Hithlum

Hithlum is a Sindarin name, the form under which the region appears throughout the narratives of the First Age. Beside it stands the Quenya Hisilómë, which the index to The Silmarillion treats as the same name in the tongue the Noldor brought with them from Aman. Both forms are rendered in English as Land of Mist. The exiles came into Beleriand speaking Quenya, but Sindarin soon became their everyday language, so the older form survived chiefly in lore and in the more formal register of the Noldor. The pairing is therefore typical of the northern realms, where many places carry a Sindarin name in common use and a Quenya equivalent in the background.1

The first element is the Sindarin word for mist, hîth, which the appendix on name elements in The Silmarillion lists under Hithlum. The same element appears in Hithaeglir, the Sindarin name of the Misty Mountains, so the two names form a small family of mist-words across the geography of Middle-earth. The Quenya Hisilómë builds on the corresponding Quenya stem and adds lómë, a word the same book associates with dusk and twilight, as in Lómion, the Quenya name given to Maeglin. The name thus evokes a land of vapour and dim light rather than one of bright plains, which fits a country hemmed in by high mountains on every side.2

Hithlum is the name of the whole enclosed land, and several of its parts carry names of their own. Dor-lómin, the fief of the House of Hador, and the Ered Lómin on the western rim are separate names whose second element The Silmarillion connects with echoes, not with mist, despite the similar sound. The Children of Húrin keeps this distinction consistently, using Hithlum for the wider realm of the Noldorin kings and Dor-lómin for the narrower homeland of Húrin's people. In the German tradition the descriptive gloss is rendered as Land des Nebels, while the Sindarin form is kept unchanged. For pronunciation, the th in Hithlum is voiceless throughout, as in English thin, following the rules Tolkien gives for the Elvish tongues.3

Hithlum lay in the far northwest of Beleriand, a broad upland shut in on nearly every side by mountains. Its long southern and eastern rim was formed by the Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow, which bent around it like a wall and divided it from the plain of Ard-galen to the east and from the lands of western Beleriand to the south. On the west rose the Ered Lómin, beyond which lay the cold coast of Lammoth and the inlet of Drengist, where the Noldor under Fingolfin had come ashore after crossing the Grinding Ice. From there they passed inland over the mountains into Hithlum, so the region was the first true country of the exiles in Middle-earth.1

Within this ring the land fell into two parts. In the east lay Mithrim, with the great lake of the same name on whose shores the Noldor first encamped, and west of it, beyond the Mountains of Mithrim, lay Dor-lómin in the southwestern corner of the enclosure. The climate was cool and damp, and the winters were hard, yet the country was green and fruitful, with good pasture for the horses of Fingolfin's people. Its sheltered position made it the natural seat of the Noldorin kings in the north, while its mountain wall made it a bulwark facing Angband across the northern plains.2

Few roads led in or out, and those that did were guarded. On the eastern face of the Ered Wethrin, where the Sirion had its springs at Eithel Sirion, Fingon held the fortress of Barad Eithel watching over Ard-galen. Westward a hidden way under the Ered Lómin led toward Nevrast, the way Tuor would later take from Dor-lómin to the sea. The Children of Húrin shows the same enclosed country from the side of Men: the homestead of Húrin stood in Dor-lómin beneath the mountains, and after the Fifth Battle the encircling heights that had once protected the land instead penned its surviving people in under their new masters.3

The history of Hithlum as an inhabited realm begins with the coming of the Noldor. The host of Fëanor, having burned the ships at Losgar, was the first to pass inland into the region, and in Mithrim it was attacked by the forces of Morgoth in the Battle-under-Stars, the first engagement of the Noldor in Middle-earth. The Orcs were routed and pursued out of Hithlum, but Fëanor was mortally wounded when he pressed on too far toward Angband. When Fingolfin's people later came into the north after their hard crossing, the two companies of exiles faced each other across Lake Mithrim with old grievances unresolved. The breach was eased when Maedhros yielded his claim to the kingship, and the sons of Fëanor then withdrew eastward, leaving Hithlum to the house of Fingolfin.1

Under Fingolfin, recognised as High King of the Noldor, Hithlum became the anchor of the western half of the leaguer that the Elves set about Angband. After the victory of the Dagor Aglareb the northern princes settled into a long watch over the plain before Thangorodrim, and Hithlum's position behind its mountain wall made it the strongest of their holdings. Morgoth did not leave it untested. In one attempt he sent a host by a roundabout way along the northern coast to fall on the land from the west through the Firth of Drengist, but Fingon caught the invaders among the hills and drove most of them into the sea. Later, when the young Glaurung first issued from Angband, it was again Fingon who met him with mounted archers and forced him back.2

During the years of the Siege, Men of the Third House entered the service of Fingolfin, and Hador Lórindol received Dor-lómin from him as a hereditary lordship. The long peace was broken by the Dagor Bragollach, when rivers of flame poured over Ard-galen and the leaguer collapsed. Hithlum itself was not overrun, for its mountains held, but the losses were grievous: Hador fell defending the rearguard of Fingolfin at Eithel Sirion, and soon afterwards Fingolfin rode alone to Angband and died in single combat with Morgoth. Fingon succeeded to the kingship. Morgoth later assailed Hithlum directly, and Hador's son Galdor was slain at the same fortress, yet the attack was thrown back with the help of a fleet sent up the coast by Círdan.3

The realm's last great undertaking was its part in the Union of Maedhros. Fingon led the host of Hithlum to the eastern slopes of the Ered Wethrin, and with him came Húrin and Huor at the head of the Men of Dor-lómin. In the Nirnaeth Arnoediad the western army was drawn out too early, cut off by the treachery of the Easterlings in the east, and destroyed piecemeal. Fingon was slain by Gothmog, and the Men of the House of Hador fell almost to a man in the rearguard that covered the retreat of Turgon, while Húrin was taken alive to Angband. With the king dead and the fighting strength of both Elves and Men spent, Hithlum was left without defenders.4

After the battle Morgoth handed the land to the Easterlings who had served him, though he kept them shut within its borders and denied them the richer country they had hoped for. The remaining Elves of Hithlum were carried off to labour in the mines of the north, save those who escaped into the wilds and mountains. The women, children and old folk of Hador's house were robbed, driven from their homes or held as thralls, and some were forced into marriage with the newcomers, as happened to Aerin, Húrin's kinswoman, who was taken by Brodda. Morwen kept her own household for a time in defiance of the occupiers before sending Túrin south to Doriath. Tuor, son of Huor, grew up among the Grey-elves hiding in the hills and was later enslaved by the Easterling Lorgan before he escaped.5

Hithlum never recovered its freedom. Túrin's return to Dor-lómin years afterwards, during which he killed Brodda in his hall, brought no deliverance and only harsher reprisals against those who had sheltered him. The land remained under Easterling rule until the end of the First Age, when the northwestern regions of Beleriand were broken in the War of Wrath and the old realm of the Noldorin kings passed out of the recorded history of Middle-earth.6

Hithlum was not empty when the exiles arrived. Grey-elves already dwelt in the region, and they remained there alongside the newcomers throughout the First Age. The bulk of its population, however, came with Fingolfin, whose following was the larger part of the Noldor who had left Aman, joined by many who had first set out under Finarfin. Thingol of Doriath, who held himself king of all Beleriand, did not contest their presence. When he set limits on where the Noldor might settle, he allowed them to remain in Hithlum, where they had already made their home, and so the realm rested on his assent as well as on possession.1

Kingship in Hithlum passed within a single line. Fingolfin ruled it as High King, with Fingon as his heir and the lord of its eastern defences, and Fingon held both the land and the High Kingship after his father's death. For a time Turgon dwelt in Nevrast beyond the western mountains, a neighbour and kinsman rather than a subject, until he withdrew to his hidden city. Fingon's close friendship with Maedhros bound Hithlum to the sons of Fëanor in the east despite the old estrangement. After the Dagor Bragollach, Fingon also sent his young son Ereinion, later called Gil-galad, to Círdan at the Havens for safety, a sign of the trust between the northern kingdom and the Falas.2

The Men of Dor-lómin formed a lordship within the realm and remained its sworn vassals. Among the Edain they stood nearest to the Noldor, and many of them learned the Elvish tongue, while their lords passed from Hador to his son Galdor and then to Húrin. Their standing depended on the Elven kings, and it did not survive them. The Easterlings who took the land afterwards were bound there by Morgoth rather than given freedom, and they ruled the remnant of Hador's people by force. The Children of Húrin portrays this as a divided country, in which the incomers held the halls and the old folk of Dor-lómin lived on as servants or in hiding.3

In the narratives of the First Age, Hithlum is first of all a threshold. It is the country in which the exiles cease to be travellers and become settlers, and The Silmarillion marks Fingolfin's entry into it with the first rising of the Sun, when his host marched with banners into Mithrim. The land is thus bound from the outset to beginnings, but also to the unhealed quarrel of the Noldor, which comes to rest there without being forgotten. For much of the tale it serves as the fixed point from which the princes ride out to war and to which the story returns between campaigns.1

The Children of Húrin gives the region a more intimate face. There Dor-lómin is the setting of Túrin's childhood, seen through small domestic scenes: his friendship with the lame servant Sador, and the death of his little sister Lalaith in a sickness carried on an ill wind from the north. These episodes make the later loss of the land personal rather than political. When Túrin comes back as a grown man, deceived by the dragon's lie into seeking his mother and sister there, he finds the house empty, for Morwen had long since gone to Doriath. The homecoming becomes a scene of absence, and his violence there only worsens the lot of those who remained.2

Read as a whole, the later chapters turn Hithlum into a place that the heroes of the story must leave in order to act. Túrin is sent away as a boy, Tuor slips out westward under Ulmo's guidance, and Húrin, released from Angband, goes there first only to depart again in search of Turgon. None of them finds a lasting home in the land of their fathers. In this way the region comes to stand for the lost inheritance of the House of Hador, a country remembered more than it is lived in.3

In the earliest layer of the legendarium, The Book of Lost Tales, the region already appears, but chiefly under its Elvish name Hisilómë, which Christopher Tolkien's commentary glosses in terms of shadow and dim twilight rather than mist. The same tales also record a separate name used by Men, Aryador, so that the northern land carried a Mannish designation beside the Elvish one, an idea later dropped. In these early versions Dor-lómin and Hisilómë are not yet clearly separated. In the tale of Tuor, Dor-lómin serves as a general name for the shadowy country from which he sets out, and its second element is understood as a word for shadow, not for echo. The later division, in which Hithlum names the whole enclosed land and Dor-lómin only its southwestern fief, belongs to a subsequent stage of the conception.1

The Sindarin form Hithlum emerges as the structure of the Noldorin realms takes shape in the later prose versions. In the Sketch of the Mythology and the Quenta that followed it, the northern land becomes the dwelling of Fingolfin's people after their crossing of the ice, and the older names are gradually drawn into the geography that The Silmarillion presents. Tolkien's Etymologies, compiled in the 1930s, place the first element of Hithlum under a root meaning mist or fog, which fixes the sense that the published text preserves. The reinterpretation of lómin as echoing, which separated Dor-lómin and the Ered Lómin from the mist-name of the wider region, was a later refinement.2