Tarn Aeluin

The lake in the pines

Tarn Aeluin lay in the eastern uplands of Dorthonion, a wide blue lake among heather and bare rock at the edge of the pine-forest, with wild moorland stretching around it. The waters were clear and cold and held sacred; the Elves said that Melian herself had blessed them in the days before the Sun. The country about it was hard and remote, and few paths led to it.

After the Dagor Bragollach, when the House of Bëor was broken and the highland became Taur-nu-Fuin, Barahir refused to leave his own country. With twelve companions, among them his son Beren and the sons of Bregolas, he made his hiding-place on the shore of Aeluin and from there harried the orcs for years. Sauron, commanding in the north, set himself to destroy them. One of the outlaws, Gorlim, returning secretly to his ruined house, was shown a phantom of his wife and captured; Sauron promised to reunite them if he told where Barahir lay, and when Gorlim had spoken he was killed. Orcs surrounded the camp by the lake at dawn and slew Barahir and his men. Beren, away on an errand, was warned by the ghost of Gorlim in a dream and came back too late; he buried his father beneath a cairn of stones, then tracked the orcs and recovered the ring of Felagund from the hand of Barahir they had cut off as proof.

The lake was left to the dark after that. Its name lived on chiefly in the song of Beren and Lúthien and in the memory of the ring that passed from Barahir to the kings of Númenor and the heirs of Isildur.