Finduilas
the daughter of Orodreth; the princess who loved Túrin
Name and Lineage
Finduilas — the daughter of King Orodreth of Nargothrond — was, in the grief of the age, the fairest of the Noldor’s women of the West: “the golden” — she was — the Quenta calls her — a princess of the hidden realm, beloved of the broken lord Gwindor.
The Love That Could Not Be
When
Túrin (as the Black Sword, Agarwaen) came to Nargothrond, Finduilas’ heart was drawn to the mortal warrior — the love triangle fate: Gwindor (her betrothed) broken and old; Túrin (the new fire) whom she loved; and the warnings that Túrin, unwilling and cursed, could not accept the gift.
- The doom-work: In grief and tangled loyalties, Túrin’s ears were closed (he fled her affection), and the tragedy’s chain — Gwindor’s death, the dragon, the ruin — runs through the unfulfilled love of Finduilas and the!Túrin who would not love where he was cursed.
The Death and the Memory
When Nargothrond fell and the people were led captive, Finduilas (with the other women — she was taken among the captives of the Orcs toward Angband) was slain in the woods at the crossing of the Teiglin (the pass of the Haudh-en-Elleth — the mound of the elf-maid where the orcs pierced her); her tomb became the Haudh-en-Elleth, “en”, by the river. Túrin, hearing of the death and of her last word of love, was driven toward the last stages of his ruin — she is among the mythology’s evocative mourned women.
Significance
Finduilas is the princess of the sorrowful love — the woman of the tale whose love was both a promise and a doom, who dies undeclared, and whose memory (with her mound by the Teiglin) marks the turn of Túrin’s fate toward the final horror.