Thangorodrim

Thangorodrim is a Sindarin name. It belongs to the Grey-elven tongue of Beleriand, which the exiled Noldor took up for daily use after their return to Middle-earth. The name is usually rendered in English as the Mountains of Tyranny, and the editorial apparatus of the published Silmarillion lists its parts among the recurring elements of Elvish nomenclature. The first element, thang, carries the sense of oppression or tyranny. The second, orod, is the ordinary Sindarin word for a mountain. The closing -rim is a collective plural ending, so the whole compound names a group of heights rather than a single peak.1

Each element can be traced in other names, which is how the analysis is anchored. Orod returns in Orodruin, the Mountain of Fire in Mordor, where it is joined to a word for red flame. The collective -rim appears in Onodrim, the name Treebeard reports the Elves gave to his own people, the Ents. Read against these parallels, the construction of Thangorodrim is regular. It is not a unique coinage but an ordinary descriptive compound of the kind the Sindar used for rivers, ranges and peoples alike.2

The name looks at the mountains from outside. It describes them by what they meant to those who lived under their shadow, not by how they came to be. Morgoth's own designs are nowhere reflected in it. The name speaks for the Elves of Beleriand, for whom the smoking heights above his stronghold stood for domination made visible. The same habit of naming shows in Angband, the fortress beneath the mountains, whose Sindarin name joins the words for iron and for prison. Taken together, the fortress and the mountains above it carry a matched pair of names, one for the dungeon and one for the tyranny that towered over it.3

Thangorodrim was not a natural range. Morgoth raised it himself after he fled back to Middle-earth from the darkened Blessed Realm and rebuilt his northern stronghold. He heaped the new heights above the gates of Angband and gave them three peaks. They were built from the ash, slag and spoil thrown up by his furnaces and by the endless tunnelling beneath the earth. A dark smoke hung about their summits without ceasing, so the mountains could be recognised from far off by their reek as well as by their outline. They rose from the Iron Mountains, the long wall that closed Morgoth's realm to the north, and faced south across open country toward the lands the Elves were settling.1

Below the mountains lay the wide grassland of Ard-galen. During the long Siege of Angband the Noldor kept watch over this plain from their holds around it. Beyond it to the south rose the highlands of Dorthonion, and to the west lay Hithlum, walled by the Ered Wethrin. Because the ground between was level and open, the smoking peaks overlooked much of northern Beleriand and could be seen from the heights that bordered it. That openness ended when Morgoth broke the siege with rivers of fire. The grass of Ard-galen was burned away, and the plain became the barren waste afterwards called Anfauglith. From then on only dust and ruin lay before his gates.2

The flanks of Thangorodrim were sheer and could not be climbed from below. On one of its precipices Morgoth hung the captive Maedhros by his right wrist, and he could be reached only from the air, when Fingon was carried up by Thorondor, lord of the Eagles. The mountains lasted as long as Morgoth's power in the north. At the close of the War of Wrath the winged dragon Ancalagon was cast down upon them, and in his fall the towers of Thangorodrim were broken to ruin.3

The history of Thangorodrim begins with the return of Morgoth from the ruin of the Two Trees. With Ungoliant he fled north to the wreck of his ancient stronghold, and there the Balrogs who had lain hidden in its depths came up to rescue him from her. He then rebuilt Angband and set the new heights above it, as described above. Almost at once the mountains became the object of the Noldor's war. In the first battle after their landing, Fëanor pressed ahead of his host into the north with a small company and was cut off and mortally wounded by Balrogs. His dying sight of the distant peaks marks the first meeting of the exiles with the full scale of the Enemy's power.1

The long period of containment followed. After the Noldor threw back a sudden assault from the north in the Glorious Battle, they drew their forces around the plain before Angband and set a siege that lasted nearly four centuries. It was never a true encirclement. The Elves could neither storm the fortress nor pull down the heights above it, and Morgoth kept secret paths open through the mountains behind his realm. His servants still broke out now and then. Once the young dragon Glaurung came forth from the gates, before he was fully grown, and Fingon drove him back with a company of mounted archers. For all its length, the siege shows the limit of the Noldor's strength against the mountains, which were never taken.2

It is not a unique coinage but an ordinary descriptive compound of the kind the Sindar used for rivers, ranges and peoples alike.

When the siege ended in fire, the ground before the mountains became a stage for single deeds instead of held lines. In the grief that followed that defeat, Fingolfin rode alone across the burned plain to the gates of Angband. He struck upon them and challenged Morgoth to come out, and Morgoth did so and fought him. Fingolfin wounded the Enemy seven times before he fell. Thorondor then swept down, marred Morgoth's face and carried the king's body away. Some years later Beren and Lúthien passed through those same gates in disguise and went down into the deepest hall beneath the mountains. There they took a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown.3

The Battle of Unnumbered Tears brought the last Elvish assault that reached the gates. At its opening, Gwindor of Nargothrond and his men charged across the plain without restraint. They broke through the outer defences and forced their way into the gateway of Angband itself. All of them were killed there except Gwindor, who was taken alive. After the battle Húrin was brought captive to Morgoth. Because Húrin defied him, Morgoth cursed him and his kin and set him on a high seat of stone upon Thangorodrim. From there Húrin was forced to watch the fate of his family through the Enemy's sight. He stayed bound there for many years, until Morgoth released him for his own purposes.4

The end came with the host of the Valar at the close of the First Age. The power of the north was overthrown in the War of Wrath, and the last defence of the mountains fell with the dragons, as related earlier. Morgoth fled into the deepest of his pits and sued for peace, but he was dragged out and bound with the chain Angainor. Angband was unroofed and laid open, and the two Silmarils that remained in his crown were taken back. The mountains were never raised again. In the tumult of that war the northern lands were broken, and much of Beleriand sank under the sea. Thangorodrim lived on afterwards only in memory. Long after, in the Third Age, Elrond recalled the great host of the Last Alliance and judged it less splendid than the hosts that had gathered when Thangorodrim was broken.5

Thangorodrim never had a line of rulers in the ordinary sense. From the day the heights were raised until the day they fell, one lord held them, and that lord was Morgoth. Soon after his return he forged an iron crown, set in it the jewels he had taken from Fëanor, and named himself King of the World. He governed from a throne deep beneath the mountains, not from their summits. The Elves beyond the plain gave him no title of lordship; for them he remained the Enemy. No heir or successor followed him. When his power was ended, the realm under the mountains ceased with it.1

Beneath and around the heights lived his servants, arranged by rank rather than by kinship. The Balrogs formed his oldest and most feared following. Their lord, Gothmog, served as high captain of Angband and led its hosts in the great battles. Sauron, greatest of Morgoth's servants, acted as his lieutenant and sorcerer and later held a stronghold of his own in the south. The dragons were bred in the same deeps, Glaurung first among them. The numberless Orcs made up the common soldiery and labour of the realm.2

The realm also held unwilling inhabitants. After the Siege was broken, Morgoth took many of the Noldor captive and set them to work as thralls in the mines and forges beneath the mountains. Some he released on purpose, so that they returned to their own people as carriers of fear and suspicion, and at times as spies. Gwindor of Nargothrond laboured in these mines for years before he escaped, broken in body. Morgoth's dealings with his neighbours followed the same pattern of force and deceit. He had no allies among the Elves. Among the Easterlings who entered Beleriand, he gained followers through lies and promises, and some of them betrayed the Eldar at the decisive hour of the Fifth Battle.3

In the narrative of the Silmarillion, Thangorodrim works less as a setting than as a fixed horizon. The wars of the Noldor are fought on the plain before it and in the lands around it, yet the story keeps its heights in view as the goal that the Oath of Fëanor can name but never reach. The first deed of the exiles upon its slopes is a rescue, not a conquest. Fingon set out alone to find Maedhros, and his rescue with the Eagle's help had its real consequence far from the precipice. The act mended the breach that the burning of the ships had opened between the houses of Fëanor and Fingolfin. Once healed, Maedhros gave up his claim to the kingship of the Noldor in favour of Fingolfin. In this way the place built for Morgoth's cruelty becomes the scene where an Elvish feud is set aside.1

Later the mountains serve as a vantage point in a darker sense. Húrin's long captivity on the heights frames the tale of his children as something watched from afar, and that watching distorts it. Morgoth showed him events only through his own malice, and Húrin carried that bent sight with him after his release. It shaped the bitterness that led him on to further harm, most of all in the events that drew Doriath toward ruin. Here the narrative uses Thangorodrim to show that the Enemy's power reaches beyond force of arms and into how the defeated understand their own fate.2

By the time of the War of the Ring the mountains belong wholly to memory, but they have not lost their meaning. On the stairs toward Cirith Ungol, Sam reflects that Beren never expected to win a Silmaril from the iron crown in Thangorodrim, yet he went on all the same. Sam then realises that the light in Frodo's phial comes from that same jewel. With this, the old tale and the hobbits' journey appear as parts of a single story that has not yet ended. Thangorodrim thus stands in the later book for the far end of that tradition: a stronghold whose fall proves that no such tower lasts for ever.3