Nimrodel

The maiden of the stream

Nimrodel lived in the north of Lothlórien beside the clear stream that ran down from the Misty Mountains to join the Silverlode, and the stream took her name. She was of the old wood-folk, the Silvan Elves, and she lived apart even from her own people, in a house among the falls, cherishing the old life of Lórien before kings and strangers came to it. The Galadhrim held the water of her stream to be healing and to take away weariness, and the Fellowship of the Ring found this so.

Amroth

Amroth, King of Lórien, loved her, and she loved him; but she would not marry him, for she laid the wars and the shadow of the Third Age at the door of the Sindar and the Noldor who had come among the wood-elves and drawn them into the affairs of the wide world. She spoke the Silvan tongue and would not learn another. Amroth wooed her for many years without success, and the two remained as they were until the mountains changed everything.

The flight and the loss

In T.A. 1980 the Dwarves of Moria woke Durin's Bane, and in the following year fear drove many of the Elves of Lórien to flee south. Nimrodel went with them, and Amroth came after her. When he found her she agreed to be his if he would bring her to a land where there was peace, and they set out together for the Elven haven in Belfalas from which the last ships were sailing West. In the White Mountains Nimrodel and her companions lost their way; she is said to have lain down to sleep beside a stream and, waking, to have found the others gone. She never reached the haven, and Amroth, waiting for her on the ship, was drowned when a storm drove it out to sea. Unfinished Tales records a tradition among the Silvan Elves that Nimrodel's maiden Mithrellas was found by a lord of the Númenóreans of Belfalas and became the ancestress of the Princes of Dol Amroth, but of Nimrodel herself nothing more was ever known.

Legacy

Nimrodel's story survived in the song of the Galadhrim, which Legolas sang in the Common Tongue to the Company beside her stream on the night they entered Lórien. It is a lament for a lost land and a lost lady, and it set the mood in which the Fellowship first heard the sea in the wind of the wood. Her name lived on in the stream, in the cape and the bay of Belfalas where Amroth waited, and in a spring on the road up to Dol Amroth said to have been hers.

Lost in the White Mountains in T.A. 1981 on the way to the haven in Belfalas; never seen again.