A Tolkien topic that my thoughts have been coming once and again to is the nature and reach of the Númenórean kingship in exile, and the configuration of the crown of Elendil under his successors, at the highest level.
One of the issuing points of this topic is the apparent contradiction between two texts by Tolkien himself, dealing with the geographic extension of Gondor.
On the one hand, the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings where we are told that the Ship-kings expanded Gondor to the west and south of the Mouths of Anduin.
On the other hand, “The Tradition of Isildur” in Unfinished Tales pt. III. II. iv, where we have “a tomb and memorial of Elendil the Faithful. Here it shall stand at the mid-point of the Kingdom of the South” in Amon Anwar, which later fell in the boundary between Gondor and Rohan.
Michael Martinez's keen deductions, particularly those in “Razing Arnor: How Real Were the Dunadan Conspiracies?” have decisively pushed my thoughts on the subject. Here, Martinez basically says that Gondor’s expansion and policies might have indirectly influenced the partition of Arnor.
Those are several points that made me wonder about the more general topic I’m dealing with now. Some of the questions were:
- If the oldest male heir of Isildur’s line was the High King, and the Númenórean kingship was sacred, how could it be that different independent realms, with their independent kings, were established through the partition of Arnor?
- What did it mean to be High King at all? What was de iure and de facto the geographical reach of High Kingship?
- Which way was the governance of Gondor included in the attributions of the High Kingship? Had the High Kings anything to say regarding the expansion of Gondor?
- And, most intriguingly, does the apparent documentary contradiction on the boundaries of Gondor play any role in all this?
Putting together the sources and the deductions by Michael Martinez and others, and using my own invention to give answers to those questions to cement all that together, I have outlined the following thread of the history of Middle-earth:
When Elendil was cast by the great wave on the shores of Harlindon, he was received by the Elves. Elendil himself said that in those times he thought of spending the rest of his life among the Elves; so heavy was the grieve in his heart for the loss of the millenary homeland, even though that homeland was his enemy, and of his people.
But comforted by the Eldar, and with the friendship and counsel offered by Gil-galad, Elendil started to change his mind, and came to conceive an ambitious idea: to keep united the Númenórean nation, though at that moment it was made of colonists and exiles. For he was the heir of Elros’s firstborn line and head of the Faithful, so if anyone was to establish a new kingship of the Dúnedain, that was him.
But the Kingdom of Númenor had been established by the Valar themselves, and Elendil could not dare to take that step without their approval. And he could take counsel from them directly, since one of the Palantíri he had brought to Middle-earth in his ship was the one with its view fixed in Valinor. Through the stone, Elendil received the ruling of the Máhanaxar: that the sacred functions of the Númenórean Kings passed to him and his dynasty.
Keeping all Dúnedain under a single crown was a most difficult task, not only because of the blasphemy of the Black Númenóreans, who were the majority of the old King’s Men left, but also because of the destructions brought by the great cataclysm.
Elendil was proclaimed as King by Gil-galad himself, and acclaimed by the nearest Númenórean colonies, those most favourable to him, which were the ones of the Arthedain, the pious colonists living in Eriador closest to Lindon. Gil-galad ceded all the lands in Eriador that he protected but were sparsely populated by Elves to the new Kingdom, which was called Arnor, “King’s Land”, as a kind of augmented reproduction of the Arandor in Númenor. Since lesser men were under the protection of Gil-galad, Arnor was intended to comprise all Men in Eriador and their affairs, not only Dúnedain. That was the first foundation of Elendil’s rule.
The kingship had yet to be extended to other Númenóreans in the south, a task started by Elendil’s sons themselves after he counselled them, through the Palantíri, to divide their areas of action. Isildur and Anárion had spent their military service in the colonies of Gondor, and there they had tried to steer their ships. The waves kept them from reaching the great colony and naval base of Pelargir directly; instead they were stranded in the Ras Morthil, a part of the coasts dominated by Tharagrond. The lord of this fortress were among those King’s Men who, in spite of his old friendship with Ar-Pharazôn, had managed to avoid declaring himself for the religion of Melkor, since he deeply rejected it, and now he offered his support to Elendil and his sons.
Now the Númenórean sway over the hinterland was tiny, and when news spread of the end of Númenor, there was unrest among the native Gwathuirim (whose descendants three millennia later were the Dunlendings), since a part of them still wanted to come back to the worship of Sauron, their god of old. So Isildur decided to deal with the Gwathuirim, and took the Covenant Stone of the Lords of Andúnie to the core of the native lands. Knowing of the natives’ superstition, he thought it to be the best instrument to keep their loyalty to the Númenórean lords (the other Covenant Stone was the globe of Umbar, on which Ar-Pharazôn had taken Sauron’s oath of fealty). Isildur planted the Stone in the place where the Gwathuirim had a temple (erech, in their tongue), and got too their oath.
Anárion chose to go to Pelargir, their first intended destination, to ask for the support of his friend Eldarion of Eldalonde, a lord of the Faithful. He was heir of the noble house of Hyarnustar, military men of renown, and in Middle-earth, as many other like him, he had found a place where his military skills were well valued over the fact of being one of the Faithful. He became commander of the Pelargirean forces in Ar-Pharazôn’s grand operation to beat Sauron, and on that occasion he had been mentor of Elendil’s sons, Anárion being his favourite. Eldarion had married Imrêth of the old house of the founders and lords of Pelargir, but had himself founded Linhir as a colony of his own. He had gained more ascendancy over the Faithful of the Bay of Belfalas when he refused to obey Ar-Pharazôn’s summon to the Great Armament, and instead attacked some of the Black Númenóreans coming to join that blasphemous force.
If there was anyone to whom the people of Pelargir could have raised to the throne before the coming of Elendil, that one was Eldarion; instead, as soon as he got word of the arrival of Elendil and his sons he did not hesitate to proclaim them as Kings. Uinen confirmed the righteousness of Eldarion’s deeds appearing before Anárion’s ship, calming and opening the whirls in the changing Anduin of those years. Enthusiasm exploded: the Kings were acclaimed by the people, bells rang along the coasts with joy for the new lord whose name alone made them feel back to the most blessed times of Númenor, the true children of that ill-fated land, liberated from Ar-Pharazôn’s madness, and the most powerful nation on Earth.
In spite of Uinen, there was not the same enthusiasm among the Pelargirean nobles, many of them officers in the armed forces, were King’s Men unwilling to accept a king of the Faithful. First among them were Herumir and Fuinur, Eldarion’s sons —that was the pitiful state of the Númenórean people, in which even families were torn apart by the Kings’ rebellion against the Valar. Herumir, a tradesman, and Fuinur, commander of the XXIII Division “Minulthôr”, main army of Umbar at the time, had plans to control both Pelargir and Umbar through their combined influence. Their father’s quick cession of the government of Pelargir and the command of the XXIX “Starry” Division, main land force of that colony, to Anárion, shattered those plans.
Maybe they had at that time already fallen under the dark religion, by which at last Herumir would change his name for Herumor, but the fact is that they rebelled against their father and, conspiring with other officials in Pelargir, they usurped the VI “Starry” Fleet, the naval forces of Pelargir, and brought it to Umbar, establishing there a stronghold against Elendil’s reclamations.
After that, Elendil’s efforts to communicate with the Númenóreans beyond Umbar were blocked by the rebel brothers. There were Faithful colonies in the Inner and Eastern Seas, but next to Umbar were the King’s Men of Bellakar, who would not accept a Faithful king, and they also were of no help. Therefore Elendil’s rule, though theoretically encompassing all Númenóreans of Middle-earth, was effective only in the old colonies of the Northwest, of strongest Faithful presence.
There, to ensure the loyalty of the small colonies of Anfalas, Elendil gave the title of “Prince” (meaning they had sovereign rule within their lands, only owing loyalty to the King himself) to both Eldarion in Linhir, on the easternmost extreme of those shores, and the lord of Tharagrond, in the west.
So far then we have seen that Elendil built his rule on different foundations: Elendil’s lordship in Arnor, the support of the Princes of Tharagrond and Linhir, the oath of the Gwathuirim natives to Isildur, and the governorship of Pelargir and command of its forces by Anárion, which he shared with his brother Isildur as soon as he came from among the Gwathuirim. And there was not at the time a particular division, let alone theoretical, between Arnor and Gondor.
When establishing what was conceived as a single realm of the human Westlands under Elendil’s rule, he and his sons added more lands to secure the Númenórean core of their dominions: the borderlands of Eriador in the North, the areas north and east of Pelargir up to Mordor, as well as the Gwathuirim lands in between, as we have seen. In Gondor, the old frontier became the centre of the brother kings’ dominions, where they built the head city of each one’s personal fief (Minas Anor for Anórien and Minas Ithil for Ithilien), and their joint capital, Osgiliath. Communications were completed by land with the North-South Road and the strongholds guarding it, most notably Angrenost (Isengard).
That is the basic outline of the general structure of Elendil’s crown. Now this is of course not the place to tell details about the War of the Last Alliance, but some things must be told which affect the subject we are dealing with.
After Sauron unexpectedly ousted Isildur and his family from Minas Ithil and the king fled to Arnor, Anárion stayed behind commanding the defence along the Anduin. Later, when the armies of the North came, a force under the command of Aratan and Ciryon, second and third sons of Isildur, was detached to recover Ithilien and its capital, while Meneldil Anárion’s son stayed behind as governor of the realm of Pelargir. Anárion and Aratan personally commanded the siege of Barad-dûr, and when Anárion was killed, Isildur joined his brother’s command to his own, thus becoming the most powerful commander of the Alliance.
As is well known, Sauron killed Elendil but was on his turn killed (or so it was thought) by Isildur, who became undisputable lord not only of Arnor (by inheritance) and Gondor (by his own kingship) but also of Mordor (by conquest). He had to arrange matters in both North and South, and he sent the main army to Arnor, but stayed a while organising the South.
Now when Anárion was killed, Meneldil made of the fact that his father had held the title of “King” more than a mere circumstance and took it too, until Isildur came from war. Finally Isildur entrusted the government in the South to his nephew Meneldil as a continuation of his functions during the war, and departed to Arnor with his three sons, but said nothing about the title of “King”. It was later evident that Meneldil had the superior ambition to fully succeed his father, but Isildur trusted his nephew would not do it without authorisation; otherwise he could have left behind his sons Aratan or Ciryon, who knew well the realm and were respected commanders of its troops, under the pretext of seeing after the lordship of Ithilien, for example.
But now Arnor was also Isildur’s fief, and much larger than Ithilien, so the King decided to bring all his sons with him, to join his wife and youngest child Valandil, left in Imladris during the war. Meneldil ruled in the south with the following duties:
- regent of the old colonial kingdom of Pelargir, with jurisdiction over Lebennin and Calenardhon and including vassalage (to say it in modern terms) of Lossarnach;
- Lord of Anórien, by right of inheritance;
- governor of Ithilien, on behalf of Isildur, a duty including the watch of Mordor, in concordance with:
- commander of the Starry Division, which included the governorship of the military territories to the west of Pelargir (later called Lamedon);
- President of the Council of the Dúnedain for the Realms of the South (later named Council of Gondor); and
- patronage of the Pelargirean League, which coordinated with Pelargir several old colonies established along the coasts.
And Isildur and his three sons died in the disaster of the Gladden Fields, and his youngest and now only son Valandil, thirteen years old, had not took part in the war and had no ascendancy over his southern subjects. Therefore Meneldil assumed the royal title, this time on behalf of his Northern cousin, and this bold and dubious step was supported by the prince Eldarion of Linhir, helping the son of his dear Anárion, and the Council of Gondor, happy to have a close King, rooted in the South.
The years it took Valandil to cement his rule in Arnor and the shameful opposition of the northern regent Elentirion, who saw in Meneldil’s elevation the possibility of a similar progress, maybe intending to leave the line of Isildur with no effective power, were enough for Meneldil to do in the South the same functions as not only his father but his uncle too.
Meneldil issued orders as “King for Gondor” at first, and later as “King of Gondor”, thus being the first to officially individuate that territory. Against that, the only resistance that Valandil was able to oppose was to devise a title of High King, which actually consisted only in adding the traditional Númenórean prefix “Tar-“ to his name and, retrospectively, his father and grandfather. But that only had effect in Arnor, while in Gondor, where our records mostly come from, it was deliberately obviated to equate both Kings.
Valandil visited his cousin on two occasions: in his coming of age, and one hundred years later; but on the first he found no option to put away from his governmental duties Cemendur Meneldil’s son and could only obtain a declaration of loyalty less effective than rhetoric; and on the second he did not dare to disturb with requirements the real or feigned illness of his elderly uncle.
Thus was Meneldil finally able to pass as inheritance his kingship to his descendants, and thence the northern Kings, though as the elder line of Elendil considered themselves as rulers of all Númenóreans, were in fact only of Arnor. And for the time being, the situation went on as each kingdom dealt with its own affairs.
There was never again debate over the nature of the High Kingship until the time of the Ship-kings of Gondor. The previous Kings of the South had expanded their rule to the East, thus surpassing the attributions of the first successors of Meneldil. One of the labours of King Siriondil, with his son Tarannon as executor, was to order the borderlands of the kingdom, and a part of the Arnorian nobility that regretted the impossibility to expand of the Northern kingdom went to help him, with the hope of establishing a lordship of their own, and Prince Cemendur, second son of High King Elendur, was their leader.
Elendur knew that Arnor could not expand, but let a part of his subjects help Tarannon to get rid of some troublesome noblemen. But trouble was not kept away that way, since the first campaign was to be held in Anfalas, of doubtful allegiance. This region had been under the control of Tharagrond, whose princes had ceded their rights to Isildur, though the municipalities descending from old colonies belonged to the Pelargirean League. The distancing of the two kingdoms had abandoned the rights over Anfalas in a grey zone, and its municipalities governed themselves and quarrelled with more independence than the old colonies they descended from.
That grey zone was now lit by Tarannon’s plans: it was a debatable matter whether Anfalas was under the High Kings, as descendants of Isildur, or under the Kings of Gondor, as successors of Isildur’s initial government in the South and patrons of the League.
The land forces of the Kings and a mixed royal-Pelargirean fleet put Anfalas under Gondorian rule, but Cemendur and his adventurers were paid with gold but no lordship or lands, a poor reward to the legitimacy that a Northern prince had contributed to Tarannon’s campaign.
The deceived Arnorians came back to their homeland with, among others, the idea that the title of High King had no effect and, within a generation, the kingdom was divided in three. The High Kingship was discarded by Amlaith, as he doubted that Tarannon, his forces now stationed in the very Arnorian frontier, would recognise it. Actually, in Gondor the idea was beginning to spread that the true heir of Númenor was Gondor, not the declining Arnor.
When later the line of Isildur had been extinguished in Cardolan and Rhudaur and the Kings of Arthedain were the only royal line descending from Isildur, they wanted to resume some sense of the High Kingship, but just for Arnor, since Gondor at the time had a great influence in the North through Tharbad. So they added to their names the “Tar-” particle in the Sindarin “Ar-” version: Celephor changed his name for Argeleb (I), later his son Belegorn to Arveleg (I), and from that moment on, princes received a name with the “Ar-” already incorporated to their names.
The last “round” of the debate over the High Kingship happened when King Ondoher of Gondor and his two sons died in battle against the Easterlings, and his only remaining child, princess Fíriel, was the heir to the southern kingdom.
Now nothing in the Númenórean law had never been said regarding preference for males in the inheritance to the throne, and actually the only rule in force was Tar-Aldarion’s law that the King’s firstborn, male or female, was the heir to the throne. But two circumstances worked against Fíriel in this case, keeping her from becoming Ruling Queen.
On the one hand, though the primogeniture rule had been the practice in Númenor itself, in Middle-earth the Kings had had a stronger military component for which the traditional male role of army commanders was more fit, so that there never was a ruling queen in Arnor or Gondor —any possible candidates did not even consider themselves as such.
On the other hand, and most important —and this is the point why the case comes to the “High Kingship debate”—, Fíriel was married to the heir of Arthedain (of all Arnor in fact), Arvedui, and it was highly unlikely that this prince could accept to restrain himself to the role of a consort in Gondor, especially once he had inherited the northern throne.
Maybe if Arvedui had taken more modest steps regarding Gondor could have granted him a slower but successful way to the rule of Gondor, but he in fact claimed the southern throne for himself by right not only of his marriage to Fíriel, but also of him being the heir of Isildur.
This latter point was the key of the controversy, of course. Arvedui was absolutely right in claiming the throne of Gondor, and actually was the first Northerner to claim it from Elendil himself. But for the southern elite he was likely to be either too distant to be a useful presiding figure towards the people, or too detached from the southern interest networks to respond positively to them.
So the Council of Gondor tried to work a way out of this uncomfortable candidature by delaying a decision debating over it. There were those who wanted only to accept someone of the line of Anárion or nothing. The army objected that in those times of trouble and invasion a male commander-King was needed. Only very few proposed reunion with Arnor through the person of Arvedui.
After one year, general Earnil, descendant of King Telumehtar by male line and recent victor of the Easterlings, who was therefore a principal person in Gondor at the time, was summoned to the Council to speak proposing a solution. It was later said in Arnor that he initially intended to speak for Arvedui, but while en route to the meeting he was convinced by a delegation from the Council itself to claim the throne for himself, which was granted wilfully by the Council and the people.
The later story is well known, that in the next generation of Kings things would change much: Arvedui was the last King in the North and his line survived ruling no realm; while in Gondor, it was the kingdom and not the royal line what survived.
We have only to point here to what we could call the “donation of Isildur”, as a parallel to the Donation of Constantine; it is related to what is said in “The Tradition of Isildur”, in the Unfinished Tales:
Isildur […] remained for a time in Gondor, ordering the realm and instructing Meneldil his nephew […]. With Meneldil and a company of trusted friends he made a journey about the borders of all the lands to which Gondor laid claim; and as they were returning from the northern bound to Anórien they came to the high hill that was then called Eilenaer but was afterwards called Amon Anwar, "Hill of Awe." That was near to the centre of the lands of Gondor.
Though the main topic of the “Tradition” is the location of Elendil’s tomb, it is supposed that the scroll that told it, kept by the Stewards, was altered at some point between two which are known with certainty: when it was first written down (ss. V-VI) and when it was used against Arvedui’s claim to the throne of Gondor.
The alteration would be the additions of the situation of Amon Anwar “near to the centre” of Gondor, and of the journey of Isildur and Meneldil along the boundaries of Gondor. That the first one was added is certain because the territory of Gondor could hardly have its centre in Amon Anwar in Isildur’s time (then it was more in a western borderland), let alone in the time of the writing of the scroll, when the kingdom had expanded eastward.
Suspicions are cast over Pelendur, Steward to King Ondoher and a staunch supporter of Gondorian establishment, as the likely hand behind the forgery. The moments in which the document could have been modified were those in which the alterations would be most necessary, and those were no doubt the ones of the debate over the High Kingship: as we have seen, either under Tarannon or after Ondoher’s death.
The latter moment is the one most likely, since the centrality of Amon Anwar corresponds to the boundaries of Gondor in that time: rivers Angren and Anduin in the North, the Mountains of Shadow in the East, river Harnen in the South. The evident intention of the alteration was to “record” the separation of the kingdom of Gondor from the High King’s crown by the only person who could have rightfully done it since he was the true sovereign: Isildur himself.
Moreover, the scroll was under custody of the Stewards, who passed it to every new King in his crowning, and Pelendur was prominent among the refusers of Arvedui’s claims. So he probably added the point of the uncle and nephew Kings’ journey to establish the separation of Gondor, but going further to the situation of Amon Anwar in reference to the boundaries of the realm was a not so necessary step that in the end has revealed the forgery.
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