Nienor

Lineage and childhood

Nienor was born in Dor-lómin in the winter of F.A. 473, the third child of Húrin and Morwen. Her father had gone to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad the previous summer and never returned, and her brother Túrin had been sent to Doriath that autumn, so that she grew up knowing neither. Her name means Mourning. She was tall and golden-haired like the House of Hador, and she grew up in a hall that had lost everything, under the rule of the Easterlings who feared her mother but oppressed everyone else.

Doriath

In F.A. 494 Morwen at last took her to Doriath, where Thingol and Melian received them and where Nienor learned that her brother had left the kingdom ten years before and become a captain of Nargothrond. When Nargothrond fell in 495 and word came that its Black Sword had been Túrin, Morwen resolved to seek him. Thingol forbade Nienor to go, and Morwen too, but Morwen rode out regardless, and Nienor disguised herself as one of the riders in the escort that Mablung led after her mother, revealing herself only when it was too late to send her back.

Glaurung

The company reached the hill of Amon Ethir above the ruined city, and there Glaurung came out of the Narog and laid a mist over the land. The horses bolted and the company scattered. Nienor was thrown and climbed the hill alone, and at its top she found the dragon waiting. He held her with his eyes, learned who she was, and laid a spell of darkness and forgetting on her so complete that she did not know her own name. Mablung found her standing there empty-eyed and led her toward Doriath, but on the way Orcs attacked and she fled in terror, faster than any could follow, tearing off her clothes as she ran, until she fell exhausted on the mound of Finduilas at the Crossings of Teiglin.

Níniel

The woodmen of Brethil found her there and Túrin, who was living among them as Turambar, carried her to their settlement. She could not speak and remembered nothing. He named her Níniel, Maid of Tears, because she wept at the ravine of Cabed-en-Aras as they passed it, and she learned speech again like a child. Brandir, the lord of Brethil, healed her of a fever and loved her, but she had loved Túrin from the moment she opened her eyes on him, and Brandir's warnings could not turn her. In F.A. 498 she and Túrin were married, and by the next spring she was with child.

The truth

When Glaurung came against Brethil in 499 Níniel could not bear to wait behind, and she followed Túrin to Cabed-en-Aras with Brandir limping after her. She found the dragon dead and Túrin lying beside it as if dead, with his hand burned by the dragon's blood. As she wept over him Glaurung opened his eyes for the last time and spoke to her, naming her Nienor daughter of Húrin, telling her that the man she had married and whose child she carried was her brother, and then died. Her memory returned all at once. She ran to the edge of the ravine and cast herself into the Teiglin, and the river took her; her body was never found.

Legacy

The place where she died was renamed Cabed Naeramarth, the Leap of Dreadful Doom, and her name was carved on the stone over Túrin's grave beside his. Nienor is the most innocent victim of the curse of Morgoth on Húrin's house: she made no choice that led to her fate, and her one act of will, following her mother, delivered her to the dragon. Morwen's last question to Húrin, how Nienor had found her brother, was the one thing he could not answer.

Threw herself into the Teiglin at Cabed-en-Aras in F.A. 499 after Glaurung revealed that her husband was her brother; her body was never recovered.