The origins of this settlement were somewhat obscure. The Dwarves of Nogrod once had a river crossing and trading post in this area early in the First Age, when the Lhun flowed eastward instead of southwestward, and Elves walked down into Eriador over a mountain pass that would later become the floor of the Gulf of Lhun. At the time of the War of Wrath, flooding and earthquakes destroyed the Nogrodic fort and dropped the hill it was built on almost a thousand feet. In the early Second Age, a river port was needed by both Elves and Dwarves somewhere on the middle Lhun, and Gil-galad, King of Lindon, commissioned Linnar's folk to build a village and docks on the rubble of the old post. The rebuilt town prospered, in a sleepy way, for long centuries. For the first 700 years of the Second Age,