Nargothrond

The name Nargothrond is Sindarin, and it is remembered as Finrod Felagund's own choice, given to the stronghold once its great delving beside the river Narog in West Beleriand was far enough advanced to be named at all. The name binds the river's own name, Narog, to a further element denoting a vast hewn or vaulted hall, so that the whole may be understood as something like 'the underground fortress of the Narog'. By rooting the name in the river rather than in his own person or house, Finrod tied the identity of his hidden realm to the waters beside which it was carved, rather than to himself as its founder.

The element completing the name belongs to the same family of Sindarin words used for great delved dwellings, and is of the same root as the -groth found in Menegroth, the name of Thingol's own halls in Doriath. This shared element is a matter of language rather than mere echo of form: it places Nargothrond, by name, in the same class of hollowed, hidden strongholds as Thingol's halls, a linguistic kinship that runs alongside the kinship long noted between the two courts. Beyond the fortress-caverns themselves, the name Nargothrond also came to serve for the wider realm ruled from within them, so that 'the folk of Nargothrond' or 'the kingdom of Nargothrond' denoted the lands and people under its authority, not the delved halls alone.

Nargothrond lay in West Beleriand, delved into the caves above the western bank of the river Narog at the point where that stream cut through the high ground and ran on southward toward its meeting with the Sirion. The site had been found long before Finrod's own coming into Beleriand, when the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains had already worked the caverns to some degree, and Finrod, whom Thingol directed to the place and furnished with guides, judged it fit for a stronghold on the pattern of Menegroth. The caves opened upon a steep bank above the river, so that the waters of the Narog themselves formed a natural moat and approach, and the doors of the fortress looked out over the gorge rather than upon open land.

Within Beleriand's broader geography, Nargothrond commanded the western marches: the realm reckoned from it stretched between the rivers Narog and Sirion, bounded on the north by the forest of Nan Dungortheb's approaches and on the south by the debated lands nearer the Falls of Sirion, while to the west the ground rose toward Nenning and the coastlands beyond. This placed it apart from the eastern strongholds of the Noldor around Hithlum and the Dwarf-road, and separate likewise from Doriath, which lay across intervening country to the east beyond the Sirion. It was reckoned among the great hidden refuges of the Elves in Beleriand precisely because of this remove, screened by distance and difficult approaches from the more exposed northern frontiers where Morgoth's power pressed hardest.

Nargothrond's builders raised over the caves a guarded gate and outworks facing the Narog, while the halls themselves ran back deep into the rock, arranged as chambered courts rather than as a single hollow. The bridge that later spanned the river before the gates was no part of the original design, its arches built only when growing wealth and confidence overcame the founders' caution about betraying the stronghold's position; before that time the crossing was kept difficult on purpose, so that the very shape of the approach served the city's concealment. In this the fortress differed from Doriath, whose protection rested on an encircling enchantment, for Nargothrond's defence lay instead in the natural strength of its cliffs and river and in the discipline of keeping its ways hidden.

The founding of Nargothrond was Finrod Felagund's own undertaking, carried out with the aid of Dwarves from the Blue Mountains who lent their skill to the deep quarrying and stonework the design demanded. For this labour they were richly rewarded from the wealth Finrod commanded as a prince of the Noldor, and the work continued over long years before the halls were fit to be called a kingdom. Finrod ruled there as King of Nargothrond, while his kin Angrod and Aegnor held lands to the north and his brother Orodreth dwelt for a time nearby, so that the family's power in the west of Beleriand came to be centred on the hidden city he had raised.

For a long age Nargothrond prospered in something close to peace, sheltered from the wars that troubled Hithlum and the eastern marches. Its wealth grew through mining and through the continuing craft of Dwarvish smiths, who fashioned costly things for Finrod's court, and its people multiplied as Elves from other kindreds, including some of the Green-elves of Ossiriand, found refuge within its bounds. Finrod kept friendship with Thingol and Melian in Doriath in these years, and the two hidden realms, akin in their manner of concealment, stood for a time as the two great strongholds of the Elves that Morgoth had not found.

This long quiet ended with the Battle of Sudden Flame, in which Angrod and Aegnor were slain and Finrod himself was cut off and nearly overwhelmed, saved only by the swords of Barahir of the House of Bëor and his companions, a debt Finrod swore to repay. In the battle's grim aftermath, with the north of Beleriand broken and overrun, Nargothrond held to a hard counsel of secrecy: its people would not march to war openly nor join the later Union of Maedhros, but would keep their strength hidden and their gates unrevealed. This policy, urged most strongly within Finrod's own council, preserved the city while other realms fell, but it also set Nargothrond apart, watchful and withdrawn, from the common cause of the Noldor.

The oath sworn to Barahir was called due when his son Beren came to Nargothrond seeking help in his quest for a Silmaril, and Finrod, bound by his word, set aside his crown to Orodreth and rode out with only ten companions, forsaking the very secrecy his own realm had been built to preserve. He did not return: taken by Sauron at Tol-in-Gaurhoth, he died there in defence of Beren, and the throne he had left passed permanently to Orodreth. In the meantime Celegorm and Curufin, sons of Fëanor who had made their home in Nargothrond, turned much of its people against Finrod's quest and sought to seize mastery of the realm for themselves, a design broken only when Lúthien and Huan came to the city and exposed their treachery, driving the two lords out.

Orodreth's reign that followed was uneasy, overshadowed by the wrong done by Celegorm and Curufin and by a continued clinging to hiddenness. Into this court came Túrin Turambar, who rose swiftly to command Nargothrond's warriors as the Black Sword, and who, against the counsel of the Elf Gwindor, persuaded Orodreth to abandon concealment: to meet Morgoth's servants in open battle and to raise a great bridge across the Narog before the gates, so that hosts could be sent out swiftly against the enemy. The bridge stood as a mark of pride and confidence, but it undid in a single stroke the discretion by which the realm had endured, and it laid open the road that would soon bring its own ruin to its doors.

Morgoth answered this new boldness by sending Glaurung at the head of a great force, and the army that met him beneath the open sky was broken, Orodreth himself among the slain. The dragon then made straight for the undefended city, and the bridge built for sallying forth served instead as his own road in, so that Nargothrond was entered, sacked, and its treasures gathered into one hoard on which Glaurung lay coiled amid the ruined halls; Finduilas, Orodreth's daughter, was among the captives taken and later put to death. In the years after the dragon's own death the ruin was for a time claimed by the Petty-dwarf Mîm, until Húrin came there in his wrath, and the hoard he took from the wreckage was afterward carried to Doriath, where it passed into the making of the Nauglamír and so into the last sorrows of Thingol's kingdom.

Nargothrond's people were, from the founding, Noldor of Finrod Felagund's own following, joined by Sindar already settled along the Narog, so that Noldor and Sindar together made up the realm's folk. Among the native lords counted afterward as princes of Nargothrond were Gelmir and Gwindor, sons of Guilin, not of Finrod's own house. After the Dagor Bragollach scattered the northern Noldor, Celegorm and Curufin, sons of Fëanor, came south with a following of their own and took up dwelling in the realm, adding a Fëanorian element to its population whose loyalty later proved divided from the house of Finarfin.

Kingship passed on Finrod's death to his brother Orodreth, whose rule leaned heavily on a counsel of strict secrecy that not all his people accepted. When the call went out for the Union of Maedhros, Gwindor defied this counsel and led a company of Nargothrond's warriors to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad; there his brother Gelmir was slain and Gwindor himself taken captive into Angband, his following largely destroyed. The episode showed that Orodreth's authority over a realm drawn from Noldor, Sindar, and the Green-elves who had joined it over the years was not unquestioned, and it left the surviving counsellors more, not less, inclined to hold the city's remaining strength close and hidden.

Relations with neighbouring realms narrowed under this rule. Kinship with Doriath endured in sentiment but bound the two hidden kingdoms to no open alliance, and after the disgrace of Celegorm and Curufin the remaining Fëanorian lords in the east had little further dealing with Orodreth's people. The clearest breach of this narrowing world came with Túrin son of Húrin, a Man taken into the city and raised to command its warriors, through whom Orodreth's own daughter Finduilas and the folk of Nargothrond were drawn into a closer mingling of Elves and Men than the realm had otherwise known.

Within the wider tale, Nargothrond functions less as a place with a will of its own than as a stage on which the story tests what its inhabitants do when a strategy of hiddenness meets a demand for open action. It is at Nargothrond's gates that the quest of Beren and Lúthien pivots: Finrod's debt of honour to Barahir forces him to choose between the caution that has kept his city safe and a personal oath that requires him to abandon it, and the narrative uses that choice to carry Beren's story eastward toward Doriath while marking Finrod's own path toward death. The subsequent exposure of Celegorm and Curufin, when Lúthien and Huan arrive at the ruined court seeking justice, turns the same hall into a place where the poem's moral accounting is settled in public, the sons of Fëanor unmasked before the very people they had misled.

For Túrin's story, Nargothrond serves a related but darker purpose: it is the one place in his wanderings where he is given power and a people willing to follow him, and so it becomes the clearest stage for the pattern of pride and persuasion that runs through his whole tale. His success in overturning Orodreth's cautious counsel is presented not as sound strategy but as the same flaw that undoes him elsewhere, so that the city's fall reads as a consequence of his character rather than of chance, and Gwindor's failed warning gives the reader, if not Túrin, the chance to see the mistake coming.

After its sack, Nargothrond continues to matter to the story chiefly as the source of a hoard rather than as a place: Glaurung's long possession of the treasure marks it as a repository of the dragon-sickness the narrative associates with him, and when that hoard passes through Mîm to Húrin and finally to Doriath, it carries the city's ruin forward into another kingdom's undoing. In this way Nargothrond's narrative role outlives its own destruction, binding the tale of Túrin's house to the later fall of Doriath through an object rather than an event.

The idea of Nargothrond emerged only gradually. In the earliest form of the tale, told in the Book of Lost Tales as Turambar and the Foalókë, there is as yet no Finrod and no city of that name: Túrin comes instead to the caves of the Rodothlim, a hidden Elvish people dwelling in rock-halls above a river, led by a chieftain already called Orodreth. These caves are overrun by the dragon Glorund, forerunner of Glaurung, in a sack that anticipates the later fall of Nargothrond in nearly every particular except its name and its founder, who does not yet exist as a character in the tale.

The name Nargothrond itself, and its attribution to a founding prince of the Noldor, entered the legendarium later, through the Sketch of the Mythology and the Quenta Noldorinwa, where the founder was called Inglor Felagund rather than Finrod. This followed from Tolkien's original naming scheme, in which Finrod was the name of Felagund's father, later renamed Finarfin; only in the revisions of the Later Quenta Silmarillion did Tolkien transfer the name Finrod to the son, fixing him as Finrod Felagund. Orodreth's place in this house likewise shifted: in the earlier conception he stood as Finrod's own brother, but in the later genealogical reworking recorded in the Grey Annals he became instead the son of Angrod, a nephew who inherited the crown of Nargothrond only through this altered kinship.