Nienna
the Mourner; Lady of Mercy and Sorrow
Nienna the Mourner
Names and Title
Nienna — “the Mourner”; the Lady of Pity and Sorrow, sister of Námo (Mandos) and Irmo (Lórien). She is the youngest of that threefold kin of the Valar who touch the sorrows of the world.
Dominion and Character
Of her the Valaquenta says: "Nienna… her name is of mourning.
For her eyes are tears… Nienna it is who brings pity into the heart of the world, and she is the constant companion of the grief of the Children." She dwells in the far west of Valinor, “beyond the mountain”, in halls of grey where “the rain falls in silver tears, and the wind blows over the sea”. She “weeps in the darkness of the world, and her tears descend as rain and quench the fires of the earth”. Her teaching is the doctrine of the value of pity: “she who tearfully endured, and mourns still, the marring of Arda” — “and only in the endurance of sorrow is strength”. She did not wait for others to mend the world; “she also, in her grief, had great power of healing” — she taught Olórin (Gandalf): “and she it was who planted the seeds of pity in the heart of the world, and in the heart of Olórin” (the germ of the mercy that later shapes the whole history of the Third Age). When the Two Trees were slain she forsook her veils and washed the hurt roots with her tears; and her weeping is the root of the counsel that the Valar gave. When the Doom of the Noldor fell, it was Nienna who “went down to the gates of Mandos” and, in the Quenta, wept with the exiles. Her sadness is not despair but purification: “sorrow counsels the wiser course” and the legends link her with both the endurance of the good through the Long Defeat and the eventual healing of Arda. In the Morgoth’s Ring essay “The Earliest Philosophy” she is spoken of as the Vala of “the penance and the purging of remorse” — the love that will not let the marring have the final word.
In the Texts
A late addition of subtle power; in the earliest Lost Tales she appears struggling with Mandos for the fate of the Men of the North. She is one of the three Valier (with Estë and Vairë) who never enter the main narrative but whose names shape its morality. Many readers count her brief paragraph in the Valaquenta among the most moving in the book.