Fornost

Fornost is the short form of a fuller Sindarin name, Fornost Erain, which the Dúnedain of the North gave to their royal city on the North Downs. The longer form ties the place explicitly to the line of kings, and in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings it is paired with an English rendering, Norbury of the Kings. The pairing follows the practice set out in the book's apparatus, where names in the common speech of the West are given in English, so that Norbury is presented as the equivalent the ordinary folk of Eriador would have used rather than as a separate foundation. In most narrative references the city simply appears as Fornost, the form that became the usual one in the annals of the northern realm.1

The Sindarin name is transparent once divided into its parts. The first element belongs to the family of words for the north, and the second is the common Elvish term for a fortress or fortified town, so that Fornost means roughly the northern stronghold. Erain is the plural of aran, king, and completes the sense as the northern fortress of the kings. The same elements recur elsewhere in the nomenclature of Middle-earth: the northern stem appears in names such as Forochel, and the word for fortress in names like Osgiliath. The name therefore describes the place by its position and its role rather than by any founder or event.2

A third name belongs to a later and humbler perspective. Among the people of Bree the ruins on the North Downs were known as Deadmen's Dike, a plain descriptive name that marks the site as a place of the dead and of old earthworks rather than as a seat of kings. It surfaces in conversation at the Prancing Pony, where Barliman Butterbur uses it for the deserted heights to the north. Set beside Fornost Erain and Norbury, it shows how a single place could be remembered in three registers: the formal Elvish name of its builders, the translated name of the common tongue, and the uneasy local name of those who lived nearby long after its walls stood empty.3

Fornost was a fortified royal city built on the North Downs, a range of high country in the northern part of Eriador. It lay well to the north of Bree and beyond the northern edge of the lands later settled by the hobbits of the Shire, in country that the Dúnedain of the North had once held densely and that later emptied. The city belonged to the realm of Arnor, and after that kingdom split into three it served as the seat of Arthedain, the portion that kept the line of Isildur's heirs. Its site on the Downs gave it the defensive character its name records: a stronghold on raised ground rather than a town in a river valley or on a lakeshore.1

Fornost is best understood alongside the other centres of the northern kingdom. The earliest royal city of Arnor was Annúminas beside Lake Evendim, and the kings later moved to Fornost as their people declined, so that the city on the Downs replaced the lakeside seat as the effective heart of the realm. To the south-east stood the watchtower of Amon Sûl on Weathertop, which held the chief seeing-stone of the North until the wars with Angmar forced its abandonment. When that tower fell, Fornost became the place of refuge toward which the defenders fell back, and the stone brought there made it the last guarded centre of the northern Dúnedain. Its position thus marked the inner line of Arthedain, with Rhudaur and Cardolan lying to the east and south.2

By the end of the Third Age the city was long deserted, its walls and dikes reduced to overgrown ruins on the empty Downs. For the folk of Bree it had become a place to avoid rather than a remembered capital, as the local name discussed above suggests, and few in the region still connected the grassed-over mounds with a seat of kings. The North Downs as a whole had become thinly peopled wilderness, watched over only by the scattered Rangers who descended from the old realm. At the close of the War of the Ring the ruin appears again in talk of the returning king, when the prospect of renewed settlement in the north is raised at Bree and met with unease by those who knew the site only as haunted ground.3

No date is recorded for the founding of Fornost, and the annals of the North say little about the city while Arnor remained a single kingdom. It comes into clear view only after the death of King Eärendur in 861 of the Third Age, when quarrels among his sons divided the realm into Arthedain, Cardolan and Rhudaur. Fornost was the royal seat of Arthedain, the north-western kingdom between the Brandywine and the Lune, and it was the only one of the three in which the line of Isildur continued unbroken. From that position its kings in time claimed lordship over the whole of Arnor, a claim the other two realms disputed. Fornost thus acquired its importance through the fragmentation of the older kingdom.1

The city's security was bound up with the rise of Angmar, the realm of the Witch-king beyond the Ettenmoors, which began to press on the Dúnedain from about 1300. In 1409 a great host from Angmar crossed into the lands of the North, surrounded the tower on Weathertop and destroyed it. King Arveleg I fell in the fighting, and his people fell back to the North Downs, bringing with them the seeing-stone they had rescued from the tower. Rhudaur was occupied and Cardolan laid waste, leaving Arthedain to bear the war alone. Araphor, the king's son and still young, then drove the enemy from Fornost and the surrounding Downs with the aid of Círdan, and the city survived as the centre of what remained of the northern Dúnedain.2

Within the king's own lands lived subject peoples: the hobbits beyond the Brandywine, mentioned above, and the Men of Bree.

Fornost also governed the western lands that later became the home of the hobbits. In 1601 the brothers Marcho and Blanco led a company of hobbits over the Brandywine to settle the country beyond it, and they did so with the leave of Argeleb II, the king at Fornost. The settlers accepted the king's lordship, undertook to keep his roads and bridges and to speed his messengers, and so became subjects of Arthedain. This arrangement gave the Shire its origin within the order of the northern kingdom, and it stood for as long as the kingdom did. Hobbit tradition later held that the Shire sent archers to support the king in the final battle for the city, although the chronicles of Men do not mention them.3

The end came under Arvedui, the last king of Arthedain. In 1974 the Witch-king attacked again with overwhelming force, overran the kingdom and took Fornost. Most of the surviving Dúnedain were driven westward over the Lune. Arvedui held out on the North Downs for a time, then fled north with part of his guard and sought shelter among the Lossoth of Forochel. In 1975 he was lost at sea in the Bay of Forochel, and the two seeing-stones kept in the North went down with him. The chronicles date the end of the North-kingdom from the fall of the city, so that Fornost's capture and the extinction of Arthedain as a realm are recorded as one event.4

Help from the south arrived too late to save the kingdom. In 1975 Eärnur of Gondor brought a fleet to Lindon, and a combined host of Gondor, Lindon and the remnant of Arnor marched against Angmar. The Witch-king was defeated in the Battle of Fornost, fought on the plain to the west of the Downs, and a force from Rivendell under Glorfindel joined the pursuit. The Witch-king fled and disappeared from the North, and Angmar did not rise again. Fornost itself was not reoccupied. The kingship of the North was not restored after the battle; Arvedui's son Aranarth became the first of the Chieftains of the Dúnedain, and his people remained scattered and without a royal seat. The city on the Downs was left empty for the rest of the Third Age.5

The people of Fornost were the Dúnedain of the North, descendants of the Númenóreans who had followed Elendil and Isildur. After the division of Arnor the city became the residence of the kings of Arthedain, beginning with Amlaith, the eldest son of Eärendur, whom the royal lists name after it. The same house ruled there from father to son until the end of the kingdom. In the other two realms the line of Isildur failed, and Rhudaur fell under the control of Hill-men who were in league with Angmar. For this reason Argeleb I, who reigned from Fornost in the fourteenth century, took a name with the royal prefix Ar-, a sign that the kings of Arthedain now saw themselves as lords of all Arnor.1

The rulers at Fornost relied most heavily on the Elves. Lindon under Círdan and Rivendell under Elrond repeatedly sent help against the North, and the link with Elrond's house continued long after the kingdom was gone. The kings also kept ties with the southern Dúnedain. In 1940 Gondor and Arthedain renewed their alliance, and Arvedui married Fíriel, daughter of King Ondoher of Gondor. On that marriage and on his descent from Isildur, Arvedui later claimed the crown of Gondor, but the southern kingdom rejected the claim. Within the king's own lands lived subject peoples: the hobbits beyond the Brandywine, mentioned above, and the Men of Bree.2

When the kingdom fell, Fornost lost its function as a seat of government. The heirs of the royal line no longer lived in any city. Their sons were raised in Rivendell, where the heirlooms of the house were also kept. The Shire, which no longer had a king to answer to, chose a Thain in 1979 to hold the royal authority in the king's name, and hobbit law continued to invoke that absent king. None of this lordship was exercised at Fornost again during the Third Age.3

Fornost is a place the reader never enters. None of the scenes of The Lord of the Rings is set on the North Downs, and none of the companions passes through the ruins on the way south. The city exists in the book only as memory and as backdrop, surfacing in hearsay at Bree and in the annals gathered in the appendices. This absence gives it a narrative function of its own. The Rangers who guard the northern lands unnoticed, and Aragorn among them, are heirs of a realm whose capital has become a grassy waste, and Fornost stands for that loss.1

The city's most consequential moment in the story comes after its fall, in the battle fought to avenge it. The appendices tell how Eärnur of Gondor, eager to catch the Witch-king as he withdrew, found that his horse would not face the enemy and carried him away, while the Witch-king mocked him. Glorfindel then held Eärnur back from further pursuit and foretold that the Lord of Angmar would not be brought down by any man. The episode plants two threads that run far beyond Fornost. Eärnur never forgot the humiliation, and long afterwards, as king, he accepted the Witch-king's challenge, rode to Minas Morgul and was never seen again.2

The prophecy is fulfilled in the main narrative, on the Pelennor Fields, where the Witch-king is destroyed by Éowyn, who is no man, with the help of Merry, a hobbit. The blade Merry uses there closes the circle with the northern war. It came from the barrow on the Downs near the Old Forest and had been forged by the Dúnedain of the North in the time of their struggle with Angmar, so that a weapon made for that long conflict finally undoes its leader. Through these links Fornost, though it never appears on the stage, reaches into the climax of the book.3