[Morthoron]

AND SO THE TALE BEGINS...

His mother had never named him; she died of grief at his birth. His grandfather, who was to die shortly afterward in one of the terrible sacks of Menegroth, had been either clever or cruel, for he named the newborn orphan Amarthanuin. Now, depending on one’s translation of Sindarin, the name could mean ‘under a doom’; however, Amarthanuin had considered his name over the dreary ages, and came to the unsettling conclusion that this epithet meant ‘doomed to be under’, or perhaps more aptly, ‘fated to be less’.

“And that I am,” Amarthanuin sighed aloud (to no one in particular), “that I am.”

Whether from melancholy or an attempt to recede further into the shadows, he slumped in his chair in the corner of the Prancing Pony – a tawdry establishment no self-respecting Elf would ever frequent – and sipped thoughtfully on his tankard of ale. He supposed it really did not matter that he hid from inquiring eyes, for it was unlikely anyone would mistake him for an Elf, save perhaps for his leaf-shaped ears, which he kept concealed beneath his travel-stained hood. No, he certainly had no other earmarks of his maternal lineage; rather, he bore much that was from his cursed father, unknown and unlamented, dead now these two ages of Arda.

Amarthanuin wondered if his father had been trampled under the powerful, plodding steps of the Onodrim on the bloody shores of the River Ascar, or perhaps it was Beren himself who slew him in righteous vengeance for the murder of innocent Elves in Doriath. Amarthanuin chuckled ruefully to himself. Not all the innocents were slain in the name of the Nauglamir; some lived on, and carried the shame with them, wearing it in their very countenances like a badge of dishonor for all to see. Amarthanuin was a living symbol of the ignominious fall of Doriath: Amarthanuin the Noegedhil, Amarthanuin who was neither wholly Elvish nor wholly Dwarvish, Amarthanuin whose two halves did not make a whole. He belched and became even more upset at himself. Elves do not belch, Dwarves do!