In the lore of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, High King Ereinion Gil-galad was one of the Second Age’s most important figures. He was the ruler of the Noldor clan of Elves, the original bearer of Elrond’s Ring of Power, and one of the leaders of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. Along with Elendil, the King of Arnor, Gil-galad battled the Dark Lord Sauron during the War of the Last Alliance, though he lost his life doing so. Gil-galad appeared very briefly in the prologue of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but he had a much larger part to play in Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In Tolkien’s lore, Gil-galad was the fourth and final High King of the Noldor, and his reign was the longest by far, spanning the last few decades of the First Age and the entirety of the Second Age.

The position of High King of the Noldor was passed down through hereditary succession, so one would expect Tolkien to have clearly outlined Gil-galad’s family tree, but that was not the case. Gil-galad’s lineage was surprisingly unclear, and even Tolkien’s son, Christopher, struggled to make sense of it all. The first three High Kings of the Noldor were straightforward, as Fingon and Turgon were both sons of Fingolfin, but their relation to Gil-galad was complicated. The Lord of the Rings did not mention Gil-galad’s parents, and though The Silmarillion did, it went with an account that Tolkien likely did not intend to be canon. Depending on the version of the story, Gil-galad may have been related to some famous Elven characters from The Lord of the Rings.

Gil-galad Was Originally a Close Relative of Galadriel

High Kings of the Noldor
Birth year
Death Year

Fingolfin

Y.T. 1190
F.A. 456

Fingon
Y.T. 1260
F.A. 472

Turgon
Y.T. 1300
F.A. 510

Gil-galad
Unknown (before F.A. 455)
S.A. 3441

In The Return of the Shadow, the sixth volume of The History of Middle-earth, Christopher shared his father’s earliest drafts of The Fellowship of the Ring. In this version of the story, Elrond described Gil-galad as “a descendant of Fëanor the renowned.” This was not a particularly informative statement, as Fëanor had seven sons, and Tolkien quickly abandoned this concept anyway. In a later revision of The Lord of the Rings, he wrote that Gil-galad was instead the son of Finrod Felagund, which would have made him the nephew of Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings. This close familial bond explained why he chose to entrust Galadriel with a Ring of Power when he learned that Sauron was searching for them. However, as Tolkien continued to develop Finrod’s lore, he made some changes that rendered it impossible for Gil-galad to be Finrod’s son.

Tolkien added a layer of tragedy to Finrod’s story by writing that he was in love with an Elven woman named Amarië, whom he had to leave behind in Valinor when he sailed to Middle-earth. During his time in Middle-earth, Finrod never married because his heart still belonged to Amarië. Gil-galad, therefore, could not be his child. Tolkien decided that Gil-galad should be more closely related to the previous High Kings of the Noldor and made him the son of Fingon, the second High King. He inherited this position after the death of his uncle, Turgon, the third High King. This was not a perfect solution, as it was unclear why Fingon’s brother succeeded him before his son, but it was the version of the story that Christopher went with when editing The Silmarillion. The section “Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad” described Gil-galad as “the son of Fingon, whom his father had sent to the Havens after the [Battle of the Sudden Flame],” and the index reiterated that he was “son of Fingon.”

Tolkien Could Not Make Up His Mind About Gil-galad’s Family

That should have been the end of it, as The Silmarillion is widely considered one of the three main canon Middle-earth novels, alongside The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Yet Gil-galad’s parentage continued to prove a tricky subject. In The Peoples of Middle-earth, the twelfth volume of The History of Middle-earth, Christopher expressed regret over his decision. He admitted “Gil-galad as the son of Fingon was an ephemeral idea” that did not truly reflect his father’s intent. The fact that even Christopher got confused is a testament to how messy Gil-galad’s family tree became over time. But if not Fingon, who was Gil-galad’s father supposed to be?

According to some notes that Tolkien penned in the 1960s — years after The Lord of the Rings had already been published — Gil-galad’s father was Orodreth, another brother of Finrod and Galadriel. This reinstated Gil-galad’s close tie to Galadriel without contradicting Finrod’s celibacy, and it explained why he did not immediately become the High King of the Noldor after Fingon’s death. This seemingly solved the issue once and for all, but that was still not Tolkien’s final say on the matter. For reasons unknown even to Christopher, he later shifted both Orodreth and Gil-galad down a generation in the family tree. Orodreth became the son of Angrod, yet another brother of Galadriel and Finrod. Though Gil-galad was still related to Galadriel, he was now more distantly so, as he was her grandnephew. These changes made the difference in age and experience between them even wider. This account of Gil-galad’s parentage was the last that Tolkien provided, as he passed away less than a decade after writing it.

The Lore of Middle-earth Was Never Completed

Tolkien originally spelled Gil-galad’s name as Gilgalad, with no hyphen.
No version of Gil-galad’s story named his mother, though the final version as recounted in The Peoples of Middle-earth described her as “a Sindarin lady of the north.”
In the final version of the story, Gil-galad had a sister named Finduilas, who shared her name with the mother of Boromir and Faramir from The Lord of the Rings.

Christopher believed that this final account was the one that his father had finally settled on, and he was aware of this even as he edited The Silmarillion. But because Tolkien made these changes so late in his life, his other writings contradicted them. Christopher thought it was best to use the version of the story in which Gil-galad was the son of Fingon because that meant making the fewest alterations to the rest of his father’s work. But canonically, most Tolkien fans consider Gil-galad to be the grandson of Angrod. In The Peoples of Middle-earth, Christopher stated that he wished he had left Gil-galad’s parentage unknown to avoid the whole issue. Almost 20 years had passed since the publication of The Silmarillion, and with hindsight, he realized how he could have better edited the text.

The problem of Gil-galad’s parentage is emblematic of the difficulties Christopher faced when assembling The Silmarillion. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the only novels that Tolkien had finalized and published by the time of his death, and even then, there were many changes that Tolkien wanted to make to those two stories. Everything else in Tolkien’s legendarium was an old draft, unfinished manuscript, or random note. It fell to Christopher to figure out when his father’s various texts were written and whether they were meant to replace older lore. This is why it is difficult to definitively label anything in Tolkien’s wider legendarium as canon or non-canon. Luckily, Gil-galad’s parentage did not strongly impact Middle-earth’s history one way or the other. Some characters, like Aragorn, were strongly defined by their ancestry, but that was not the case for Gil-galad, especially since the position of High King of the Noldor died with him. His ever-changing family tree created no plot holes in The Lord of the Rings, but it provided a fascinating rabbit hole for fans of Tolkien’s legendarium to explore.