Grey Havens

The haven's principal name, Mithlond, is Sindarin, built on the same root that appears in Mithrandir, the Grey Pilgrim, the Elvish name later given to Gandalf; in both, the element mith carries the sense of grey. Throughout the narrative this Elvish name stands beside its translated English form, Grey Havens, the version by which hobbits and, within the tale's fiction, the readers of the Red Book of Westmarch came to know the place; elsewhere the same site is called simply the Havens, a shortened form used once its identity is already clear from context. This paired naming is not unique to Mithlond but reflects a general practice in the narrative of rendering Elvish place-names into their English sense for the reader's benefit, while the Sindarin form remains the name still current among the Elves themselves.

The second element, lond, is Sindarin for a haven or landlocked inlet suitable for anchorage, and is attested independently in Alqualondë, the Haven of the Swans raised by the Teleri on the shores of Aman, whose Quenya form londë carries the same meaning. Taken together, Mithlond means simply 'Grey Haven', a plainly descriptive name rather than one commemorating a founder or a deed connected with its settling.

The English plural, Grey Havens, also reflects a fact of the place itself: the anchorage on the Gulf of Lune was reckoned as two harbours rather than one, Forlond in the north and Harlond in the south, both sheltered within the same inlet. In ordinary usage the two were nonetheless spoken of together as a single place, and it is this collective sense that both Mithlond and its English equivalent carry in the tale.

The Havens lie on the Gulf of Lune, the broad inlet into which the River Lhûn empties on its way from the Blue Mountains to the Sea, and mark the point where the Great East-West Road, the old highway linking the Shire and Rivendell to the coast, finally runs out of land. In effect the site stands at the western limit of the settled regions of Eriador described in the tale: beyond the gulf there is no further country to travel through, only the Sea itself, so that the Havens function narratively as the last inhabited place before the world's edge rather than as a crossroads within it.

Between the Havens and the Shire rise the Tower Hills, known in Sindarin as Emyn Beraid, a range on the Shire's western marches on which three towers were built; the tallest of these, Elostirion, held for a time the palantír that had come west with Elendil, and it was said that from its summit a keen eye might catch sight of the grey sails of Círdan's ships far off in the gulf. The hills thus stand as a kind of threshold on the road, the last high ground from which the sea-coast can be marked before the traveller descends to the harbour itself.

The land in which the Havens sit, Lindon, is a narrow coastal country bounded on its landward side by the Blue Mountains and open on the other directly to the Sea of Belegaer; within so slender a strip the gulf's inlet forms the one considerable harbourage, so that the Havens are not merely a settlement within Lindon but effectively its seaward face, the line at which the land gives out and the waters of the Sea, and the Straight Road that crosses them, begin.

The community that built the second Havens did not begin on the Gulf of Lune. Círdan and his shipwrights had earlier held the older Havens of the Falas, Brithombar and Eglarest, on the coast further south, until these were broken in the wars that closed the First Age; the survivors withdrew first to the Isle of Balar and, once that age's fighting had ended, moved north to raise a new haven at the mouth of the Lhûn. Under Gil-galad, whose reconstituted Elvish realm of Lindon grew up around this anchorage, the new Havens took shape as the chief harbour and shipyard of the Sindar and Noldor remaining in Middle-earth, sheltering a fleet under Círdan's charge unmatched by any other Elvish settlement of the Second Age.

Word of this haven reached across the Sea. Early in the Second Age, Númenórean seafarers under Vëantur, sailing east in search of the land their fathers had glimpsed, made landfall at the Grey Havens, the first recorded contact between the Dúnedain of Númenor and the Elves who had remained in Middle-earth. Círdan received the mariners as guests, and the meeting opened generations of traffic between the two peoples, carried out largely through this same harbour, by which the friendship between the Kings of Númenor and Gil-galad's realm was chiefly maintained.

The Havens' security was not always assured. When Sauron's armies broke out of Eriador in the middle centuries of the Second Age and overran Eregion, they pressed on toward the coast, and for a time the Grey Havens themselves, together with the rest of Lindon, lay under siege, with Gil-galad's remaining strength pinned against the sea. The Havens held only until a fleet sent from Númenor, under Tar-Minastir, landed at the mouth of the Lhûn and broke the siege from the rear, driving Sauron's forces back east; it was the one occasion in the haven's recorded history when its safety was seriously threatened by war.

Lindon's fortunes turned again at the close of the Second Age. After the drowning of Númenor in the year 3319, Elendil and his sons escaped the ruin and came over the Sea to Middle-earth, making landfall in part along this same coast; it was from bases here and elsewhere in Lindon that the exiled Númenóreans built the alliance with Gil-galad that, from 3434 to 3441, fought the long war against Sauron known as the War of the Last Alliance. Gil-galad marched out to that war and did not return, and with his death the line of Elvish High Kings seated in Lindon came to an end, leaving Círdan as the senior authority remaining at the Havens.

Through the Third Age the Havens endured quietly under Círdan's keeping, largely apart from the wars that troubled the rest of Middle-earth, and it was here, unrecorded at the time, that one of the Three Rings changed hands: when the wizard later known as Gandalf first landed from the West, Círdan perceived something of his errand and gave into his keeping the ring Narya, which he himself had held since the ancient forging of the Rings of Power, so that the Havens' part in that history was not made known until long after.

The Havens' last recorded role in the tale comes at the very end of the Third Age. In September of the year 3021, Frodo and Bilbo took ship from the quays here, sailing west with Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel in the last great crossing of Ring-bearers out of Middle-earth. Sam followed some years afterward, and in the Fourth Age Legolas is recorded as building a ship at the Havens for himself and Gimli, in whose company he made the last departure named in the chronicle, after which the tale gives no further account of the haven's history.

The community settled at the Havens was never a single people. Its core was the Falathrim, Sindarin-speaking Elves of the western coast who had followed Círdan since long before the elder Havens of the Falas were lost, and who supplied the greater part of the haven's shipwrights and mariners. Around this core, in the centuries after the ruin of Eregion, gathered Noldor loyal to Gil-galad, so that the realm of Lindon which grew up about the anchorage held two related but distinct Elvish peoples, Sindar and Noldor, under one crown; within that realm Círdan retained his own standing as lord specifically of the haven-folk, a rank he had held since the days of Beleriand and kept even as he served under Gil-galad's wider kingship.

When Gil-galad fell at the end of the Second Age, the high-kingship once seated in Lindon was not renewed, and for the whole of the Third Age Círdan stood as the sole authority at the Havens. Under his long keeping the population did not grow but slowly thinned, since departure from the haven's quays proved final rather than a passage repeated; those who sailed did not return to replenish the folk left behind. Even in the Third Age's last years, companies of Noldor still passed through the Shire bound for the coast, wanderers who, like Gildor Inglorion's company, kept no fixed dwelling east of the Sea and looked on the Havens as their last home in Middle-earth.

Relations with the mortal realms nearby were for the most part distant rather than close. In the year 1975 of the Third Age, after the Witch-king's forces had overrun Arthedain, a force from the Grey Havens under Círdan joined the army Gondor sent under Eärnur, together with Glorfindel out of Rivendell, in the battle that broke Angmar's power at Fornost — the one occasion on which the Havens' folk are recorded taking the field beyond their own coast. With the Shire directly to the east, contact stayed slighter still: hobbits seldom travelled so far, and it was mainly Elvish wayfarers moving along the Road toward the sea, not any tie of rule or tribute, that linked the two peoples.

Within the narrative the Havens are reached only once the story proper is over: nothing is fought for or won there, and no errand is carried out within its walls. Its function is instead to mark an ending — the point at which a road that has run through the whole tale simply stops, and those who have finished their part in it step out of the story altogether. The scene built around this act of leaving occupies the book's penultimate chapter, set apart in both place and mood from the councils, battles, and journeys that fill the chapters before it, so that the Havens read less as a location the plot passes through than as the frame in which the plot is finally closed.

The Havens also gather up a strand of longing that the narrative has been quietly laying since Frodo's early dream of a tower by the sea and the calling of gulls, a sound that later unsettles Legolas at Pelargir and leaves him, as he says himself, unable to find full rest in Middle-earth again. What draws the principal travellers there at the end is not triumph but a hurt that the tale treats as beyond cure at home: Frodo's wound from Weathertop and the deeper weariness left by carrying the Ring do not heal in the Shire, and departure over Sea is presented as the only remedy left to him. In this respect the Havens stand in the story for a passage out of grief and diminishment rather than for any further adventure.

The parting itself is given as a leave-taking among companions who will not all make the same journey: Merry, Pippin, and Sam ride back from the quay to the Shire while Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel go the other way, and the difference between those two roads carries the chapter's weight more than anything said at the harbour. Sam's return to an ordinary house and family in the sentence that closes the book stands deliberately against the ship vanishing into the West, so that the Havens serve the story as the hinge between a fading elder world and the persisting, unremarkable life of the Shire that carries on without it.