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It is understood that the Nírnaeth Arnoediad was the greatest tragedy the world has ever seen, and that it was, for a long time and in many collections of songs, the first benchmark for every loss to happen since. It might as well be. This history does not claim the battle did not end in tragedy, nor does it claim that the tragedy did not occur due to Uldor’s treachery. It only clarifies that in the songs of the East and South, the Nírnaeth is not sung of as a great victory like many presume it is sung of in our parts. It’s only ever sung of as a tale of stupidity.
Like the tale of the donkey and the cliff.
There are several strains of stupidity. One is reserved for people who spend too much of their time conscripting others into their own magnificence, so occupied with the grandeur of their own suffering that they cannot register how they have made spectators out of entire peoples. Ulfang and his sons Uldor, Ulfast and Ulwarth exist, in the tale as is told, chiefly as a backdrop against which the virtuous valour of the Eldar can be measured; and that of Maglor’s, and that of Fingon’s, and that of Turgon’s. And of course, to stand in stark contrast to the loyalty of Bór, who took what he was given, and did not ask for more. Uldor’s host, however, remains present enough to be counted in the tally of violences yet absent enough that no one troubles to ask how far the chain of actions stretches prior to the betrayal. A position simultaneously overexposed and unseen, which this historian thinks is a far more efficient cruelty than either condition managed alone.
In the singing of the Nírnaeth, the treachery of Ulfang and his sons is the lowest note, an unexpected burr, a discordant—
slam!
Little, however, is written of the reasons for such a betrayal, aside from the possibility of the possibly looming possible hand of possibly Morgoth possibly influencing them possibly before they possibly entered Beleriand. Possibly. And these, a people who had lived amongst the Noldor for years upon years before the battle… long enough that Ulfang himself had passed. Ulfang’s men swore loyalty to Caranthir, and thus by extension to Maedhros, in the year 463 of the First Age, nine full years to the advent of the treachery.
And so, all these years to turn from Morgoth!
All the more opportunity to spurn the darkness!
It is not impossible!
It has been done, over and over!
All these years to turn from Morgoth, and Ulfang and his sons did not. But why? You know this too, though it seldom enters song. Your histories and ours both know that Ulfang’s loyalty to Morgoth came not from a deep-rooted propensity to bend towards the darkness, but simply because Morgoth had tempted them—falsely, it turned out—with fertile land within Beleriand, to farm upon, to live within, for the conditions of the desert have always been harsh.
How trite it sounds!
The greatest tragedy in the history of Arda, all for eight hundred acres of arable land. The life of Fingon the Valiant, cast aside for a few reeking fields for sheep to graze upon! And yet, the answer to what Morgoth promised Ulfang serves equally well as an answer to why Ulfang betrayed the Noldor. Nine years in the bosom of the Noldor, and they still turned traitor over a handful of acres they never received in the end. Because even after nine years in the bosom of the Noldor, they had no more lands to feed their own.
How greedy we are!
Not more land, but land.
How greedy we are, in the reading of battles!
How effectively such histories are written, how high we historians stoke the flames of the blood-boiling pots, so that you too are transposed into the thick of it. The eye, sprinting ahead to the falling of the towers, the beating of banners, to the fall of Fingon the Valiant and the hope of Lord Turgon, who came when he was called. The tragedy of Maedhros, who for the second time took a traitor’s hand and found a knife sprouting from his heart. We speed to these moments so swiftly because they turn us bright and beautiful and tragic in turn, and so whatever comes before, the small and unglamorous grievances which set the catastrophe afoot, gets trampled in the mire in the rush to get to the burning.
The histories of Middle Earth arrive at Uldor’s name knowing already what he is, the accursed traitor, the son like his father, the hinge upon which the tragedy turns, for when he is first named he is named the Accursed. To get to Uldor, we must speed past the years in which he was not named in Sindarin Uldor, Unsightly Lord, the years in which his father Ulfang was not named Unsightly Beard, the question of what he’d actually been promised for his service. We cannot bear to understand that the promise had been so ghastly in its modesty: land alive enough for crops, patches of Beleriand to call a people’s own. It is unbearably unheroic, a speck of horseshit in nectar, how a people spent nine years under the thumb of the Noldor, and remained discontent enough to burn the entire edifice down instead.
But were the hosts of Ulfang and Uldor and Ulfast and Ulwarth truly landless?
Nay, for in 463, they had sworn allegiance to Lord Caranthir, as has been established. As Maedhros gifts Lothlann and the Southern March to Bór in thanks for his pledge, Caranthir bequeaths the host of Ulfang his former lands to settle upon, the vast green plains of Thargelion. The once-green plains of Thargelion. For eight years before the bequeathal, the orcs break through to the plains amidst the Dagor Bragollach. It is written that Thargelion is ravaged and the shimmering Lake Helevorn is defiled. The land is laid to waste, and its lord flees southwards. The orcs pass through. The land is empty. The land has been laid to waste.
This is the land given to Ulfang’s host.
There are certain strains the songs always reach for yet never acknowledge. The Sindar are always rooted: the trees know their king, the river comes when called, the girdle grows from the forest instead of enclosing the same. Ironically, the Noldor in exile are also granted a similar ancestral fluency in mythic proportions, even by the scribes accused of being their greatest detractors. Finrod’s delving of Nargothrond is a harmonious communion with stone; the mallorn takes to Lothlórien like a native son returned. Whatever it is that the Eldar do to the landscape, the songs will declare it kinship.
No such word exists for the rest of us.
And so nobody knows why the line of Ulfang once chose the Foe, and kept choosing so.
The Orcs are sung of in terms of ruin alone; the land under them, Thargelion, Mordor, Harondor, is never theirs to belong to and only ever territory they happen to occupy while destroying it, the soil itself recoiling from their feet. Easterling and Southron settlement gets folded into that same devastation. Nine years in Thargelion and not one surviving line describes what Ulfang’s people might have felt, standing at Helevorn's foaming blunt edge, whether the bleeding lake ever became anything more than a knife with no handle, whether they ever even attempted to read its moods. An entire world of words to describe the spirit of a people as one with their ground, yet none for a dead land, a fled land, but gift.
The year is turning as Ulfang’s host enters Thargelion for the first time. Eight full years have passed since the Bragollach and a handful of flowers have sprung up, so the valley does not so much look devastated as it looks a devastation unfinished. Miles in from the boundary, in the middle of the old plains, ash-birch still shows the burn scars, thin-limbed and quick, dragging lightly across the soil.
Where the fires ran hottest the earth is truly bare with a faint salted blandness to it, grass thin and yellowed even in season, stringy white roots fingering an old bitterness in the soil that eight autumns of rain hasn't yet leached clear, as pale and listless as a skeleton-child found picking his nose, curled up deep within the heart of a ruin. Mount Rerir's broken shoulder stands over all of it, black-scarred stone screaming up into the cloud, halls after old halls fallen in on themselves, doorless, roofless, sheltering naught but wind and the occasional destitute bird.
“Lord, the cattle are dying.”
“The grass will grow,” promises Caranthir to Ulfang, such benevolence directed to that Ulfang who is ungrateful for his gift. “You and yours must cease the wandering life, if you wish to settle the lands of Beleriand. The grass will grow, and we will give you cattle, and sheep, once you have cleared the ground.”
“Lord, the ground is poisoned,” Ulfang stretches his arms out at the land, at the lake. “It has been a full year since we have begun settling. Nothing will grow on this soil, and things keep dying. Cattle, horses, children. Men need feeding, and settled women will bear more children, are already bearing children, who will need feeding and sheltering. The water of the Helevorn is not fit even for pigs to drink, let alone a warhorse. Our steeds are old stock, prize stock, as you were told when you bred them with yours.”
“Give it time,” says Caranthir. “Till the ground barren for some years, ten, twenty, and the soil should replenish. For water, turn from the lake, there are rivers bordering my lands. I will let my patrols let you pass, and collect the water you may need.”
A muscle twitches in Ulfang’s jaw, under his close-trimmed black beard, and it is Caranthir who first thinks him haughty and first names him so. “It is not we who ravaged the earth. Neither were we the ones to defile the lake. Why must it be my men who clear the mess and tills the barren soil? We were not the one who fled from the Helevorn’s banks. Ten years? Twenty? We are not blessed with eternal life as you are, lord. Children die before ten in every mannish settlement, and twenty is a third of a lifetime—you expect us to pay this cost for a mess not of our making? You give us poisoned ground and expect us to give thanks?”
Uldor slinks out from the shadows, and Caranthir gazes impassively at him. A young man, even slighter of frame and darker of skin than his father, wearing his hair in sleek braids. He too has hair upon his chin, though his is the pampered, over-pruned offering of a newly-bearded youth, unlike the thunderous, tightly hewn, harsh jawed angles across his father’s cheeks.
“What my father means, lord, is that we cannot feed an army on such ravaged land,” he says. “I have a young child, a boy. These are the children who will be the best hope we have against darkness, who will be our fiercest fighters. But only if they have room enough to grow.”
“Is anyone else offering you anything better?” Caranthir smiles pleasantly, before the smile turns into a freezing, furious sneer. The scribes were wrong. The famous temper runs not hot, but colder than ice. “Insolent child. To covet the lands of others, to blindly follow his father into blatant insubordination.”
“Yes, to covet the land of others, you sun-blinded piece of shit,” Ulfang slams a hand down on the gilt-edged mahogany table between them. Uldor jumps, then stifles a smile. His father’s temper is as harsh as Caranthir’s, hot and unexpected and striking ever-true. “Strangers to this land are we, who crossed a bed of sand to get to these plains! But we are not alone, lord. I have never seen the coast, but it is said to me that the sea too floats on a bed of sand.”
Caranthir laughs, his eyes sparkling. “Oh, my. Tyelkormo was right about you.”
Ulfang breathes inward, deep and deeper. He stares at the lamp near the sill where a moth, trying over and over to get to the flame, batters its little body over and over against the glass. A knife, strapped to his belt, burns against his hipbone, cuts his slight frame in half. Not for the first time, he thinks of his own death, and wonders whether they’ll call it a killing or a carving.
“If you mean your silver-haired little cunt of a brother, you’ll soon find that he was indeed right about me, in fact the only one of you who has ever been right about me, and certainly the only one with the fucking balls to say it to my fucking face!” he snaps. “Spare me this idle talk, Caranthir. You know as well as I that I am no Bór, I care little for your talk of great men and lesser men and swarthy men, I do not judge my worth by what spills from your jaw but by the steel in my hand.”
The elf lord raises an eyebrow, leaning back in his seat. “You accuse me of prejudice? I, who established both trade and friendship with the Haladin long before you and yours have shown your grim faces in my lands?”
“I don’t give a shit what forest bitch you keep where and less of a shit about what you give grass-adorned whores in the dark,” spits Ulfang brusquely. “And less do I care about that dog of a Bór, to whom your redheaded brother has given the untouched Lothlann and the Southern March, whose people eat well and sleep easy. Return to the matter at hand, I pray.”
Uldor rolls his eyes and winces at grass-adorned whore and forest bitch, rubbing a temple in embarrassment. Oh, Ado was in for it when they got home. He cannot stifle his laughter this time, remembering how once, back home, the man had once made a similar comment about his sister-in-law who enjoyed collecting thistles and disliked men a little too much for his taste, and how his mother had twice clipped her husband hard around the ear and made him sleep in the stables with the stallions for a week, to cast out the donkey’s disposition rooted so deeply within your derriere that only a horse-cock could dig it out! She was surely going to kill him for this.
Caranthir’s lip curls in genuine distaste at the two of them, looking actually nauseous at the smile on Uldor’s lips. “How dare you leer so at such a shameful address. In such a foul manner do you people speak of womenfolk. Do you all speak the same about your own? My, never have I pitied more the—”
Uldor laughs only harder, remembering how his brother Ulwarth, only six at the time, had innocently reported to his aunt what Ulfang had said of her. And that incorrigible aunt of his, she went and spread it to all her friends, and her friends spread it to their husbands, and their husbands spread it in the council rooms, and at last Ulfang (who had been allowed back into the marital bed at last and had let his guard down, assuming his punishment was over) had to mosey into the women’s hall and tender a public apology for his prejudiced comment, red of cheek and shameful of eye, lest he be stabbed in the dark and the stabbing forgiven for the good of their clans. He remembers standing in the hall that day, his mother beside him with her arms triumphantly crossed, remembers everything being tear-blurred with laughter, thinking that everyone should have been alive on that day, the best day ever, the funniest day of his life.
“THE LAND, ELF!” roars his father, rising in his seat, slamming his palms on the table and knocking over Caranthir’s goblet. “The land, the land, the land! The fucking land, you stuck-up cunt! The land is poisoned! The people upon it are dying! Can you not hear me? Do you wish for me to carve the words between your damnable ears?”
“My god. What an onerous task this has all become. Like arguing with an infant,” whispers Caranthir, grimacing. He rises himself, beckoning his aides to prepare his horse. “Whilst I do not ask for gratefulness, Ulfang, a crumb of grace would be welcome. But I refuse to hear of my allies spoken of so, and I refuse to let you subject the women of my court to such vile testimony. And I certainly do not expect my gift to be spat upon in such a manner. I must say, Curufin hit it on the head when he predicted this little arrangement of land would prove to be a thorn in my side.”
“Ado, be careful,” Uldor mutters to his father in their own tongue. “Remember where we stand. Remember the loss, and think of the gain.”
Ulfang looks at him, nods curtly. He turns to Caranthir, inclines his head, face still flushed but oddly peaceful now, a squall swallowed by the great sea. Like a man who has made a choice he has been putting off for a very long time, an awful choice that comes with the awful relief of having made it at last. His eyes glitter furiously in his skull, head tilted slightly upwards for Ulfang has always been slight, has always looked at the world like a kestrel poised for flight. He wants to claw through the elf’s chest. He is utterly present, but for the wound in his eyes.
“Your brothers are wise men,” he acquiesces, suddenly pliant. “A poisoned thorn it will prove indeed.”
“I did not say the thorn is poisoned,” Caranthir says, off-hand, shrugging on his outer robe.
The moth climbs higher, finding the lamp’s chimney and slipping inside it at last. In the final second before it is set ablaze, Ulfang is certain he sees it rejoicing, exalted, enveloped in the warm touch of light, wings aglow, a source of light all on its own. Then, the smell of burning, so swiftly passed-across, a single exhale in the face of eternity. The elf-lord watches him, expecting, half-waiting, for another moment of fury, another little anecdote to slip to a brother after breakfast. But Ulfang has never felt calmer.
“No, lord. It was I who said such a thing.”
Any historian perusing the scarce fragments of First Age Easterling testimony that survived floods and indifference soon comes to recognise their restless preoccupation with boundaries and belonging, a constant response to an unhoused life. Unlivable lives lived conspicuously and invisibly at once, promised a future and given none, betrayed and betraying, needed enough to be conscripted but never enough to be neighbours.
Is it strange, then, that surviving testimony from the host of Ulfang in Thargelion fixates obsessively on fences and markers, on measurements of land pledged and never delivered? One woman, writing of the nine years before the Union, dwells at unusual length on the exact dimensions of a field boundary promised to their house by the Lord Caranthir, a field which turned out to be barren, and compares it for a full chapter, to the land provided to another kinsman. But is it truly unusual? If your claim to the ground beneath you is perpetually provisional, is it any wonder your prose keeps circling back to edges, to who stands where and the width of a milestone?
These are a people without walls of their own construction, but newly borrowed shelter, both benevolently granted and easily revocable, under a sky that had already been divided among older claimants before they arrived to ask for any part of it. They possess none of the settled certainties that, say, the house of Finwë, had taken for granted from its first waking at the water. Life, for the people of Ulfang, is contingent and provisional. It is shaped relentlessly by other hands.
The cruelest thing about Lake Helevorn is how unpoisoned it looks. High and cold in the northeastern mountains, the water lays flat and beautifully dark and remarkably ordinary against all light, herons stalking its margins, and only when one draws from and drinks it long enough can they tell what it has endured. A faint metallic taste, gluts of dead fish that rise too easily and yet too slowly, their flesh tired even before encountering the net. A healthy lake answers a people back, usually. Gives them something in return for what it takes from them, a fish for a little flood, so on and so forth. Helevorn receives. It takes the nets down into its depths and gives up just enough to keep a handful of households fed, never once anything more. Sometimes it takes a child. Sometimes a horse. The waters are repaying some older tithe, and have little left over for the new arrivals made to draw from its edges.
What do they find in Thargelion?
Perhaps the ordinary residue any hard-fought field leaves for the ones who come after, a strip of orc-mail rusted into peat, a broken buckle. Perhaps once in a while a longer bone turns up beneath a plough that a farmer reburies without ceremony. Then one day a hunter’s boy finds under the bracken, his second autumn in that valley, a skull half-swallowed by moss, jaw still hinged, as though it had died in the thick of an argument with the ground it fell upon. Does the finding of this skull, and others, change how Ulfang’s host understands the vale they have been given? Do they measure, standing over the skull, the cost of the glory that was fought for on that stretch of grass? Or do they move the bones aside as another obstacle between hoe and furrow, and say nothing, for nothing was worth saying?
Perhaps what frightens them, in the end, is not the bone itself but the wondering it leaves them with, no name to put to the jaw, no assailant they have seen, the cause of it all so far from their own cause. The questions.
What happened here?
Who will be saved?
From whom?
Are we next?
Where will we go when this happens once more?
It is difficult, after the skulls begin to surface, for Ulfang’s men to summon the promised duskfall glittering gold over an old elven kingdom. They live in Thargelion, though not the Thargelion of old. The hares run thick through the burn scars and the wheel tracks, and kestrels pick at things they would rather not look at. One fears going on, going deeper into what happened to the land, season into season, through the wolf-quiet of winter, the badger-track months, places it must go before it can burst out into whatever full harvest the ground has been promising and hasn't yet paid.
The hunter’s boy, the year after, begins to hunt himself.
The valley empties of light as he creeps along the treeline, the ridge above Helevorn flashing first a threatening violet, then a sudden black. The ground huffs back the day's heat in one long breath, and frost gathers first where old fire-scars still keep the grass thin. A battalion of owl-hoots starts up along the treeline as the first stars settle in, stretching unhurriedly, and the boy stands where the kestrel stood at dusk, listening to the deep valley-dark.
He finds himself crouching over a fence-post driven into the hard ground, his eyes flitting nervously to the border before he even decides to look there. Two sons of Fëanor ride the boundary road: one slight, silver-haired and wild, the other dark and cold-eyed, tall on their horses. They are good riders, their horsemanship undeniably beautiful, and the boy knows that because his people are horse-people, road-people, nomads and hunters. His father was a rider and his grandfather was a rider and his mother could ride standing upon a stallion and he himself could ride before he walked. And yet to his great surprise, he finds himself disgusted by the ease with which they ride, made nauseous by their unhurried certainty. In the shadow past the treeline something moves behind him, reeking and patient, and he does not startle.
He does startle at the recognition, however, long minutes later when the beautiful riders pass and he turns for home and before him stands a wolf with furiously yellow eyes. The recognition not that a wolf stands before him but that his body, in paying no heed to its snuffling, has evidently trusted the wolf in the black bracken more than it trusted starlit horsemen on a flame-bright road, that he and it are living now the same wary life, studying the same tall, cold shapes. He can no longer easily tell whether he belongs with the elves in the light, or the wolves in the dark.
Treachery is afoot.
Treachery is afoot, so look no further. We see Ulfang the traitor with one eye and Uldor the coward with the other, and we are blind to the whale passing beneath their boat, to nine unrewarded years, to a stinking lake, to a boundary drawn to end one conflict rather than to nurture a place where lives might be lived. A people who crossed a sea of sand in the hopes of arable land. A tidy map slides across the entire affair. Here, a traitor. There, the faithful. The prefix, the epithet. Beneath it, silently, the movement.
Treachery is afoot.
The Union of Maedhros is betrayed.
The histories of the East do not claim to have wished this betrayal on the Noldor, and neither do they celebrate Uldor’s act of treachery. Nor does this historian. I grieve the grief of Maedhros, I feel the blade of Maglor. I mourn the young-old king beaten into dust. I say only that I find myself unable to locate the vantage from which a betrayal at the Nírnaeth comes as a surprise. Betrayal, by a people brought under a banner not their own, promised a false share in a glory there had been no plans then to divide, and offered instead the privilege of dying in service of grievances several generations older than their own arrival into the story. The violent result of having loyalty presumed than earned is a phenomenon which recurs through military history with a regularity that ought to embarrass those who keep being surprised by it. The only way to avoid singing of it as a tale of stupidity, is to say, in every story, that Ulfang might have been black of heart from the first. That it had naught to do with nine years.
(There are days I think myself a better man than Ulfang and Uldor, a braver man. I think I should have found some way to object louder, and sooner.)
It is there that history leaves the sons of Ulfang. Exiled, oath-bound, standing in the ash of a victory that was never going to give them back what they'd crossed the land to reclaim. Dead. Empty handed in the belly of a battle, their six shadowed hands reaching through time and space to Sirion. They scrabble through the bleeding sand. They scurry through the rubble. They grasp the three cold hands of the last two sons of Fëanor.
We are, all of us telling this story and reading it too, standing in the third of its three generations, which cycle over and over and over. The first, who needed wonders to be kept from the dark, who sought light and newness beyond all. The second, who swore oaths and crossed seas. Who raised and slew kingdoms, who earned and lost glory. The third, who lives on either edge of old lines drawn to end half-remembered wars, who live in the aftermath and die for the cause regardless. This is how the age of jewels and conquest gives way to the age of ledgers and borders, through an inheritance that keeps costing more than it was ever worth, paid out generation after generation by those whose names their forebearers will never know.
First, the fathers who sow the seeds. Then, the sons who wage the wars. Last, the rest who pay the cost.
History gives nothing up on its own terms, waiting neatly behind the barricade until some current grievance muddies the waters enough to see a shape in it. Nothing preserved in the rolls I consult is truly fixed; every time I go looking for Uldor in the tale of the Nírnaeth, I disturb the record a little further from whatever it was the last time I rummaged through it, and come away with a slightly different figure than the one I went looking for the year before.
This is the real dishonesty in all such reconstructions, mine included. I tell you this story as if I found Uldor waiting there at the borders of Beleriand in 463, and simply walked forward through his life to the field where he died. But the truth is that I have never once gone forward. I backpedal, always, from wherever I currently stand. Resentful of the world and made worldly by war, weary of barren vastnesses, newly a father myself, I build him retroactively out of whatever grievance I carry that season. This man is not the Uldor of record, but neither is he the Uldor who lived, because that man had never in his life answered to the name Uldor. No one knows the man I have written into these pages, for much like the Uldor of record, this man too has never existed. Still, when my daughter wails into the dead of the night, rendered sleepless for want of a pyre-burnt breast, it is he who comforts us both.
Like all gods, we see him through the heart’s eye.
We choose his choices.
We trace his steps.
We trace his steps.
We trace his steps.
The trail goes cold.
We lose ourselves.
We are found.
We choose once more, what he once chose before.
Posthumously named foul with a certainty that clearly outpaces the felt experience of foulness, Ulfang and his sons fall against the syllable with nary the mercy of a single hour’s uncertainty in which to argue against it. Ul, ugly, unsightly, grotesque, affixed to the front of the name of a man and the name of his sons and the name of a people. There is the prefix, and there is the prefix, and there is only the prefix, over and over. Ul, in your histories, in Ulfang the Black, the conspirer, in Uldor the Accursed, the traitor. Then Ulfang dies. Then Uldor and Ulwarth and Ulfast are killed and gone and no more, and so too are Bór and Borlad and Borlach and Borland, who die fighting the traitors and sink too evermore, their purpose extinguished. For once the faithless are eradicated from the face of the earth, what need have we for the faithful? The comparison vanishes, and so too does Bór.
Never again shall Ul strike your lips.
Until it must again, when Morgoth pens the hosts of Ulwarth and Ulfast into Hithlum, knowing what would happen having seen what had happened before. Locked in a frigid, barren land once more, the clans turn fey and cruel, chewing inwards and down towards the House of Hador. They become the greatest fear of all of Arda, the Interloper, the Occupier, eaters of peace, slave-owners, child-beaters, women-takers. Ul, rearing its head in a cobra’s stance, and in its gluttony growing the grief of Húrin, the torment of Morwen, the folly and tragedy of Túrin, exquisitely ragged threads heading elsewhere into other stories, into griefstruck lives and tragic deaths. What the Interlopers did in Hithlum was nothing short of atrocity. But to think that of all the sacked cities and sieges and razed kingdoms across this sorrowing realm, it is of Dor-lómin’s plight you are told of the most.
The host of Uldor, unlike those allied to Ulwarth and Ulfast, do not take part in this cruelty. So the host of Uldor becomes unhooked from the prefix to their name. And the host of Uldor too drops out of the record for good, as meaningless as Bór without Ul. And that is where I began. It ends there, breaks in two, never to appear in the record again. I, like many historians, had started so simply, by tracing my own lineage and going where it took me. That is where I found the vast, gaping hole which stood between a single ancestor, and everyone who came before, swallowing my name, and that of my sister, and that of my childhood friend, and that of the lady who sold rabbits in the house across from my father’s.
Am I of the line of Uldor?
Didn’t Uldor have a child?
What of my child?
Perhaps we come from a lesser lord, linked to Ulfang’s house?
I don’t know. I don’t know how to find the answer. I don’t know where to look.
For the prefix meant that there was never anything Uldor's line could see in the lineage, never a fever or a wound they could point to and say: here, this is where a foulness entered, this is where it left, this is from whence you came. The verdict arrived only at the moment of treachery, in someone else's tongue, and radiated backwards and forwards through every act they would ever take so that each choice read as cunning and each necessity read as spite. Once, the traitor’s name was simply a title bestowed at birth, meaning nothing until a life filled it in. Now, Uldor arrives accursed, despoiled, a whole life dragging behind it like a carcass on a wagon.
When you affix a name to a person, they slowly cease to be known by any other name in your eyes. Both the Fëanorians and the host of Ulfang are hunters and gamesmen, who know that the best way to train a dog is to treat it as a dog and only a dog. Ulfang's line, in every chronicle after Nirnaeth, can only ever exist in the shape of that prefix, in the shape of Ul-uncontested. And because no scribe ever thought that Uldor was worth naming past his treachery, his story has nowhere to end. It keeps expanding, filling in for whatever had been lost in the filing, until a syllable that once meant nothing at all has come to mean an entire nation, and the side it once chose in war.
I do not turn to the sorcerer because I wish to carry out his will. I turn to him because I see nowhere else to turn.
This feeling of watching your own name go by like a stranger's, flinching at a syllable you were given at birth, in reality has a plain enough cause. History is written over people in the way history tends to be. And yet knowing the mechanism does little to touch the actual horror of it, the horror of existing, consciously, clearly, in a body, in a bloodline, with children and trade and a face in the water bowl each morning, and still find yourself absent from the count of the world. Half of me stands here, an ordinary, undoubted scribe. Half of me was buried in Anfauglith, and no one has come looking for that part because as far as the record is concerned, there was nothing there to lose.
Writing this account of Ulfang’s treachery and Uldor’s broken legacy feels on some days like an absurd labor. Imagine! Imagine trying to raise something that might outlast me, out of scraps a chronicler had already decided weren't worth the vellum, when I myself still wake each morning and need to convince myself I truly exist. For to know oneself truly, one must understand the ways in which one is a child of their history. All of them, and all of history, even the parts one desires to excoriate, the deeds you wish your ancestors hadn’t done. One must be consumed by their history, like a parent consumes a child, in order to be reborn into an understanding of their present, in order to receive the tools to navigate the now. Especially the bad parts, the worst parts.
They are the most important parts, not because they tell you not to do a thing, but why it was done, and thus ensure it never happens again.
It is not enough to think of a people simply as names erased by history and holes in the page to be mourned unsought. Equally, it is not enough to name a people as the ones who did the erasing alone, or to name the erasure as a simple flattening with neither intent nor purpose. In doing so, you leave no room for the third position, the murkier field between accuser and accused. As a historian, loosening my grip on history has always been the hardest part, the greatest labour. It is the hardest part of knowing anything, of knowing peoples, mountains, valleys, the realisation that these stories are in the end inseparable from each other. Ulfang’s line was betrayed by the land it was given, and so betrayed the men who gave it. We are none of us in this line reducible to the towering Ul. But if we refuse, out of loyalty and discomfort, to think about the worst things our people have done, we risk letting the verdict finish becoming truth by the sole fact of remaining unquestioned.
Uldor did not vanish at the Nírnaeth, whatever the chroniclers assumed. Uldor had committed a treachery and died for it, yet he lost little more than a single life. It is I the historian, who might or might not trace his blood to the blood of Uldor, who has lost something. I have lost the unmarked version of myself, the man unmarred by the verdict prefixed to Uldor’s name, the verdict which attached itself, uninspected, to my life, my son’s life, his son’s life, all our lives. I have lost my tidy lineage, lost my child’s face as it must have looked before it twisted into an unsightly omen. I have lost my father’s face.
Oh, my friends, I have lost whole seasons of my life.
I am all over missing pieces.
I dream I have swallowed my tongue.
On the worst days, I wake limbless beneath the sun.
Still, what’s left of me now writes Uldor’s history with a license the unmarked version of me never had, because now there is no reputation left to guard, no later, brighter draft of the lineage to protect from smudging. The old rolls, the scant testimonies I consult, sit as brittle as shed insect casings, and beneath their dust lives a live lightning-strike, faint and stubbornly dangerous. Temptingly so. Perhaps if a hand was patient enough to pry loose the right seam, a name might be dragged out of the silt of another story and sit, wet and intact and electrifying, upon the once-green, once-fertile plains of the page.
I had always known he was waiting patiently somewhere in these rolls, waiting to be found by the first to not stop looking. What no one prepared me for was arriving at his name and discovering the search had not ended. Nobody prepared me for the meeting itself, of buried man and breathing descendant, standing on opposite ends of a silence, utterly unable to lead the other one home. I am a historian of Rhún, who carries Rhún within him. A Rhún which, in its middle centuries, nursed generations of anxieties about what men of the East must be, a set of unspoken tests each Easterling child must sit. You are not allowed to fail. Failure is but evidence of an older, inherited failure. To fail is to admit that ul had always belonged to your name, to come when called like a river, or a dog. How cruel we have become in these dark days of the sun. How strange it is to have lost what once made you human.
Oh, Uldor.
Had you seen yourself on that final morning?
Did you run your hands across the jagged scars on your face, your fiery mane of braids?
Did you see your father in your face?
What did he call you?
What did your father call you, Uldor?
Did that name sit lightly upon your shoulders? Did you go days and weeks forgetting it was there, until someone you loved sent it into the air and you turned, a smile hovering over your shoulders? Did you inherit the name from your father? Did you earn it in your youth? Did your mother take one look at your infant scowl and kiss the word gently into the damp new shell of your little pink ear? Does it break your heart to know what it has become? To know that it has become the only word standing, and to know that each year you answered to another must be walked again from the start, out of sequence and uncounted. To know that none of your life has happened for the first time.
How sharp is the cutlass you wield in the dark?
What did your mother call your father?
I write this history, training one eye to flit between fragments, tracing the birth and death of Uldor the Accursed. I am a man of presumed loyalty and bifurcated heart. Even to Uldor I cannot give my all. My other eye, always, is affixed upon my daughter in her cradle, crawling across the floor, asleep against my shoulder, growing with each day I leave this work unfinished. I start to fear. These days when she wakes, she neither knows nor cares about what it is I seek in these pages, unknowing of where in the world she will grow old and what it is her father fears will happen to her in this suffocating spiral of a city. Soon, she’ll find words and put them together. Then she will ask why her father’s name comes prefixed with ul, and sooner still, begin to carry it herself. The years will move and Uldor will not move with them, the girl will outgrow my lap before I can bring myself to explain what it is I have thrust upon her by bringing her to life. Why I raise her in Gondor, in the hopes of a future elsewhere.
What if it is the first word she says?
Ul? What if that is her first true utterance?
A simple syllable, easy enough to unfold from her tiny pink tongue.
She will hear it often enough, will she not? Here, in Minas Tirith.
Traitor, she will say, looking into my eyes.
Traitor, traitor, traitor.
All my life. All my years. All her years. All these years.
Traitor, traitor, traitor, she will say into mirrors.
No matter how many words I teach her. No matter how many seasons I spend trying to make her say anything else. The unsightly shadow of the beast, forever trapped behind her chapped, chubby cheeks.
You are not Uldor, and the day has come.
Beyond the standards, lit by the stars, one field, an army skewered from the back, Maedhros the Beautiful, your treachery scrawled across his face, the two of you scrambling knee-deep in broken promises, drunk with scarce offerings. Whiter than the tents that surround you, his remaining hand upon the map marking out lands, his lands, Fingon’s lands, Turgon’s lands, lands for the Haladin, lands for those of Hador, lands that might be blackened by the Foe. Cook-fires, spear-racks, swords sharpened for morning. You are crown-blind and full of promise, watching his brothers move through camp gold-lit and untouchable, certain that if you cut one of these fell creatures down, it would bleed blinding light instead of sticky blood. Aware of your own dust, your own smell of horse and sweat and leather, the ache in your knees from sword-stances, wondering what fault in your birth had located your rewards always just past the next campaign.
Banners cracking, horns calling formation, silence between horn-calls, men's swift turns before the enemy lines swallow them. Then nothing. All suddenly soundless, the shield-wall dividing like water round a blade, and the six thousand of you left standing in Ulfang's own skins, huddled like bears driven from dens mid-winter. A decision that had been forming for three unrewarded years surfacing now upon the field itself, away from the horns, away from a promise of land the Foe made your father, an oath you had never sworn yourself but was born into. The betrayal happens, faster than the charge could follow.
You fight.
You are the turning, the treachery, the blade screeching in the wrong direction, forgetting your vacant promise and forgotten in turn, folded down into a single syllable no one would trouble to unfold again. In the gap between one clash and the next, the whole shape of what you'd become, written into battle. On your knees now in the mud you'd been promised as your own, staring upwards, the dawn floating indifferently like oil on water. The hands, Maglor's, closing on your collar and on the hilt already through you, the strange lack of surprise in your own body at how simply it happened, how little ceremony a betrayal requires from the betrayed.
How silent a sword is when it splits the skin. It passes through flesh like a needle through butter, blood shoving its way onto the surface in bubbles, burning on your skin, soaking into the soil.
The poisoned lake, you think. The ground is poisoned, my lord.
The cattle are dying.
You writhe, your dark eyes glazing and slipping from Maglor’s gaze before holding it once more, suddenly focused. Your lips part.
“Your mother,” you strain through the blood in your teeth. “Your mother was a pox-ridden whore. As we speak, lord, she fucks dogs in Eldamar… hasten. I hear tell… she is considering… moving on to pigs.”
“What?”
“Leave me,” you choke. “Leave me, cur, and fly home. Lest you are landed with yet another divine piglet you must name brother.”
Maglor looks at you incredulously, your blood scattered across his cheek, and for a second he seems horrified and furious at once. Another second passes, this one in confusion, a hysterical, momentary desire to laugh, wondering: which brother was intended to be the extant divine piglet? Curufin? Caranthir? Surely not Maedhros! The third second: in another world, this bastard would find a kindred spirit in Tyelkormo. From tales brought home to you, you know that this elf loved his mother greatly, that he was alike to her in gentle, stubborn compassion. Your words let you see this in the flesh. His compassionate eyes fill with the gratefulness of a child. Imagine a child. A child who forgets himself and kicks the throat of his beloved dog. A child whose hair is stroked, its cheeks kissed, told that perhaps one day, that dog might have turned rabid, might have killed his little sister in his sleep.
You call his mother a whore, and so spare him an upheaval. You allow Maglor Fëanorian to survive, undisturbed, the killing of Uldor. You let him hear you cast angels into pigs, and let him breathe easier on the battlefield, for you know that his brother must have told him once, of how Ulfang had spoken of women in his presence. For you know that every person trusts their own bigotry to be instinct, and assumes that of their enemy to be innate. You allow Maglor Fëanorian to be brave today and sleep easy tomorrow. You allow his cups of wine to slide down his throat, unretched.
You do not truly think his mother is a whore. You had thought your crotchety old father crossed the line when he spoke of forest bitches, in truth you had given him an earful on your ride home that evening. You had scolded him just as Maedhros pleaded with his father on the cusp of Losgar, clicking your teeth in irritation, like any young son with such a stubbornly middle-aged father. You threatened to tell your mother. You had told your mother. Your mother refused to speak to your father for two full weeks.
Will you titter so if an elf lord calls me a horsefucking mare, you son of a packrat!?
It was in jest, woman! It was a heated moment, nothing more! Am I no longer allowed mirth, or must you tie me to your apron strings in the council hall as well!?
You can shove your jests where the sand sticks most!
Your brothers had found the whole thing very funny, and in truth, you had as well, almost as funny as the time with your aunt. Because it was rather funny. Because you did not wish to think about how your father’s rude, brash statement would, in the eyes of the Eldar, poison all of you into a race deserving of poisoned Thargelion. In the end, Ulfang the great Eastern lord had to once again hang his head in shame and grovel at the breakfast table, seasoning his apologies with muttered commentary on henpecked horselords being an ill omen for the end of days. You had laughed just as loud.
Even now, you are not yet Uldor the Accursed.
You are a man, who made a choice.
You are a man, who wishes for his final act of cruelty to be the guise for an act of mercy.
And so, you make another choice.
But Maglor does not know that. Nobody knows that.
Voices everywhere, shouting one confusion into a larger confusion. Your blood sings in your ears, louder than any call to arms had ever sounded, the field spinning white then red then nothing, and above it, further off than you can turn your head to see, Fingon, Fingon, whom you do not know, whom you have never seen, Fingon, blue, silver, gold, staring, falling, the banner of the House of Fingolfin folding down into the same mud that was taking you, both of you ending in the same dirt on the same afternoon. You are two men with betrayed fathers. The light is fading, and you can no longer tell which one of you the day will mourn. His cloak glints gold even now. The mountains edging the dirt do not move.
Your name leaves your body before your body finishes dying, stolen by surviving scribes. Ul- settles over the whole of you like soil over a discarded flag, indifferent to the shape of your life.
You are Uldor, and the night has come.
Your story ends here.
But how can a story be truly finished, when so much of it was never written?
The answer to this lies not in the archive alone, but also in those running through its halls seeking for other answers and running past these names, briefly grieving the gaps. Uldor’s name is a prefix because a prefix is all that is required to close the file of a man like him; enough radiance elsewhere to satisfy a reader of his villainy, not enough to go on to trouble anyone into asking whether the son wanted what the father intended. Whether Uldor had been a father too. And what oath he was keeping when he broke the one which mattered most to Maedhros. How is it that we, so fluent in resurrecting drowned kingdoms from a single fragment, so rarely trouble to point out the silence around a bygone verdict? Why does our endless appetite for answers and our inexorable curiosity lead us to salvage some ruins yet leave others as mausoleums? To be preserved untouched evermore.
Whose ghost is it we fear?
The answers aren’t gone. As we have established, a properly-disturbed history throws up body after body like Helevorn after the Bragollach, turns from tidy rows into scattered jungles of half-legible grudges and unrecorded debts, tax rolls that don't match treaties, boundary walls that read more like grievance than geography, and here and there, unexpectedly, a line about grain shared freely in a terrible winter, or sons who stayed to bury the enemy dead. A boy and three wolves in the jungle. A root network of contradictory tales, into which Ul sinks and drowns, never to be heard from again.
Forgive me my preoccupation with opacity. But I find it so awful how deliberately people can arrange never to be curious about one another and just... live like that, and I think the arrangement costs more than the curiosity ever would have. I picture some scribe at an elven court, a year after the Nirnaeth, drawing up the boundaries of what could safely be written about it all. There’s ink on his chin and his fingers are chapped. He’s not malicious in the slightest, but he is a creature of instinct. It is war, and the history of war must be made easy. It is easier to leave the betrayal standing alone than to ask what comes after and what came before. Easier to preserve a prefix than a person. I don’t think it’s hatred that drives him. I think he just knew, when putting pen to paper, what version of Uldor his people wanted to carry forth, and why. Which is much sadder, I think, than hatred. It is sad to think about just how much it would have taken from these gentle scribes, to keep a people at sword’s length for all these years, six thousand years, lifetime upon lifetime.
How much less would it have cost to just write down his name?
I cannot undo the tragedy within the archive, and I cannot pretend that people spent years upon years looking for Uldor. I can only refuse to let my own looking stop where theirs did. I can take the responsibility the chroniclers declined. I can record the unrecorded until it becomes, at least in this one late reading, recorded anyway. I too am answerable for how much further the gaze goes.
For whether it stops again at the prefix, or keeps walking past it, into the man. Into Uldor, who is a man and not a beast, whose human need to be understood will outlast every refusal of the same. Which is the saddest thing of them all, the worst thing, the most shameful of things. How Uldor waits beneath the dirt. He sits with stones up his nose and mud packed into his ears, hoping that someone someday will go trudging once more through that mire into which Fingon was trod and where Maedhros was betrayed and Turgon was crowned by the sun, that this time, it will be he whom they seek. And they will walk back with him, if even in chains, and see at last from whence he came.