Carcharoth

Bred for a purpose

Carcharoth was not born great; he was made so. After Huan broke the power of Sauron at Tol Sirion in F.A. 465, word of the hound's doom reached Angband: Huan could not die until he met the mightiest wolf that would ever walk the world. Morgoth resolved to be the maker of that wolf. He chose a whelp of the brood of Draugluin, the sire of all werewolves, and reared it himself, feeding it on the living flesh of Elves and Men and pouring into it a measure of his own power. The creature grew until it filled the gateway of the fortress, and the fire of its hunger never went out. The Elves called him Carcharoth, the Red Maw, and also Anfauglir, the Jaws of Thirst, because no feeding could satisfy him.

Morgoth had a second reason for wanting a warden. Since the fall of Tol Sirion he had grown suspicious of the roads to his gate, and he wanted a guard that would not sleep. Carcharoth was set in the archway beneath Thangorodrim, and there he lay, day and night, watching everything that came and went.

The gate of Angband

In the winter of F.A. 466 Beren and Lúthien came up the road to Angband in disguise, he in the pelt of Draugluin and she in the bat-fell of Thuringwethil. Carcharoth was not deceived by the wolf-hide. He had heard that Draugluin was dead, and he rose to bar their way and question the shape that walked toward him. Lúthien threw off her disguise and commanded him to sleep, naming the terrible things that were coming, and the power in her voice was greater than anything Morgoth had put into him. The wolf fell as if struck down and the two passed over him into the halls beneath.

When they came out again, Beren carrying a Silmaril cut from Morgoth's crown, Carcharoth had woken. He stood in the gate, and Lúthien, spent from her enchantment of Morgoth, could not cast him down a second time. Beren held out the jewel in his right hand, thinking its holy light might drive the beast back. It did not. Carcharoth bit off the hand at the wrist and swallowed it with the Silmaril inside.

The burning

No unhallowed flesh could bear the touch of a Silmaril. The jewel began to burn inside the wolf from the moment he swallowed it, and the pain drove him mad. He ran howling from the gate, and every living thing in the northern lands fled from him. He tore southward through the wilds, killing whatever he found, and became in that season the most dreaded creature that had ever entered Beleriand, more terrible than any of Morgoth's captains. The Great Eagles under Thorondor carried Beren and Lúthien away from the gate meanwhile, and so the wolf and his victims went their separate ways for a time.

At last his course brought him to Doriath. The Girdle of Melian turned away every servant of the Enemy, but Carcharoth carried within him a thing that was holy, and the doom that had been set upon the jewel was stronger than the fence around the kingdom. He broke into the forests from the north, and the fear of him emptied the woods.

The Hunt of the Wolf

Beren had returned to Doriath and told Thingol that a Silmaril was even then in his hand, though not the hand upon his arm. When news came that the wolf was ravaging the northern march, Thingol called a hunt, and it is remembered as the greatest hunt of beasts in the old tales. The hunters were Thingol, Beren, Mablung, Beleg and Huan. They found Carcharoth at a fall of the river Esgalduin, where he had come to drink and ease the fire in his belly. He sprang out of the thicket at Thingol; Beren threw himself in front of the king and took the wolf's jaws in his breast. Huan leapt on Carcharoth, and the two greatest of their kinds fought under the trees until the wolf lay dead. But the venom of Morgoth was in his teeth, and Huan died of his wounds at Beren's side.

Mablung opened the wolf's body and found Beren's hand still closed about the Silmaril, unconsumed; when the jewel was taken from it the hand fell to dust. Beren was borne back to Menegroth and died there, having laid the jewel in Thingol's hand and fulfilled his quest.

Significance

Carcharoth was the instrument of two dooms. He was bred to kill Huan, and he did; he was set to guard the Silmaril, and by swallowing it he carried it, in the end, into Doriath, where Morgoth could never have reached it. The jewel he could not keep passed to Thingol, then to Dior, to Elwing, and at last to Eärendil, to become the Star that guided the West to war.

Slain by Huan at the falls of Esgalduin in Doriath, F.A. 466, after mortally wounding Beren; the Silmaril was cut from his body by Mablung.