Elenwë
the lady of the Teleri who came over the ice
Name and Lineage
Elenwë — the Telerin wife of Turgon and mother of the queen of Gondolin’s other line — of his daughter Idril. She was of the Teleri (the Sea-elves’ kindred), so Turgon’s house gained the Telerin blood and the swan-love that later bore the ship of Eärendil — she was “beautiful and graceful, and the light of the sea was in her eyes”.
The crossing of the Helcaraxë
When the Noldor were left far north by Fëanor’s burning of the ships, and the house of Fingolfin chose the terrible way across the Helcaraxë — the Grinding Ice — Elenwë, with the Telerin gentleness unhardened to the northern cold, perished on the passage: she fell into the ice of the frozen seas and drowned; Turgon, who loved her, was “inconsolable”. The Quenta says of the crossing that “in that evil way some perished… and Elenwë, the wife of Turgon, was lost, and he grieved for her ever after”.
Significance
Elenwë’s death is one of the small, sharp costs of the Exile that the histories record among the great: hers is the great personal grief behind Gondolin’s king — the reason Turgon “went ever as one from whose house the light had gone” — and her loss is the seed of the cloud that later falls on Idril, and thereby on the whole tale of Gondolin and Eärendil. She is also the link through which the Sea-elves’ blessing enters the line of the Half-elven.