The Children of Angband by AdmirableMonster

The Children of Angband

This is a history that has never been told.  Those whom it concerns most deeply are dead now, even those who chose or otherwise received the lifespans of Elves.  It is a story that has been kept hidden for more than six thousand years.  Now, I believe it is past time it should be revealed.

I am sure there are those who will claim this history is false, and those who will claim—for a variety of reasons—that it should have remained hidden.  I no longer care.  I am too old to worry what others will think, and if I use my pen once more to shape the future—as I can hardly avoid doing—at least I will do so according to my own conscience.  I have shaped more than my fair share of history and without any clear understanding of the effects I would have, so perhaps it is hubris that leads me to write this, in the earnest desire to leave behind a legacy of understanding, rather than fear or hatred; unity, rather than division.  In any case, a historian cannot remove themself wholly from their own narrative, and this time I will not try.

I first met Ereinion Gil-galad at the end of the First Age—he arrived too late to stop the kinslaying at Sirion and too late to save a dear friend of mine, but if he had not come, I would have bled to death by inches.  I have spoken with other survivors, and none of us witnessed his arrival, but Gil-galad himself told me they sailed through the night to come to Sirion’s aid, only to arrive at dawn to see smoke bleeding silently into the sky.  It pained him, I think—my earliest memories of him are of Elven grace mixed with a mighty strength and a strange way of tilting his head, which, I later realized, he often repositioned to scent the wind.  He had a sallow complexion, which he hid beneath a careful application of cosmetics.  I do not know if his eyes were truly brown—they may have been—or if he paid some Dwarven artisan to make him a clever pair of tinted lenses.  Such trinkets became suspiciously popular in his court in the early part of the Second Age.

That is my beginning with the last High King of the Noldor.  Of more interest to this narrative is his beginning in the world.  There are many different lineages claimed for him, each more portentous and auspicious than the last—I have heard him called son of Orodreth, who was the nephew of Finrod Felagund; child of Lalwen, the sister of Fingolfin who died so nobly in Middle Earth; and son of Fingon Astaldo, sometimes by Maedhros Fëanorion.

He was none of these things by blood, although as a child he did live for some time with Fingon, whose love of Maedhros is well-known.  But Ereinion Gil-galad, despite his name, was called Ereinion Finellagh upon his birth, and he was not of any of the mighty families of any of the Eldar, nor yet of the Úmanyar.  His mother was indeed an Elf—of Sindarin descent, if not of full Sindarin blood, as is clear from his mother-name, but she was not—at least not as far as Gil-galad himself knew—of any particularly notable heritage¹.  Indeed, at the time of his birth, she was a thrall in the terrible fortress of Angband.

Terrible fortress.  So I name it, and so indeed it was, but—like the Omin Haishû of our day, which in the language of my mother we call Mordor—it was a prison for all those that dwelled within its walls, not just the Firstborn.  Of course, Omin Haishû, as its inhabitants call it, is no longer a prison.  Part of the reason I am writing this is to ensure that those of us who have always lived in free lands understand that to have lived in Mordor beneath Sauron, or in Angband beneath Morgoth, was an ugly thing for all those peoples, and now that the Enemy is no more, they are not our enemies.

In Angband there grew up a shared culture of thralls, Elves and Orcs and other creatures alike.  Our knowledge of that culture is minimal, for not only did few escape, those who did were called spies by the occupants of the free lands.  Elves and Men who had escaped thralldom were unwelcome in all the lands of the Úmanyar, and many killed themselves or returned in despair to Angband.  Some few reached the lands of the Noldor and were welcome there.  Of those peoples who were most closely tied to Angband—Orcs, Trolls, Werewolves, and other creatures shaped most intimately by the Enemy—only one refuge was offered: Himring, the fortress of Maedhros, which accepted all who petitioned for safety there.

I do not seek to excoriate those who would not welcome the escaped thralls.  The escaped folk were few, and it is true that some were spies, and some went mad, and some simply did not know how to exist in freedom.  At the time, I lived in safety in the hidden city of Gondolin, wanting for nothing—what did I know of the hardships of those dwelling in any other part of Beleriand?  No, I pen these words only to explain why we have so little knowledge of the culture of Angband.

What we do know I have mainly gathered from Gil-galad’s dim reflections and from the few fragmented stories passed by word of mouth down the lines of the descendants of those First Age Haish.  The folk of Angband at the time probably spoke a pigeon dialect of Black Speech and Sindarin.  Based on the ways in which Sauron was known to deliberately break apart family groups and deliberately employ linguistic difficulties to maintain control, it seems safe to hazard a guess that the same tactics were employed by his former master.  There is evidence that the folk of Angband, like their modern counterparts, devised a musical language to communicate, and some of the rhythms yet survive in the songs of the Haish today.  Gil-galad’s knowledge of this language of drums served him well—not only was he able to teach his folk to sometimes decipher the coded messages sent by the Enemy, the Dwarves with whom he forged an alliance used their own knowledge of stone along with the idea to devise a way for Gil-galad’s army to communicate with little chance of being overheard.

We also know of those who lived in Angband was that intermarriage between races was frequent and encouraged.  As it was common for Morgoth to divide friends, lovers, and allies, there grew up a culture of dual marriage, public and private.  A private marriage was like those of the long-ago Elves who undertook the Long Journey—lovers exchanged vows to one another in complete secrecy.  Once a private marriage had been undertaken, it was common for the folk to then seek another partner for a public marriage which would be entered into the records of Angband.  Some of these public marriages were made in good faith, between friends, comrades, or sympathetic strangers; sometimes they were not.  Because of the pressures placed on the thralls, it was not uncommon to consummate both the marriage with one’s public and with one’s private spouse.  For this reason, many rumors of sexual depravity and widespread rape arose in the other lands, although from what I have been told, an act of rape in which one party was unwilling (rather than both) was vanishingly rare.  Ironically, because of the customs and beliefs of Valinor, according to which the Firstborn do not survive such things, the Noldor were less quick to believe these rumors than the Úmanyar.

Children were born comparatively rarely in Angband.  Widespread scarcity impacted fertility rates, and an unwillingness to bear children into the broken structures that Morgoth enforced led to a heightened incidence of non-fertile marriages, at least private ones, which were more commonly consummated.  It could not always be avoided, however, and those children who were born were regarded with as much love and care as any who opened their eyes in the Free Lands.  This regard for their children is the primary reason we know anything of the culture of Angband at all.

Around a decade before the Dagor Bragollach, near the end of the Long Peace, a group of the people of Angband tried to escape.  It is unclear how many adults were with the party, but it is certain the effort was largely focused on a group of young children, all of them well below the age of pubescence, though their actual ages remain murky, as all of them were children of mixed heritage².  The escape effort was likely planned over a number of years, and it was successful enough that it was the largest egress of persons from Angband witnessed to that point.  Unfortunately, this very success doomed most of the refugees, as Morgoth could not afford the precedent it might set, and he sent more than enough troops to exterminate the entire group.

They would have been cut down to a man, if a sortie from Himring had not happened across them as Morgoth’s troops set upon them.  It is also possible that among that troop there may have been those sympathetic to the refugees, which might explain why a small force from Himring—even one led by Maedhros himself—was able to drive off the much larger band from Angband.  Still, there were few survivors of the initial assault, and only five children were uninjured enough that they were brought back to Himring alive.

It is at this point that the astute reader may realize that I seem to have diverged from my initial point, and may realize the final point I am driving at in this essay: Ereinion Gil-galad was one of the five children of Angband brought to Himring by Maedhros after much hardship.  His mother was an Elven thrall, and his father a Haish one.  He had few memories of either, but he once told me that he remembered his father as a tall, gentle man, who held him and his mother close and whispered words that made a mockery of the claim that the language of the Haish at the time was ugly.  It seems likely that this was his mother’s private husband, though it is not impossible that they were an unusually affectionate public couple.  Of him, nothing else is known.  The mother was one of those who perished in the escape attempt.  From her, Gil-galad received a single trinket: a small, carved wooden creature.  By the time I saw it, it had been worn nearly smooth, and Gil-galad himself did not know for certain what it had been intended to be, but he said he thought it had been a vicious, clever creature known for its fierce defense of its cubs.

Gil-galad was a deeply private person.  He instructed me that I should never reveal this history of his origin, and even in the three thousand years since his terrible fall, I have not done so.  It is only now that the gates of Omin Haishû are open that I find myself compelled to speak.  He became the High King of the Noldor not because of the blood that flowed in his veins, but because there was no one else.  He was brave and kind and good—one of the best friends I ever had—and he died terribly, and all these traits he learned from his father as well as from his mother.

The Haish are not our enemies.  They are victims of the Enemy just as we were.  All people produce wicked folk, and folk who do wicked things in the name of what they believe to be a good cause.  Did we suffer less in Sirion than in Gondolin because those who raised their weapons against us were Elves and not Orcs?

I hope this treatise is read as widely as my history of Beleriand, which was written by a young scholar who had just lost everything.  I hope in some small way this can be a kind of reparation.  Gil-galad, my friend, I have betrayed your trust, and for that I am sorry.  I hope that you will be there to blame me personally when I reach the West.

—Lendalwed Órontelós, called Pengolodh, Year Ten of the Fourth Age

1. There is, unfortunately, no information on the names of either of Gil-Galad’s parents. He was too young when he was taken from them to know it himself, and of course any records other than those in the minds of our people were long ago destroyed. ^{[ ▲ ]}
2. It is at this point that I wish to make it extremely clear that the standard history of Beleriand vastly underestimates the number of children born to multiple kindreds. There are several reasons for this—one primary one is that the most well-known surviving source was released in its most complete form after the end of the War of Wrath, with the primary goal of legitimizing the rules of Gil-Galad the High King and Elros Minyatur. Its author never considered it that it would become the definitive history of the time. ^{[ ▲ ]}