Aragorn often used the sword to help establish his credentials. He carried the sword during his journey south as one of the Fellowship of the Ring, and it featured prominently at several points in the story, where it was sometimes referred to as "the blade that was broken" or "the sword reforged".īoromir, son of the Steward of Gondor, traveled to Rivendell in time for the Council of Elrond because of the prophetic dream of his brother Faramir, in which he was told to "seek for the sword that was broken". Thereafter it was renamed Andúril (meaning "Flame of the West" in Sindarin, another of Tolkien's invented languages), by Aragorn, the heir of Isildur. during the War of the Ring, in celebration of the rediscovery and capture of the Ring with which it had become associated as its symbolic antithesis. The sword was reforged in Rivendell in 3018 T.A. The Shards of Narsil became one of the heirlooms of the Kings of Arnor, and after the Northern Kingdom was destroyed they remained an heirloom of the Rangers of the North. He took them to Imladris (Rivendell), where Isildur's youngest son Valandil was fostered. Shortly before Isildur was killed in the second year of the Third Age in the disaster at the Gladden Fields, the shards of Narsil were rescued by Ohtar, squire of Isildur. Isildur took the shards on his journey home. Elendil's son Isildur then used the hilt-shard of the sword to cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand, thus destroying the Dark Lord's physical form. During the siege of Barad-dûr, Elendil and Gil-galad overthrew Sauron, but perished in the act, and Narsil broke into two beneath Elendil as he fell. He used Narsil in the War of the Last Alliance against Sauron. He brings it back with him to Middle-earth towards the close of the Second Age, as his father Amandil correctly predicted Númenor's imminent destruction.Įlendil became thereafter a great lord, the first of the kings of Gondor and Arnor.
The sword is first mentioned in Tolkien's legendarium as being in the possession of Elendil. The sword's name contains the elements nar and thil, "fire" and "white light" respectively in Tolkien's fictional language of Quenya, referring to the Sun and Moon ( Anar and Isil). The sword was forged during the First Age by the Dwarf Telchar of Nogrod, a famous weaponsmith and artificer who also made the knife Angrist, which cut a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth, and the Helm of Hador later used by Túrin Turambar.