Nan Elmoth

Nan Elmoth is a Sindarin name, built by compounding like most place-names of Beleriand. Its first element, nan, is the ordinary word for a valley or vale, and the appendix of name-elements in the published Silmarillion lists it with that meaning; the same word opens Nan Tathren and Nan Dungortheb. The second element is less transparent. The appendix identifies el as a stem meaning 'star', familiar from names such as Elbereth and Elwing, and the remainder of the word is usually taken to express dusk or dimness, so that the name as a whole is commonly rendered 'vale of star-dusk'. The published text prints no complete gloss, so this rendering is best treated as a reading of the elements rather than a translation Tolkien set beside the name.1

The narratives do not say who first gave the wood its name or when. It appears in the same form in the account of the meeting of Elwë and Melian and again in the chapter devoted to Eöl, and no second name, older or later, is recorded for it. English readers are never offered a translated equivalent in the running text, as they are for some other regions of Beleriand; the forest is known only by its Sindarin form.2

What the texts do show is that the name fits the place. The chapter on Eöl describes the forest as the darkest in Beleriand, its trees so tall and dense that sunlight hardly reached the ground, and presents this gloom as the reason Eöl, who disliked the sun, chose to live there. That enduring half-light accords with the twilight the name seems to evoke. Whether the name was coined with that darkness in mind, or with the starlit age before the Sun, is nowhere stated, and the connection should not be pressed beyond what the sources allow.3

Nan Elmoth was a forest of eastern Beleriand, lying on the far side of the river Celon from Doriath. It stood close to the Thousand Caves' kingdom but never became part of it. When the Girdle of Melian was drawn about Doriath, Nan Elmoth was left outside that protection. The chapter on Eöl makes this plain: he had lived in the Forest of Region, within Thingol's realm, and when the Girdle closed around it he withdrew eastward over the Celon into Nan Elmoth. The wood therefore lay just beyond the guarded marches, near enough to Doriath for its lord to count Eöl as a kinsman, yet outside his rule.1

Its relation to the lands north of it appears in the account of Aredhel's wandering. Having come to Himlad, the region held by Celegorm and Curufin, and finding its lords absent, she rode out into the country beyond and crossed the Celon. Almost before she noticed, she was caught in the forest, and afterwards she could not find her way out again. Nan Elmoth thus lay south of Himlad, across the river from the Fëanorian lands, and it was easily entered but hard to leave. The earlier section has already described the forest's gloom. What the narrative adds is that Eöl could guide or hinder anyone who went into the wood. He knew hidden paths through it, used them on his journeys eastward to the Dwarves, and he saw Aredhel long before she was aware of him.2

The forest's standing among the woods of Beleriand is older than Eöl. In the days before the Sun, when the Teleri were still waiting for the march westward, Elwë went alone through these woods and there came upon Melian. The account says the two stood together while the years passed, and in that time the trees of Nan Elmoth grew tall and dark about them. The texts do not describe the forest's full extent or its eastern and southern edges. Its borders are fixed only against the Celon, against Doriath, and against Himlad, and this section does not go beyond them.3

The recorded history of Nan Elmoth begins in the Years of the Trees, during the Great Journey of the Eldar. While the Teleri lingered in the lands east of the Sea, their lord Elwë often travelled through the wide woods to visit his friend Finwë among the Noldor. On one of these journeys he entered Nan Elmoth, and there, as the section on the land has already described, he met Melian, a Maia who had come from the gardens of Lórien. The published text gives no year for this meeting. It places it only within the long wait of the Teleri before their crossing, and the forest's first appearance in the chronicles is tied to this one event rather than to any settlement or founding.1

The consequences of Elwë's absence reached well beyond the wood. His people searched for him and could not find him, and when the call came to depart, his brother Olwë took the lordship of the Teleri and led the greater part of them westward. Those who would not leave without Elwë stayed behind and became the Eglath, the Forsaken People. When Elwë at last woke from his enchantment, he did not return to the march. He remained in Beleriand with Melian as his queen and became known as Thingol. The later centres of their realm grew up elsewhere, in Doriath and at Menegroth, and the forest where the kingdom of the Sindar had its beginning lay outside those borders.2

The forest's second period came much later and belongs to Eöl, the Dark Elf. After he withdrew from Region into Nan Elmoth, his residence there still rested on Thingol's consent. The account of Túrin's sword records that Eöl paid a price for leave to live in the wood. He gave Thingol the black blade Anglachel, a sword he had forged from iron fallen from the sky, and he gave it unwillingly. Eöl kept apart from the Noldor, whom he blamed for the troubles that had come upon Beleriand. He preferred the company of the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost, learned their smithcraft, and invented the dark metal he named galvorn. His house in the forest was therefore a smith's dwelling, turned eastward toward the mountains rather than toward the courts of the Elves.3

The fullest events in the forest's history come after Aredhel, sister of Turgon, lost her way in it. Eöl took her as his wife, and the chapter says she was not wholly unwilling at first. Their son Maeglin was born in Nan Elmoth and grew up there. His father allowed him to travel east to the Dwarf-cities, but forbade him to seek out the Noldor or any of their kin. Aredhel was permitted to wander the woods but was bound by similar restrictions, and over the years she grew weary of the sunless wood. She told Maeglin about her brother's hidden kingdom. Together they planned a departure, and their plan waited only for a time when Eöl would be away.4

That opportunity came when Eöl went to a midsummer feast of the Dwarves. Mother and son left the forest and rode for Gondolin. Eöl came home sooner than they expected, found them gone, and set out in pursuit. With that his life in Nan Elmoth came to an end, for he followed them into Turgon's realm and never came back. After this the chronicles no longer speak of the forest. The published text records no later lord or dweller there and no battle fought beneath its trees. It gives no separate account of the wood's end. It records only that at the close of the First Age, in the War of Wrath, Beleriand was broken and much of it went under the sea. Whether Nan Elmoth perished with the rest is not stated, and nothing survives in the canonical narratives beyond the lives of Elwë and Eöl.5

Nan Elmoth was never the seat of a realm, and no people settled there as a people. The sources name only two lords whose lives are tied to the wood, and only one of them made it his home. Elwë's time there was an enchantment, not a reign, and his kingship took shape elsewhere. Eöl was a lone Elf of Thingol's own kin, and he governed nothing beyond his own household. His right to stay rested on the king's leave, but the text never shows Thingol exercising any authority inside the forest, and no officer or garrison of Doriath is recorded there. The wood was therefore a private holding at the edge of a kingdom, not a province of it.1

Within that household Eöl's authority was close and exacting. He controlled not only where his wife and son might go but also what they might say. The Quenya of the Noldor was forbidden under his roof, and Aredhel could use it only in secret, which is how she gave her son a private name that his father did not know. Eöl gave the boy his own name when Maeglin was twelve years old. The two names, one given openly and one kept hidden, show the divided loyalties of a family ruled from a single will.2

He controlled not only where his wife and son might go but also what they might say.

Eöl's relations with his neighbours followed his loyalties. To the north lay Himlad, held by Celegorm and Curufin, and between the Dark Elf and the sons of Fëanor there was no friendship. When Eöl rode after his wife and son, he met Curufin, who let him pass but made it clear he was unwelcome in Noldorin country. Only the Dwarves were received as friends, and even that friendship lay along the eastern roads more than within the wood itself. The sources record no other folk living in or near Nan Elmoth in Eöl's time.3

In the narrative, Nan Elmoth matters less as a setting to be described than as a place where travellers lose their bearings. Both episodes set there begin with someone entering the wood on the way to somewhere else. Elwë is going to visit a friend, and Aredhel is riding on from lands she had come to see. Neither of them treats the forest as a destination. It is a place meant to be passed through that does not let them pass. This gives the wood a narrative weight far greater than the little the text says about how it looks.1

The two episodes invite comparison, though the Silmarillion never draws it itself. Each begins a marriage between an Elf and someone from outside that Elf's own people, and each sets off consequences that reach far beyond the forest. The meeting of Elwë and Melian is told as a shared enchantment. From it come a kingdom and, through their daughter Lúthien, one of the central lineages of the legendarium. The union of Eöl and Aredhel is told as a captivity that eases only in part. It produces Maeglin, whose later betrayal of Gondolin to Morgoth helps bring ruin on his mother's people. Read together, the wood holds a bright and a dark version of the same pattern.2

The forest also shapes the story after its characters have left it. Maeglin takes with him into Gondolin the reserve and the smith's skill he acquired under his father's roof. The tale of Eöl ends with a curse spoken before his execution, in which he foretells that his son will die as he himself does. That prophecy is fulfilled on the walls of Gondolin, when Maeglin is thrown down from them. In this way a thread that begins in the dark wood beyond the Celon runs through to the end of the last Elven kingdom of the Noldor.3

In the earliest form of the mythology, the episode later set in Nan Elmoth already exists, but without the name. The Book of Lost Tales tells how Tinwelint, the precursor of Elwë and Thingol, is drawn away from his people by the song of the nightingales of Wendelin, as Melian is called there. He falls under a long enchantment in the woods while his folk wait for him in vain. The tale gives the place of this meeting no proper name, and the forest is not yet singled out from the other woods of the Great Lands. The later story of the Dark Elf has an equally early seed. In the tale of the fall of Gondolin, Meglin is the son of Isfin, sister of Turgon, and of Eöl. That tale already contains the essentials of the union and of the son who betrays the city, but it is not yet set in a forest east of the Celon.1

The name Nan Elmoth belongs to a later layer of the writings, which is edited in The War of the Jewels. There the Grey Annals place the meeting of Elwë and Melian in this wood. A late, separate account of Maeglin makes the same forest Eöl's home and joins the two episodes to a single place. Christopher Tolkien drew largely on that late text when he compiled the published chapter on Maeglin. The shared setting of the two stories, which the finished narrative treats as a matter of course, is therefore not original. It is the result of Tolkien's later revision.2