Túna

Túna is a name in Quenya, the tongue of the Eldar who settled in Aman, and it belongs to the hill itself rather than to the city built upon it. The published Silmarillion presents it as a name the Elves gave to ground they had made themselves. After the Vanyar and the Noldor came over the sea, they heaped up a green height in the Calacirya, the cleft that opens through the Pelóri toward the shore. Unlike most places in Valinor, the hill was not found and then named. It came into being together with its name, as the first work of Elvish hands in the Blessed Realm. The text gives no gloss for the word, and the etymological appendix to the volume does not treat it either. Any translation offered for it therefore lies outside what these works support, and this entry leaves the meaning open.1

The two names Túna and Tirion work together. Tirion names the town on the hill's crown, and the appendix of name-elements connects it with a stem meaning to watch or to guard. That makes the city a place of watching, which suits the tall white tower the Elves raised on its summit, whose lamp shone out through the gap in the mountains. The formula Tirion upon Túna keeps the two apart: one name for the settlement, one for the earth that carries it. The editor's Index of Names keeps the same division and enters Túna as the hill in the Calacirya on which Tirion stood.2

In the narrative the hill's name also stands for the people who lived on it. The text speaks of the dwellers of Túna much as it speaks of those of Alqualondë, so the place name serves as shorthand for the Noldor who stayed in the Calacirya. This figurative use extends the word without changing it: Túna remains the name of a hill, and through it the kindred who held that height can be named.3

Túna stands in the Calacirya, the one deep passage through the Pelóri, the mountain wall that shuts Valinor off from the eastern shores of Aman. The Valar opened this cleft so that the Elves who had settled by the sea could still receive the light of the Two Trees. The passage runs as a long valley from the inner lands down toward the coast. Túna rises within it as a raised hill set in the floor of the pass, not as a spur of the surrounding peaks. It therefore stands between two worlds. Behind it to the west lie the plains of Valinor and the lit country around Valmar, and before it to the east lies the Bay of Eldamar and the open water beyond.1

This position between the two regions gives the hill its particular character. Light from the Trees came through the pass from the west and fell on Túna's western slopes. The eastern face lay toward the shadowed sea, and the hill cast its shade down the valley on that side. Light that went past the hill and out through the gap reached the waters of the bay and the Lonely Isle, Tol Eressëa. The isle's western shore turned green under it, and the first flowers east of the mountains bloomed there. From its height the hill looks both inward to the Blessed Realm and outward over the bay toward the seas that divide Aman from the Hither Lands.2

The hill's crown was built over entirely. Tirion covered it with white walls and terraces rising in stages to the summit. In the courts below the high tower grew Galathilion, the white tree that Yavanna made for the Elves as a lesser image of Telperion. The summit also held an open square before the king's house, a public space large enough for the Noldor to assemble. It served that purpose in the later history of the city. The land around the hill is less clearly defined. The narrative places the Noldor who stayed there in the Calacirya itself and in the neighbouring uplands within hearing of the western sea, but it does not mark where the hill's lower slopes end and the rest of the valley begins.3

The history of Túna begins with the coming of the Eldar to Aman. The Vanyar and the Noldor, the first two kindreds to arrive, built the hill and the town on it together, and for a long age they lived there side by side. This shared settlement did not last. In time the Vanyar came to prefer the full light of the Trees to the light that reached the pass. They withdrew into the inner lands, and the hill was left to the Noldor alone. The published text gives no dates for this age, since the counting in Years of the Trees is not carried into its narrative. The early history of the hill can therefore be told only as a sequence of events, not as a set of years.1

Under Finwë the hill became the seat of the Noldor and the centre of their crafts and learning. The Teleri settled at Alqualondë on the nearby coast, and the two peoples formed a lasting friendship. The Noldor gave the sea-elves many gems, and there was traffic between the city and the shore. Knowledge also grew on the hill. The narrative names Rúmil of Tirion as the loremaster who first devised signs fit for recording speech and song. Fëanor, Finwë's eldest son, later refined that work. His own skill in making reached its height in this period, and it produced the Silmarils.2

The prosperity of the hill was undone from within. After Melkor was released, he spread rumour and suspicion among the Noldor, and rivalry grew between Fëanor and his half-brother Fingolfin. It broke out openly in Finwë's council, where Fëanor threatened Fingolfin with a drawn sword. Mandos judged him for it and banished him from Tirion for twelve years. Fëanor went north with his sons to the stronghold of Formenos, and Finwë followed him there out of love for his son. For the time of that exile the rule of the Noldor who remained on Túna passed to Fingolfin.3

The decisive event on the hill came after the Darkening of Valinor. The Trees had been destroyed, Finwë had been slain at Formenos, and the Silmarils had been taken. Fëanor then returned to Tirion in defiance of his banishment and addressed the Noldor by torchlight on the summit of the hill. There he and his sons swore their oath to pursue the jewels. Most of the people were stirred to leave Aman, and the greater part of the Noldor went out from the city under Fëanor and Fingolfin. This departure led on to the kinslaying at Alqualondë and ended the friendship between the hill and the haven. Not all went, however. Some of the Noldor stayed behind. Finarfin turned back after the Doom of Mandos, received pardon, and became lord of those of his people who remained in the Blessed Realm.4

Túna survived these events. When the Valar later fortified their land against the east and raised the Pelóri still higher, they left the Calacirya open, because the Eldar who had stayed faithful still dwelt there. The hill appears once more at the end of the First Age. Eärendil came ashore and walked up to Tirion, only to find its streets empty, because its people had gone into Valinor for a festival. The Noldor who had stayed in Aman later marched east under Finarfin in the host that overthrew Morgoth. The published narrative carries the hill no further than this. It records no ruin of Túna and no abandonment of it. Its fate after the Elder Days is left untold.5

Túna was never the home of a single kindred. The hill was first shared by the Vanyar and the Noldor. After the Vanyar withdrew, it stood in a wider order of Elvish lordship that the published text sets out plainly. Ingwë, lord of the Vanyar, was held to be High King of all the Elves. He did not rule from the hill but lived at the feet of Manwë on Taniquetil, while his people spread through the plains and woods of Valinor. The hill itself belonged to the Noldor, and Finwë was their king in Tirion. Finwë's kingship over his own people and Ingwë's precedence over all the Eldar existed side by side. The narrative records no dispute between them.1

The ruling house of the hill was bound by marriage to both neighbouring kindreds. Finwë's first wife, Míriel, was the mother of Fëanor. His second wife, Indis, was of the Vanyar, a close kinswoman of Ingwë, and the mother of Fingolfin and Finarfin. The house thus kept a line of descent toward the Vanyar after they had left Túna. Finarfin in turn married Eärwen of Alqualondë, the daughter of Olwë, lord of the Teleri of the haven. This marriage gave the friendship between the hill and the shore a dynastic form, and Finarfin's children were half Noldorin and half Telerin by descent.2

He did not rule from the hill but lived at the feet of Manwë on Taniquetil, while his people spread through the plains and woods of Valinor.

The succession on Túna can be traced only through the course of events, since no formal rule of inheritance is set down. Finwë held the kingship for as long as the Noldor stayed undivided. When he left the city, the governance of those who remained passed to Fingolfin, as the history above relates. Finwë was then slain and the greater part of his people departed. The lordship of the hill came at last to Finarfin, the youngest of the three brothers. He ruled over the Noldor who had stayed in Aman, a much smaller people than the one his father had governed. The text says nothing of any ruler of Túna after him.3

Within the narrative, Túna works as a threshold. The Silmarillion places its most settled people at the edge of the Blessed Realm rather than at its heart, on ground that faces the inner lands and the sea at once. The story makes this placement meaningful. The Vanyar go inward toward the Valar, the Teleri keep to the shore, and the Noldor on their hill hold the middle position that suits a kindred defined by curiosity and making. The reader first meets them there as builders and learners, not as exiles. The later story draws its force from how much the hill represents before it is lost.1

The hill is also where the ruin of that ideal is staged in public. The Darkening falls on the whole of Valinor, but the choice to leave is made openly on Túna, before the gathered people, and the text presents it as a communal act. The city that first stood for Elvish achievement becomes the point of departure for the Flight of the Noldor. After that the hill is present mostly by its absence, as the home that the exiles carry with them into Beleriand. Turgon expresses this directly when he resolves to build his hidden city in the likeness of Tirion upon Túna. Gondolin thus becomes a remembered copy of the hill, raised in a land that does not hold the light of Aman.2

The hill's last narrative role is to receive a traveller from outside. Eärendil climbs it as the first mortal to set foot in Aman, and his visit reverses the earlier departure. Where the Noldor once went down from Túna toward the Hither Lands, a half-mortal messenger now comes up from the sea looking for them. The emptiness he finds there troubles him, and the story holds that moment before it reveals the reason. The hill therefore frames the Noldorin story at both ends: it is where they choose to leave, and it is where the plea that ends their exile first arrives.3

The hill has a long history in the drafts, and for most of it the name Túna did not belong to the hill. In the earliest form of the mythology, The Book of Lost Tales, the Elves who come to Valinor build their town on a hill in the gap of the mountains, and the name Kôr covers both the height and the settlement. Tolkien kept this conception for many years. In the Quenta of the early 1930s and in the fuller Quenta Silmarillion written shortly before The Lord of the Rings, the two were separated. Kôr remained the name of the hill, and the town upon it was called Tûn. The formula of the later text, with one name for the ground and another for the city, therefore existed in these drafts, but the names were assigned differently.1

The final arrangement came with Tolkien's revision of the Quenta after the completion of The Lord of the Rings. Kôr was dropped as the name of the hill, and the form derived from the old town-name, Túna, took its place. The town itself received the new name Tirion. Christopher Tolkien traces this change of names in his commentary on the later Quenta. It explains why a name once used for a city came to be used for a hill. Beyond this shift in naming, the drafts give the hill essentially the same place and function throughout, as the Elvish height in the pass facing the sea.2