Doriath

The name Doriath belongs to Sindarin, the tongue of the Grey-elves of Beleriand, and describes the realm by the thing that set it apart: its enclosure. It joins the element dôr, "land", to iâth, "fence", so that the whole may be rendered as the Land of the Fence, and it is in this sense that the alternative English rendering Land of the Girdle is used. The naming is therefore not descriptive of soil, river or wood, but of a condition imposed upon the country by Melian, whose power lay about its marches; the name records an act rather than a place. Later usage also knew it by epithets of the same import, the Hidden Kingdom and the Guarded Realm, which say in plainer words what the Sindarin compound says in one.

Before that enclosure the land bore another name, Eglador, which appears to derive from Eglath, the Forsaken People — the name taken by those Teleri who stayed behind in Beleriand when their kindred passed over Sea, and who remained to seek their lost lord. The two names thus stand in instructive contrast: the older defines the country by the people who held it and by their loss, the younger by the boundary drawn around them. Within the same naming tradition lie the realm's inner places, among them the beech-woods of Neldoreth and the close forest of Region, and Menegroth, the Thousand Caves, whose name counts the delvings hewn in the rock above the Esgalduin.

Doriath is among the few First Age realm-names that Tolkien allowed into print in his own lifetime. It stands in the genealogical preamble to the Númenórean annals, where Lúthien is introduced as the daughter of Thingol Greycloak, king of that land, and Melian; the name is given without gloss, as a fixed point of older reckoning rather than a matter to be explained. The word-element dôr itself remained productive far beyond the drowning of Beleriand, surviving in the Sindarin names still current in the Third Age, so that a reader of the later book meets the same first syllable in wholly different countries.

Doriath lay in the middle of Beleriand, in the belt of forested country between the northern highlands and the southern plains, and it was defined less by any natural frontier than by the reach of Melian's power. Its heart was woodland: Neldoreth, the great beech-forest, filled the northern part, bounded east and south by the Esgalduin, while Region, denser and darker, lay between the Aros and the Esgalduin. Between and beneath them ran the waters that gave the realm its shape, for the Esgalduin flowed down out of the north through both woods to join Sirion in the west, and the Aros came out of Dorthonion to meet Sirion below the forest. Where Esgalduin cut its gorge stood Menegroth on the southern bank, reached from the forest by a stone bridge; the halls themselves were delved into the rock, so that the seat of the kingdom lay under the hill rather than upon it.

North of the woods, across the Esgalduin's upper waters, the land rose towards Dorthonion and the empty land of Dimbar, and beyond those lay the shadowed country under the mountains where Morgoth's power sat; westward, past the fords, the vale of Sirion carried the road down towards the sea. Doriath's own boundary followed no single river or ridge for its whole length. The Girdle drawn about it was a maze of shadow and bewilderment set upon the marches, so that those who came without leave found the paths turning them back the way they had come. This meant that the realm's edge was a condition of the air rather than a mark upon the ground, and that its extent could be enlarged or narrowed as the queen who held it chose.

Not all that was accounted Thingol's was enclosed. Eastward beyond Aros lay the wooded land later held by his kinsman Celeborn and by Galadriel, and southward the woods thinned towards open country; the huntsmen of the realm knew ways out into these marchlands, and the border-wardens kept watch there. Within the fence, the character of the place was of an old forest left largely to itself: little was built, the people dwelt among the trees, and the one great work of hands was the delving beneath the Esgalduin. What set Doriath apart from the other Elvish realms of Beleriand was therefore not fortification in stone but the fact that its defence was invisible, and that a traveller could stand at its edge without knowing that he had reached it.

The realm's beginnings belong to the Years of the Trees, and the published narrative gives them no numbered date. Elwë, one of the three lords who had led the Eldar out of the east, was lost to his people on the westward march when he came upon Melian in the woods of Nan Elmoth and stood spellbound with her for a long while; his followers, unwilling to depart without him, remained in Beleriand and forfeited the passage over Sea. When at last he came forth he was a changed lord, and he ruled the Grey-elves of the region with Melian beside him. In this early period the Naugrim of the Blue Mountains came west and traded with his people, and it was they who at his commission delved the halls beneath the Esgalduin, taking a great pearl and other treasures in payment, and receiving Melian's counsel in the shaping of the work. The land was then open country, and no fence lay upon it.

The enclosure came out of war. Even as the Noldor returned from the West, Morgoth loosed his first assault upon Beleriand, and orc-hosts came down on either side of Sirion. Thingol drew help from the Green-elves of Ossiriand under Denethor, who crossed the Gelion to his aid and was cut off and slain upon Amon Ereb; the eastern host was destroyed, but at bitter cost, and Denethor's people never again set a lord over themselves in that fashion. In the west Círdan was driven back and besieged in the havens until Thingol's power relieved him. It was in the aftermath of that victory, with Morgoth's reach now proven, that Melian set her enchantment about the woods, and from that time the country was reckoned a hidden kingdom rather than a march of open forest. The Sindar who could came within it, and those who would not were left to the Falas or to the wilds.

The coming of the Noldor altered the realm's politics more than its borders. Thingol maintained a claim of lordship over Beleriand and allowed the exiles to settle only in the north and in the empty lands beyond his eastern frontier, reserving the woods and the vale of Sirion to himself; his counsel and Melian's, together with the Dwarves' craft, went into the founding of Nargothrond by Finrod, whom he favoured above the rest. That favour did not survive the news of Alqualondë. When the deeds of the Noldor before their exile were told to him, Thingol forbade the speech of Valinor within his borders, so that the tongue of the Grey-elves prevailed thereafter among the exiles themselves. Through the long siege of Angband and the ruin that ended it, the enchantment held: the burning of the northern lands and the breaking of the leaguer did not touch the woods, and when the Noldor gathered for the fifth battle Thingol sent no army, though Beleg and Mablung went with the northern host by his leave and returned out of the defeat.

The one crossing of the boundary that mattered most was made by a mortal. Beren son of Barahir, fleeing the wreck of Dorthonion, came through the fence by a doom laid upon him and was brought before the king, who set upon his daughter's hand a bride-price of a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown. The demand carried the enmity of the Oath of Fëanor into the realm, and Lúthien's part in the quest was made against her father's will; she was pursued, betrayed by one of Thingol's own household, and confined for a time in a house built among the boughs before she escaped. The quest returned maimed and successful, and its consequence followed it home, for the wolf of Angband broke through the guarded marches with the jewel burning within him and was hunted down within the woods at the cost of Beren's life and Huan's. The Silmaril came into Thingol's keeping, and Beren and Lúthien, restored to a brief mortal span, dwelt not in Doriath but in Ossiriand.

The realm's last decades were shaped by the house of Húrin. Túrin was fostered at Menegroth as the king's ward, and left it an exile after the death of Saeros, unaware of the pardon given him; Morwen and Niënor took refuge there in their turn. Húrin himself, released from Angband after long captivity, came at last to the Thousand Caves and flung down before Thingol a great necklace taken out of the emptied treasury of Nargothrond. Thingol set the Silmaril in it, employing craftsmen of Nogrod who were then at work in his halls, and the finished thing roused their covetousness; they killed him in the deep chambers and fled with it. With her husband dead Melian's will failed, the enchantment about the marches was withdrawn, and she departed out of Middle-earth. Doriath now lay open. A host from Nogrod came against it, sacked Menegroth and slew Mablung at the treasury doors, and was destroyed in turn at the ford of Sarn Athrad by Beren and the Green-elves, who recovered the necklace.

There was a brief restoration. Dior, son of Beren and Lúthien, came north with his wife and children and took up the kingship in the ruined halls, and something of the old people gathered again about him; when his parents died the necklace with its jewel was brought to him there. The sons of Fëanor claimed it, and receiving no answer came in arms in winter. In the fighting Dior and Nimloth were killed, three of the attacking brothers fell, and the king's young sons were abandoned in the forest to die; his daughter Elwing was carried away to the mouths of Sirion with the jewel. The halls were not reoccupied, and the realm ended there, some years before the drowning of Beleriand in the War of Wrath swept away the land itself. What survived was a lineage: through Elwing and Eärendil the blood of Thingol's house passed into the records that Tolkien himself published, where Doriath is named as a fixed point in the ancestry of both the kings of Númenor and the lords of Rivendell.

Those who lived within the fence were Grey-elves: the Sindar who had remained in Beleriand when their kindred passed over Sea, together with such of that people as came in from the lands round about. They stayed a woodland folk rather than a building one, dwelling scattered through Neldoreth and Region, and no second work of masonry to set beside the Thousand Caves is recorded. Not all of them were of Thingol's original following; Elves of Nandorin descent, whose forebears had turned aside from the westward march east of the mountains, were counted among his people and could stand high in his household, as did Saeros, who sat among the king's counsellors. Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost came and went as traders and as hired craftsmen, but they did not settle in the woods, and the road they used ran to the halls and back out again.

Rule rested with two persons of very unlike kind. Elwë, called Thingol, had been one of the ambassadors summoned to Valinor and a lord of the Teleri upon the march from the waters of awakening, and he held the kingship, the judgement and the treasury; Melian was of the order of the Ainur, and her authority was of another sort, since the border itself was her doing and the narrative sets her counsel at most of the points where his policy turns. The offices named beneath them are few: Mablung as chief captain of the king's arms, Beleg as master of the marches, and Daeron as loremaster and minstrel, to whom the making of the runes of Beleriand is credited. Kinship carried the house outward past the fence — Olwë, the king's brother, ruled the Teleri in Aman, and Celeborn, named a kinsman dwelling in Doriath, wedded Galadriel there, an account preserved in Unfinished Tales making him a grandson of a third brother, Elmo.

Towards its neighbours the realm acted as an overlord rather than a partner. Círdan and the folk of the Falas were reckoned Thingol's subjects, and the Green-elves of Ossiriand his friends without being his men; the Noldorin princes were dealt with correctly and at a distance. Men were not admitted within the woods at all, though the people of Haleth were granted the forest of Brethil to dwell in, a land held to lie under Thingol's lordship, on the understanding that they would guard the crossings against the enemy. The kingship itself changed hands once only. It stood vacant between the death of Thingol and the coming north of Dior, his grandson, who was named Eluchíl, Thingol's heir, and who took as wife Nimloth, a kinswoman of Celeborn; Dior's sons were lost as children, and his daughter bore the realm's inheritance away rather than its crown.

As a setting, Doriath functions chiefly as a threshold, and much of its narrative usefulness comes from the difficulty of getting in. Because entry is not a matter of walking but of permission, every arrival becomes an incident with a scene of its own: the story halts at the marches, a stranger is taken by the wardens, and the crossing must be accounted for before the tale can go on. The consequence is that the realm rarely acts and frequently receives. News of the burning of the north, of the fall of Nargothrond, of oaths sworn in another land, all reach the woods as report rather than as experience, and the hall beneath the river becomes a court in the older sense, a place where petitioners are heard and judgements handed down that then take effect elsewhere. A striking number of the turns in the Elder Days material happen because someone stood before that seat and was answered.

What the place stands for is preserved time. Within the fence the seasons turn without history: there is dancing in the beech-woods, music that the narrative treats as the finest made in Middle-earth, and a queen whose gift is to keep things as they are. This makes Doriath the book's chief image of what the wars are being fought to save, and also its chief statement of what such saving costs, since safety is purchased by absence. The realm's neighbours bleed while it does not; its lord withholds his strength; and the tale does not let this pass without comment. For those who leave it the effect is sharper still, and the story of Húrin's children in particular uses the woods as a lost childhood, a place remembered as home by a man who cannot go back to it and who ruins himself elsewhere.

The realm also has a life beyond its own age, as something told rather than entered. When Aragorn sits with the hobbits under Weathertop and gives them a piece of the oldest story he knows, he sets it in a hidden kingdom in the forest of Neldoreth and expects the name to mean nothing to his listeners. Doriath survives in the later book in exactly that condition: a wood in a song, glimpsed by people to whom it is impossibly remote, and carrying the weight of an antiquity that the narrative uses to measure its own present.

The realm passed through several names and conceptions before it settled. In the earliest prose of the mythology it is Artanor, the Land Beyond, ruled by Tinwelint and his queen Gwendeling, a pair who correspond to Thingol and Melian but stand at some distance from them. Tinwelint is a woodland king of modest state, his following small and his wealth slight, and his dwelling a cave in the forest rather than a delved city of many chambers. Gwendeling's protection is present in germ, as enchantment woven about the ways so that strangers were led astray, but it is not yet the formal fence of the later writing, nor is it withdrawn or set at a fixed extent. The name Doriath belongs to the following stage and appears in the alliterative Lay of the Children of Húrin, where Gnomish forms such as Garthurian, the Hidden Realm, stand beside it; by the time of the Quenta the outline familiar from the published book was largely in place.

The ending gave more trouble than the beginning and never reached a finished form. In the early telling the treasure of the plundered hoard is carried to the king by Úrin at the head of a band of outlaws, and the quarrel that destroys the kingdom turns on the wages of the Dwarves who wrought the necklace; they come back in force with allies out of the mountains, the king is slain and his caves are stripped. Tolkien reworked much of the surrounding material in later years without ever writing the fall itself again, and the obstacle is set out plainly in The War of the Jewels: while the queen's enchantment stood, no army could reach the halls at all. Christopher Tolkien recorded there that the chapter printed in The Silmarillion had been assembled editorially with a considerable measure of invention, and judged the decision a mistaken one.