Thangorodrim

The three peaks

Thangorodrim was not a mountain in the way that mountains are made. It was the heaped refuse of Morgoth's tunnelling, piled above the gates of Angband when he came back from Aman with the Silmarils and delved the fortress anew and vastly deeper than before. Out of that spoil he raised three great peaks, the highest thing in the Iron Mountains and among the highest in the north of the world, and hollowed them into vents so that the fires, fumes and ash of the forges below were driven out of their tops. They stood together above the Gate, black and streaked and always smoking, and the sight of them was the plainest statement Morgoth ever made about what he was and what he intended.

The smoke was constant. In the years of the Siege it hung as a stain across the northern sky above Ard-galen, and the Elves of the leaguer watched it as a man watches weather. When Morgoth was preparing something the smokes grew heavier; on the day of the Dagor Bragollach they poured out ahead of the rivers of fire that came down over the plain and burned the grass of Ard-galen away for ever, so that the land was renamed Anfauglith, the gasping dust. Nothing grew within sight of the peaks.

Beneath and within

Angband lay under and behind the three peaks: pits, armouries, breeding-chambers and the great throne-hall, with the Gate opening south at the mountain's foot. The whole complex was designed to be approached only across open ground under the eyes of the towers, which is why the assault on it succeeded only once, when Fingolfin rode alone to the Gate in despair after the Bragollach and struck it so that the sound went down into the deeps, and Morgoth, shamed before his own captains into coming out, fought him and killed him at the seventh wound. Thorondor came down from the peaks, marred Morgoth's face, and carried the body away to a mountain-top above the hidden vale of Gondolin. Morgoth limped from that fight afterwards and never left Angband again himself.

Maedhros on the precipice

Early in the First Age Morgoth offered a parley to the sons of Fëanor and both sides came with more force than they had agreed. Morgoth's was the greater treachery: Maedhros was taken alive, his companions killed, and he was hung from a sheer face of Thangorodrim by an iron band about his right wrist, high above the ground, where Morgoth intended him to stay while his brothers watched and did nothing. They did nothing, judging any attempt hopeless. Fingon, the son of Fingolfin and Maedhros's friend from Valinor before the quarrel of their houses, went alone into the north, climbed among the black slopes and found him by singing until he heard an answer. He could not reach the band, and at Maedhros's own asking he set an arrow to kill him; then Thorondor came at Manwë's sending and bore Fingon up to the cliff, and Fingon cut off the hand at the wrist and both were carried away. That rescue on the face of Thangorodrim did more than save one prisoner: it healed, so far as anything could, the feud between the houses of Fingolfin and Fëanor, and made possible the Siege of Angband and everything the Noldor achieved in the four centuries that followed.

The Siege and the breaking of it

For almost four hundred years the peaks were the thing the Noldor watched. The leaguer never closed the northern side and never seriously threatened to take the fortress, but nothing came out of the Gate that was not caught, and Morgoth's answer, when it came, came from under the mountains rather than through them: fire, Glaurung full-grown, and the Balrogs, in the winter of F.A. 455.

Húrin's chair

After the Nirnaeth Arnoediad in F.A. 472, Húrin was brought before Morgoth alive, the only prisoner he ever wanted more than a victory. Húrin would not tell him where Gondolin lay and would not be broken by anything offered or threatened. So Morgoth cursed his family, set him in a stone chair on a high place of Thangorodrim, and bound him there with a spell so that he could not move or die or age, and gave him Morgoth's own sight, so that he watched the working of the curse on Morwen, Túrin and Nienor year by year for twenty-eight years, seeing it as Morgoth chose to show it. When he was released in F.A. 500 he was a broken man carrying his enemy's version of his own life, and much of what he did afterwards, at Nargothrond and at Menegroth, served Morgoth's purpose rather than his own.

The end of the peaks

In the War of Wrath the host of the Valar broke the armies of Angband and had all but won when Morgoth loosed his last weapon, the winged dragons, which had never been seen before and which drove the host back for a while by sheer terror. Eärendil, in the ship Vingilot with the Silmaril on his brow, and Thorondor with the great birds of the sky, fought them for a day and a night, and Eärendil killed Ancalagon the Black, their captain and the mightiest of the winged dragons. Ancalagon fell out of the air onto the three peaks and broke them in his ruin. With the towers down, the pits of Angband were laid open, the host came in and the prisoners were freed, Morgoth was taken and bound, and the last two Silmarils were cut from his crown. What was left of Thangorodrim went under the sea with the north of Beleriand when the land was broken, and by the Second Age nothing of it stood above water at all. Its name survived only as a measure of ruin.

Thangorodrim stood at the western end of the Ered Engrin, the Iron Mountains, directly above the Gate of Angband and facing south across the plain of Ard-galen toward Dorthonion and the passes into Beleriand. The Elves of Hithlum could see its smokes from the walls of the Ered Wethrin, and the whole line of the Siege was drawn with reference to it. West of it the Iron Mountains ran toward the sea above Lammoth and the firth of Drengist; east of it they curved away toward the unmapped north. Every assault on Morgoth in the First Age, and every flight from him, was measured against the three peaks.