Formenos

The stronghold of exile

When the Valar judged Fëanor at Máhanaxar for drawing a sword on his half-brother Fingolfin on the stairs of Tirion, the sentence was banishment from the city for twelve years. Mandos named the deed for what it was, the first shadow of the strife that Melkor's lies had been growing among the Noldor for years, and Fëanor accepted the judgment without repenting of the quarrel behind it. He went north with his seven sons, among them Maedhros, Maglor, Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin and Amrod and Amras, and in the hills of the north of Valinor they built a fortified house with strong walls and a treasury.

Formenos was the first fortress ever raised in the Blessed Realm, and that fact was itself the news. Aman had never needed a guarded door; nothing in it had ever had to be defended from anything. Now there were walls, and a garrison of a sort, and a store of weapons, for Fëanor and his sons had been the first of the Noldor to make swords and had not stopped making them. In the treasury Fëanor gathered the jewels he had made, and above all the three Silmarils, which he shut in a chamber of iron and brought out less and less often, growing jealous of them even toward his own kin.

Finwë's choice

Finwë, High King of the Noldor, would not be king in Tirion while his eldest son was in exile. He left the city and came north to Formenos to live with Fëanor, and the rule of the Noldor in Tirion passed for the twelve years to Fingolfin. It was a division of the people in fact if not in name: two courts, two allegiances, and a growing habit on both sides of thinking of the other half as a rival. The Valar let the sentence run and did not intervene.

The household at Formenos was not a happy one. Nerdanel, Fëanor's wife, who had for years been the one person able to soften his moods, would not go north with him, and the estrangement between them was never healed; she stayed with her father's people, and only the youngest of their sons kept close to her afterwards. Fëanor's sons went with him and shared his temper, and the years of exile hardened all of them.

Melkor at the door

Melkor, released from his long imprisonment and then fleeing the Valar's judgment, came to Formenos before he went into hiding. He spoke to Fëanor as a fellow-victim of the Valar's jealousy, warning him that Fingolfin meant to take his place and offering help and strength for a flight into the wide lands beyond the mountains. Much of it Fëanor was more than half inclined to believe, for it was only what he had been saying himself. But Melkor could not keep the Silmarils out of his speech, and at that Fëanor's mind cleared: he saw that the jewels were what the visitor had come for, and he cursed Melkor and shut the door in his face. Fëanor reported the visit, but Melkor was gone, south through the empty land to Avathar and Ungoliant, and the Valar had no word of where he was again until the Trees died.

The night of the Darkening

At the appointed time of the festival on Taniquetil, Manwë called Fëanor to come and be reconciled with his brother, and Fëanor came, though unwillingly and alone of all his house; his sons stayed at Formenos, and Finwë would not go to any feast that his son attended under sentence. The Silmarils were left behind in the iron chamber, for Fëanor had refused to bring them out. So the fortress was full and the plain of the Trees was empty of its keenest eyes when Melkor and Ungoliant came over the Pelóri and destroyed the Two Trees on the green mound of Ezellohar, and darkness that was not merely the absence of light spread out over Valinor.

Under cover of Ungoliant's unlight the two went straight north to Formenos. The sons of Fëanor were away or scattered; Finwë alone did not flee. He stood in the door against Melkor and was killed there, and the Noldor learned for the first time what it was to have one of their own struck down by violence in Aman. Melkor broke into the treasury, took the Silmarils and every other jewel that was in it, and Ungoliant devoured the lesser gems while he held the three. The Silmarils burned his hand as he closed it on them, and the pain never afterwards left him, but he would not let them go. Then the two fled north through the empty land and over the grinding ice of the Helcaraxë into Middle-earth.

The consequences

Word came to the Valar as they sat in the dark on the Ring of Doom, and it came at the worst possible moment: Yavanna had just asked Fëanor to give up the Silmarils so that the Trees might be rekindled from their light, and he had, after a long silence, refused. Then messengers arrived to say that Finwë was dead and the jewels already gone. Fëanor ran from the Ring of Doom, naming Melkor with a new name, Morgoth, the Black Foe, which was the only name the Noldor used for him afterwards. He went to Tirion, called the Noldor together against the Valar's ban, and there swore with his seven sons the oath that no one could keep and no one could be released from: to pursue with hatred anyone, of any kindred, who kept a Silmaril from them.

Everything that followed came out of that night at Formenos. The Flight of the Noldor, the burning of the ships at Losgar, the Kinslaying at Alqualondë, the wars of Beleriand, the two sacks of Menegroth and the raid on the Mouths of Sirion were all consequences of the oath, and the oath was sworn for a father killed at a fortress door. The fortress itself was simply left. When the host of the Noldor marched out of Aman, Formenos was abandoned with everything else they could not carry, and it is not mentioned again in the histories of Valinor.

Formenos lay in the hills of the north of Valinor, well away from Valmar and Tirion and off the roads of the Eldar, on the way toward the cold empty country under the northern Pelóri and the passes into Araman. It was near enough the plain of the Trees that Melkor, coming from Ezellohar under Ungoliant's cloud, reached it in a single night, and far enough that no one in Tirion or Valmar had any sight of what happened there. Its northward position also put it on the road the Noldor themselves later took out of Aman.