Daeron

Minstrel of Menegroth

Daeron was a Grey-elf of Doriath and the chief minstrel and loremaster of King Thingol. The Sindar counted him the greatest musician who ever lived east of the Sea, greater even than Maglor son of Fëanor, and in Menegroth he played while Lúthien danced, the two arts answering each other in the halls of the Thousand Caves. He was also a scholar, and it was Daeron who devised the Cirth, the angular runes suited for carving. The Dwarves of Belegost and Nogrod took to his alphabet eagerly, and through them it spread east and north until, long after, it was the script of Moria, of the Men of Dale and of the Dwarves' tomb-inscriptions. Thingol's people used it far less than the Dwarves did.

Lúthien and Beren

Daeron loved Lúthien, and she did not love him in return. When the mortal Beren came into Doriath and Lúthien gave him her heart, Daeron discovered them and told the king. It was his word that brought Beren before Thingol and led to the demand of a Silmaril. Later, when Lúthien learned that Beren was a prisoner of Sauron and asked Daeron for help in leaving Doriath, he betrayed her a second time, and Thingol shut her in the tree-house in Hírilorn. Both betrayals were done out of love and jealousy rather than malice, and the Silmarillion is careful to say so; but they set Lúthien on the road that ended in her mortality.

Wandering and disappearance

When Lúthien vanished from Doriath, Daeron went out to look for her and did not come back. He crossed the mountains into the East of Middle-earth and there, by dark waters, he made the songs of his grief for Lúthien, daughter of Thingol, which the Elves held to be the fairest laments ever composed. What became of him afterwards no tale tells. His fate stands beside that of Maglor as one of the two great singers of the First Age who ended in wandering and loss.

Left Doriath searching for Lúthien, wandered into the East of Middle-earth, and was lost; no account tells of his death.