same word for green stands in Calenardhon, the older name of the land later called Rohan, where ardh is a variant of the element for region, and in Parth Galen, the green sward on the western shore below Amon Hen. In Calembel it keeps its unmutated form. The pairing of the two elements in Ard-galen is thus not unique to the far north, since Calenardhon uses the same pair in the reverse order. This recurrence places Ard-galen within the ordinary descriptive naming of Sindarin topography and sets it apart from the more elaborate honorific names given to fortresses and kingdoms.2

The plain did not keep its name. After it was laid waste it was called Anfauglith, a name the text renders with an image of dust that leaves one gasping for breath. A second, longer form, Dor-nu-Fauglith, glossed in the index of names as a land lying under choking ash, is also used for the same ground. Where the older name describes growth, the later names describe suffocation, so the renaming itself preserves the change the land underwent. The Silmarillion's index treats Anfauglith explicitly as the name of the former Ard-galen, so the two are one place under successive names, not neighbouring regions.3

Ard-galen was the great open plain of the far north of Beleriand, the ground that lay between the hills of Dorthonion to the south and the mountains of Morgoth's realm to the north, where the peaks of Thangorodrim rose above the gates of Angband. It was not a valley or a hill-country but a wide, level expanse, and this openness defined its character and its fate. To the west it ran up against the Ered Wethrin, the Shadowy Mountains that walled Hithlum. From their heights the plain could be surveyed together with the upper Vale of Sirion. The Silmarillion does not fix a precise eastern limit for it. It treats Ard-galen as the country directly before the fortress, bordered by the highlands and ranges that the Noldor held against the north.1

Its surface changed with the fortunes of the war. At first the reek and refuse cast out from Angband lay far across the plain. After the first rising of the Sun, grass spread over it in abundance. While the Noldor maintained the Siege of Angband and the gates remained shut, green growth crept even into the broken rock and pitted ground immediately before the entrance. The plain therefore marked the edge of the leaguer itself. It was open ground under the watch of the Elven lords, and Fingolfin's chief stronghold at Eithel Sirion, on the eastern face of the Ered Wethrin, looked out over it. The horsed hosts of Hithlum pastured their steeds on its grass.2

Because it lay open between the fortress and the Elvish realms, the plain was where the north first struck. When the young Glaurung came out of Angband during the Siege, he emerged onto Ard-galen and was driven back there by Fingon's mounted archers. Its lack of any natural barrier later made it the path of Morgoth's fire in the Dagor Bragollach. The flames swept over its grasslands, and the plain became the barren country known thereafter by the harsher name already discussed. Its position and its flatness shaped its history: the same openness that made it good pasture left it defenceless.3

The plain enters the record in the years after the Noldor returned to Middle-earth. Morgoth had rebuilt his fortress in the north, and at first the land before it was fouled by what the stronghold cast out. The change came with the first rising of the Sun, when growth took hold where waste had lain. The Silmarillion gives no founding date for the plain, because no one founded it. It was open country, and its history begins with the wars fought over it and not with any settlement.1

Its first recorded battle was the Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle. Morgoth tested the strength of the newly established Noldor by sending out a host. Fingolfin and Maedhros came upon it from both sides, and the survivors fled back across Ard-galen. The Noldor followed them over the plain and destroyed them within sight of Angband's gates. This victory showed the princes of the Noldor how dangerous it was to leave the fortress unwatched. They drew the Siege of Angband around it, and the Silmarillion states that the leaguer held for nearly four hundred years. The plain was the ground the Siege was meant to hold, and for that long span it stayed a peaceful field under guard. Apart from the brief outbreak of the young dragon, already noted in the account of the land, no major assault was delivered across it in that time.2

The long peace ended in the Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame, which Morgoth opened on a winter night. The plain was the first ground to be struck. Rivers of fire poured from Thangorodrim, and the fumes and flames destroyed many of the Noldor and their allies camped or riding in the open. Behind the fire came Glaurung, now fully grown, together with Balrogs and armies of Orcs. The assault reached the highlands of Dorthonion beyond the plain, and the brothers Angrod and Aegnor fell there. The Siege of Angband was broken for good. The green plain ceased to exist in that single stroke, and the ground was known thereafter under the grimmer names that recorded its ruin.3

Once burned, the former plain became a road of desperate crossings. When Fingolfin learned how complete the defeat was, he rode alone across the dust to the gates of Angband and challenged Morgoth to single combat, and he died in that duel. Some time later Beren and Lúthien crossed the same waste to reach the fortress in their quest for a Silmaril. They went disguised in the shapes of a werewolf and a great bat, since no open company could have passed that way unseen. In both accounts the ground that had once been the Elves' pasture and watch-field is now a no-man's-land. Only the fortress's own servants could move across it freely.4

The same ground was the field of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the great defeat of the Eldar and the Edain. The host of Fingon met Morgoth's armies on the waste. Gwindor's company drove through to the very gates of Angband before they were overwhelmed, and the day ended in the ruin of the western host and the capture of Húrin. Afterwards the Orcs gathered the bodies of the fallen and heaped them into a great mound in the middle of the plain, the Haudh-en-Ndengin, the Hill of Slain. Grass came up again on that mound, long and green. It was the only green left on the whole waste, so the plain's old colour survived only over the graves of those who had died there.5

The Silmarillion does not record a separate fate for the plain at the end of the First Age. Its history ends in the general ruin of the north during the War of Wrath, when the host of the Valar overthrew Angband and the violence of that war broke the northern lands. Much of Beleriand then sank beneath the sea. Nothing in the published texts suggests that the plain outlasted this destruction as a recognisable country. After the drowning of Beleriand, Ard-galen belongs only to the record of the Elder Days.6

No people is recorded as dwelling on Ard-galen, and the Silmarillion names no lord of the plain itself. It was not a kingdom or a fief but a march: common ground between the realms of the Noldor and the fortress they besieged. Its standing came from the realms around its edges. In the west lay Hithlum, held by Fingolfin, who was acknowledged as High King of the Noldor, with his son Fingon. The plain was therefore watched from several sides at once rather than governed from any single seat. Authority over it meant the power to keep Morgoth's servants from crossing it, and nothing in the texts describes towns, tillage or tribute there.1

Its southern neighbours were the sons of Finarfin. Angrod and Aegnor held the northern heights of Dorthonion, facing the plain, and they did so as vassals of their elder brother Finrod, lord of Nargothrond. Further east, the sons of Fëanor guarded the approaches, with Maedhros on the hill of Himring. When Men came into Beleriand, Finrod granted the people of Bëor lands in Ladros, on the north-eastern side of Dorthonion. This brought the Edain into the line of realms that looked out over the plain. The houses that bordered Ard-galen were thus of several kindreds and allegiances. Their common interest in the leaguer, not any shared rule, bound them together along its rim.2

It was not a kingdom or a fief but a march: common ground between the realms of the Noldor and the fortress they besieged.

The breaking of the Siege reversed the balance of power over the plain. After the fire, the realms that had bordered it were lost or driven back, and the scorched ground passed wholly under the dominion of Angband. Dorthonion fell to the enemy. Barahir of the house of Bëor held out there for a time as an outlaw with a small band, until that resistance was also destroyed. From then on the plain had no neighbours among the free peoples to the north or south. It ceased to be a border between realms and became territory of the enemy, and it remained so to the end of the Elder Days.3

In the narrative of The Silmarillion the plain works less as a setting than as a measure. The chronicle seldom dwells on it for its own sake. Instead it uses the state of its grass to tell the reader how matters stand between the Noldor and the power in the north. While the plain is green, the leaguer holds and the realms behind it are free to grow. Once it burns, the reader knows without further explanation that the watch has failed. The image of growth reaching the very threshold of the fortress while the gates stayed shut marks a peace that rested on Morgoth's forbearance, not on his defeat, and the story later collects on that difference.1

The plain also gives the book its sense of distance and exposure. Because nothing stood between the Elvish watch-posts and Angband, any approach to the fortress had to be made in full view, and the tales that cross this ground turn on that openness. Fingolfin's last ride is told as a lone passage over empty land. This framing makes it read as a deliberate act of defiance and not as one more engagement in a battle. The disguises of Beren and Lúthien answer the same problem from the opposite side, since the only way across was to seem to belong to the enemy.2

In the Fifth Battle the plain becomes a line of sight. Fingon's host waited on the eastern slopes of the Shadowy Mountains and could see whatever Morgoth chose to show them across the open ground. There Morgoth's heralds put to death the captive Gelmir, a lord of Nargothrond and brother of Gwindor, in view of the Elves. The act drew the western host out before Maedhros had come to join it. Ground that had once been kept empty to shield the realms was turned into a place from which the enemy could provoke their undoing. Read across the whole book, Ard-galen follows the course of the Noldorin war in small compass: held, burned, crossed in secret, and at last given over to the dead.3

The green plain is a comparatively late idea in Tolkien's development of the northern lands. In the alliterative verse of the 1920s, the ground before Morgoth's fortress already appears as a barren expanse. The Lay of Leithian names it Dor-na-Fauglith, with the linking element in a form that later gave way to the familiar nu. There it serves above all as the parched, dust-choked country that Beren and Lúthien must cross on their way north. At this stage the plain carries only its desolate character. The published version's contrast between an earlier pasture and a later waste had not yet been drawn in these poems.1

The notion of a wide grassland lying open before Angband during the long leaguer took shape in the prose of the 1930s. There the plain bore a different name, Bladorion. It appears in the Quenta Silmarillion and the Annals of Beleriand of that period as the ground held under watch by the Noldor and later consumed in the Battle of Sudden Flame. The Etymologies of the same years place the name under a root for flat and wide things. Bladorion therefore described the plain by its breadth, not by its colour. Only in the later work on the Annals, the Grey Annals, did Tolkien replace Bladorion with Ard-galen. With that change the emphasis of the name shifted from the land's extent to the greenness that its ruin would destroy.2