Weathertop

Weathertop is the name the hill bears in the Common Speech, and it is the one used by the people of Bree and by the hobbits who come to it in the autumn of their flight from the Shire. The name is descriptive rather than historical: it belongs to a folk who knew the hill only as the tallest and most exposed summit at the southern end of the Weather Hills, and who had long ceased to remember what had once stood there. The narrative of The Lord of the Rings adopts the same plain usage, so that Weathertop is the form a reader meets first. The older name comes through Strider, who explains to the hobbits that in the days of the northern kingdom the Men of Westernesse raised a great watch-tower on the summit and called it Amon Sûl. The Appendices then use the two names side by side, giving the Elvish form with the common one set beside it as a gloss.1

Amon Sûl is Sindarin, the language that the Dúnedain of the North used for the names of their lands and strongholds. Its two elements are well attested elsewhere. Amon is the ordinary word for a hill, familiar from Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw above the Falls of Rauros, while sûl means wind; the list of name-elements appended to The Silmarillion places the word beside Súlimo, a title of Manwë, Lord of the Airs. The name therefore means Hill of the Wind, and the English renderings Hill of Wind and Hill of the Wind are translations of it rather than independent traditions. Unfinished Tales likewise pairs Amon Sûl with Weathertop when it names the seeing-stone once kept on the hill.2

The two names thus describe the same quality from different distances. The Elvish name records how the builders of the tower thought of the place, as a height given over to the wind; the Common Speech name keeps that sense of an open, weather-beaten crown while dropping any memory of the tower. German translations follow the Common Speech form and render it as Wetterspitze, leaving Amon Sûl unchanged.3

Weathertop is a single steep height in the wild country of Eriador, east of Bree and beyond the Midgewater Marshes. It is the last and greatest summit of the Weather Hills, a ridge of lesser heights running roughly north to south, and it stands where the ridge ends and falls away towards the Great East Road. The Road passes close under its southern side on its way east towards the Last Bridge and, beyond that, Rivendell. This position between the Road and the long line of hills makes the hill the natural landmark of the whole region: a traveller who leaves the Road can steer for it across open land and rejoin the Road beneath it.1

In the political geography of the northern Dúnedain the hill had a border position. After Arnor was divided into three kingdoms, the Weather Hills and the East Road marked the lines along which Arthedain, Rhudaur and Cardolan met. Amon Sûl stood at that meeting point, and the Appendices record that both Rhudaur and Cardolan wanted to hold it. The reason was the tower on its crown and the seeing-stone kept there, which gave the hill a value no other height in the region had. Its position between three realms explains why it was contested, and why its fall mattered to all of them.2

The hill itself, as the hobbits find it, is a bare, steep cone with a flattened summit. On top, a broad ring of old stonework has crumbled and been overgrown with grass, and this is all that remains of the tower. The slopes are open and almost treeless, so anyone standing on the summit can see far across the surrounding lands and along the Road below, and anyone on the plain can see them. On the western side, below the crown, lies a sheltered dell among the hills, where the Rangers had left a store of firewood and where the travellers make their camp. This combination of open height and hidden hollow gives the place its double character, as both a lookout and a refuge.3

The founding of the tower on Amon Sûl belongs to the early days of the northern realm of the Dúnedain, after Elendil and his followers came to Middle-earth at the end of the Second Age, but no year is given for its building. Strider tells the hobbits that the Men of Westernesse raised the tower, and he adds a tradition that Elendil himself once stood on the summit watching for Gil-galad to come out of the West in the time of the Last Alliance. The tower's lasting importance came from the seeing-stone kept there. Of the palantíri Elendil brought to the North, the stone of Amon Sûl was counted the chief. It was the only one of the northern stones able to communicate with those of Gondor, which gave the watch-tower a role in the affairs of both realms.1

The Harfoots were the earliest of the hobbit-kinds to move west. The Prologue records that they wandered across Eriador as far as Weathertop while the other kinds still lived in the Wilderland. The Tale of Years first mentions the Halflings around TA 1050, when the Harfoots entered Eriador; at that time the tower still stood and the North-kingdom was not yet under serious threat. Arnor had already been divided in 861 into Arthedain, Rhudaur and Cardolan. As described above, the hill then became a contested possession on their common borders, and the dispute over it and its stone was one of the causes of strife between the three kingdoms.2

By the fourteenth century of the Third Age, the realm of Angmar had arisen in the north under its sorcerer-king and was working to destroy the Dúnedain of the North. In Rhudaur the line of Isildur had failed, and power had passed to a lord of the Hill-men in secret alliance with Angmar. Argeleb I of Arthedain fortified the Weather Hills against this threat, but he fell in battle against Rhudaur and Angmar in 1356. His son Arveleg, with help from Cardolan and Lindon, drove the enemy back from the hills. For a long period afterwards Arthedain and Cardolan held a defended frontier along the Weather Hills, the Great Road and the lower Hoarwell, and Amon Sûl was its strongest point.3

That frontier gave way in 1409, when a great army from Angmar crossed the river into Cardolan and surrounded Weathertop. The Dúnedain were defeated and King Arveleg was killed; the tower was burned and razed to the ground. The palantír, however, was rescued and carried back to Fornost as the defenders retreated. The Dúnedain continued to hold Fornost and the Barrow-downs, but the hill was never fortified again. The stone outlived its tower by little more than five centuries. When the North-kingdom fell in 1974, Arvedui, its last king, took the stones of Amon Sûl and Annúminas with him into exile, and both were lost when his ship went down in the Ice Bay of Forochel in 1975.4

In the centuries that followed, the ruin became a landmark in empty country, and the Rangers used it on their journeys through the region. Its last recorded part in history came in the autumn of 3018, over just a few days. On the night of 3 October Gandalf, riding ahead towards Rivendell, was attacked on the summit by the Nine. He held them off through the night with fire and light before breaking away northward, and later described the encounter at the Council of Elrond. He also left a hurried mark on a stone at the top, which Strider read as a sign of his passing. Three nights later, on 6 October, the Ringwraiths came upon Frodo's company camped in the dell below the crown. Frodo put on the Ring and was stabbed by the Witch-king before Strider drove the Riders off with burning brands. The wound Frodo received there troubled him for the rest of his life in Middle-earth.5

No settled population is recorded on Weathertop in any period. The hill mattered as a royal stronghold rather than a place of habitation, and its story is the story of the powers that claimed it. While Arnor was undivided, the tower lay within a single realm governed by the heirs of Elendil, first from Annúminas and later from Fornost. The division of the kingdom among the three sons of Eärendur ended that unity. Each of the new realms had its own king, and the tower stood at the point where their borders met. The Appendices say nothing of a formal settlement over who should keep it; they record only that the rulers of two of the three kingdoms coveted it.1

The claim to rule shifted as the royal lines changed. In Rhudaur and Cardolan the descendants of Isildur died out, while in Arthedain the line continued unbroken. From Argeleb I onward, the kings of Arthedain again asserted lordship over the whole of Arnor, and they marked the claim by taking royal names beginning with the prefix Ar- or Ara-. Rhudaur refused to accept this. There, only a few Dúnedain remained among a larger population of Hill-men, and their rulers had turned toward Angmar. The contest over the watch-tower was therefore also a contest over who could rightly speak for the North-kingdom as a whole, and the hill came to embody that dispute.2

It lets them see: from the ruined crown Frodo watches dark shapes gathering on the Road below.

After the fall of the tower, the lands on either side of the hill passed out of Dúnedain rule. Rhudaur was occupied by Men subject to Angmar, and the Dúnedain who had lived there were either killed or driven west. Cardolan was laid waste, and its surviving people held out only in the region of the Barrow-downs. When the Great Plague swept through Eriador, the Dúnedain of Cardolan came to an end altogether, and evil spirits from Angmar and Rhudaur took possession of the empty mounds. From then on the hill stood in country that no kingdom governed. After the North-kingdom itself fell, the only people who regularly came to Weathertop were the wandering Rangers, heirs of the old royal line who no longer had a realm to rule.3

In The Lord of the Rings, Weathertop is where the hobbits' flight from the Shire changes character. Until Bree the pursuit is mostly heard of and glimpsed; from the Midgewater Marshes onward Strider steers the company across trackless country toward the hill, hoping to find word of Gandalf and to see the Road from above. The approach is also where the reader first hears the old history of the North. On the way up, Sam half-remembers verses about Gil-galad that Bilbo taught him, and in the dell below the summit Strider tells the story of Beren and Lúthien. Both passages tie the small company to much older and larger events just before those events catch up with them.1

The height offers two things, and both work against the travellers. It lets them see: from the ruined crown Frodo watches dark shapes gathering on the Road below. It also leaves them exposed, so their small fire in the dell draws the Riders instead of keeping them away. The attack itself is told almost entirely from Frodo's side, and it turns on his own weakness rather than on any contest of arms. Overcome by the urge to use the Ring, he puts it on, sees the Riders as they truly are, and is stabbed as he strikes at their leader and calls on Elbereth. Strider's burning brands drive the attackers off, but the next morning brings only the slashed cloak and a blade that melts away in the daylight.2

From that point the journey to Rivendell becomes a race to save Frodo from the wound, and Weathertop remains in the story as a measure of what the quest has already cost him. On the homeward road a year later, as the hobbits come near the Ford of Bruinen, Frodo is struck by pain and sorrow on the anniversary of that night. The hill therefore marks the first lasting harm the Ring's burden does to its bearer, a harm the later triumph does not undo.3

Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film of his trilogy, keeps the attack on the hill as the turning point of the journey from Bree, with Elijah Wood as Frodo and Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn. The film uses the Elvish name as well as the common one, presenting the ruin as the remains of the old watch-tower of Amon Sûl. The staging departs from the book in several documented ways. The fight takes place among the ruins on the summit rather than in the sheltered dell below it, and Aragorn is away from the camp when the hobbits' careless fire gives them away, returning only once the Riders have closed in. In the book, Strider stays with the company throughout, and the fire is a deliberate choice rather than a mistake. The film also leaves out Gandalf's own night on Weathertop and the mark he left on the summit stone. In the film's sequence of events, the wizard is still being held elsewhere while the hobbits cross the wild country toward the hill.1

The two older adaptations of the first part of the story both include the episode. Ralph Bakshi's animated film, with Christopher Guard as the voice of Frodo and John Hurt as Aragorn, takes the company to the hill and keeps Frodo's wounding by the leader of the Riders as the event that sends the travellers hurrying on toward Rivendell. The BBC radio dramatisation, with Ian Holm as Frodo and Robert Stephens as Aragorn, tells the crossing to Weathertop and the night attack within its larger adaptation of the Road to Rivendell. As a sound-only production it relies on narration and dialogue to convey the setting.2