Tol Sirion

The watch-tower of the pass

Tol Sirion was a green island standing in the river Sirion where it ran through the narrow gap between the Ered Wethrin on the west and the western spurs of Dorthonion on the east. That gap was the Pass of Sirion, and it was the gate of Beleriand: an army coming south from Angband that would not climb the pine-highland or force the western mountains had to come down the vale, and the island sat squarely in the middle of it. The river divided about the isle and ran fast on either side.

After the Dagor Aglareb, when the Noldor set their leaguer around the north, Finrod Felagund built a strong tower on the island and called it Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard. It was not a city but a garrison, manned by Noldor of his following, and while it stood no orc-company came down the vale unfought. When Finrod finished Nargothrond and removed his seat there, he left the tower in the keeping of his brother Orodreth, and for more than three hundred years the island was the northern outpost of the western Noldor and a place of no particular story.

The taking of the isle

The Dagor Bragollach changed that. Two years after the fires, in F.A. 457, Sauron, the greatest of Morgoth's servants and the commander of his western thrust, came down the vale with a great force. Orodreth was driven out and fled to Nargothrond with the survivors. Sauron did not merely garrison the tower; he took it as his own seat, filled it with werewolves and with things that had no shape at all, and laid over the whole pass and the vale around it a horror that no one could enter and keep his own mind. The island was renamed Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves, and it was the darkest place in Beleriand outside Angband itself. From it Sauron watched the vale, kept the road open for Morgoth's armies, and hunted the last free Men of the north.

Gorlim

It was to Tol-in-Gaurhoth that Gorlim was brought. He was one of the twelve outlaws who held out with Barahir in ruined Dorthonion, and he had been drawn back again and again to his own empty house by the hope that his wife Eilinel was alive. Sauron's servants used that hope as a snare, took him, and brought him to the island, where Sauron offered him Eilinel in exchange for the outlaws' hiding-place. Gorlim, worn down, made the bargain and told him of the camp at Tarn Aeluin. Sauron then told him that Eilinel had been dead for years, and had him killed. Barahir and all his men but Beren were destroyed the same night.

Beren and Finrod

Seven years later Beren came to Nargothrond with the ring Finrod had given his father and asked for help in an errand that Finrod knew was hopeless. Finrod held the Noldor to the debt, gave up his crown when the sons of Fëanor turned his people against him, and left with Beren and ten who would still follow. They took orc-gear and orc-shapes from a company they ambushed, and came down the vale disguised. Sauron watched them from his tower, thought their manner wrong, and had them brought before him. There followed a contest of song between Sauron and Finrod, power against power in words, until Finrod's strength failed at the memory of the Kinslaying at Alqualondë and the disguises fell away. Sauron still did not know who they were or what they wanted, so he threw them into a pit in the dark to find out.

He sent a wolf to the pit and it killed one of them, and then another, night by night, and none of them spoke. At last only Beren and Finrod were left, and when the wolf came for Beren, Finrod broke the chains that held him, killed the beast with his hands and his teeth, and died of his wounds in the dark. He had told Beren, before it happened, that he would not return from this errand, and the vow of the debt was kept to the letter.

The overthrow

Lúthien came to the island with Huan, the hound of Valinor, having escaped both her father's guard and the captivity of Celegorm and Curufin at Nargothrond. She stood on the bridge and sang, and Beren answered from below, and Sauron, who knew who she was and what a prize she would be, sent out his wolves one at a time to take her. Huan killed every one of them, including Draugluin, the sire of all werewolves, who crawled back to Sauron's feet to die and named the hound before he did. Then Sauron came himself in the greatest wolf-shape he could make, and it was foretold of Huan that he would not fall before any wolf but one, and this was not that one. Huan bore him down and held him, and Sauron shifted from shape to shape and could not get free. Lúthien gave him the choice of surrendering the mastery of the tower or being stripped of his body and sent naked back to Morgoth to answer for the loss, and he yielded the tower and fled in the form of a vampire to Taur-nu-Fuin.

Lúthien broke the spells that held the stones. The tower fell, the pits were opened, and the prisoners came stumbling out into the daylight, many of them people whose disappearance had never been explained. Beren was found sitting in the dark beside Finrod's body. They buried the King of Nargothrond on the crown of his own island under a green mound, and the Elves said that the grass there stayed green and clean while everything around it lay under shadow, and that no evil thing set foot on the isle again while the world lasted. Orodreth pulled down what remained of the works.

Afterwards

Tol Sirion was never re-garrisoned. The pass stayed open, and Morgoth's armies used it freely in the years that followed, coming down to the Crossings of Teiglin and the fords of Sirion. The island went under the sea with the rest of Beleriand at the end of the Age, and Finrod's mound with it; but by then Finrod himself had been released from the Halls of Mandos and was said to walk in Valinor with his father Finarfin, the only one of the exiled Noldor lords of whom that is recorded.

Tol Sirion lay in the upper course of the Sirion, some way below the springs of the river at Eithel Sirion and above the Fens of Serech, in the pass between the Ered Wethrin and the western arm of Dorthonion. North of the pass the vale opened toward Ard-galen and Angband; south of it the river ran on past the eaves of Brethil toward the fords and the Twilight Meres. Gondolin, hidden in the Echoriath, lay a short way south-west of the island, though no one at the tower knew it. The road down the vale from the isle was the main highway between the north and the heart of Beleriand.