Mahtan

Mahtan

Nerdanel

A Noldorin smith in Valinor, who studied the arts of working metal and stone with the Vala Aulë himself. It was Mahtan who taught these skills in turn to the great craftsman Fëanor, who also wed Mahtan's daughter Nerdanel. In later years, Mahtan came to regret passing his knowledge on to Fëanor, who used it to build stores of weapons and armour.

The Silmarillion gives little detail about Mahtan or his history, but The Shibboleth of Fëanor and its attendant notes (in volume XII of The History of Middle-earth) provide rather more depth.³ There Mahtan is named as an Aulendur, a devotee of the Vala Aulë, and it was from that Vala that he learned his remarkable smithcraft. Mahtan prized copper above all other metals, and indeed he became known as Urundil, 'copper-lover'. It was his habit to wear a circlet of copper on his brow, a habit that he was said to have passed on to his eldest grandson Maedhros.

Mahtan raised a strong-willed and independent daughter in Nerdanel, and she would often wander far afield in Valinor. It was on such an expedition that she met her future husband Fëanor, and Mahtan at first welcomed that son of Finwë, teaching him the skills that he himself had learned from Aulë.

Nerdanel and Fëanor gave Mahtan seven grandsons (an extraordinarily large family among the Elves), but divisions began to emerge when Fëanor turned against his own brothers, and used the skill he had learned from Mahtan to begin to forge weapons and armour. When Fëanor proposed leaving Valinor to pursue Morgoth into Middle-earth, Aulë advised Mahtan that Fëanor's folly would lead to death. So both Mahtan and his daughter Nerdanel remained in Valinor while Fëanor and his sons took their Oath, and went on to abandon their kin in pursuit of the Silmarils.