Almarian

Almarian belongs to the Númenórean generations of the middle Second Age, and she is drawn in any detail only in the unfinished tale of Aldarion and Erendis, where she appears as the wife of Meneldur, son of Tar-Elendil, and so as queen of Númenor when the sceptre came to her husband. Her name is Quenya in form, like those borne throughout the earlier line of the Kings, in the long stretch of the realm's history before Adûnaic names were taken up by the rulers. No meaning is supplied for it in the narrative, and the published material does not gloss it; the most that can be said with certainty is that its first element recurs in the name of her younger daughter, Almiel, which suggests a family habit of naming rather than an interpretable statement about her.

By descent she was of a seafaring house rather than of the royal line. Her father was Vëantur, who held the office of Captain of the King's Ships under Tar-Elendil, at the time when Númenórean voyaging to the coasts of Middle-earth was resumed after long neglect. Her marriage joined that house to the heirs of Elros: Meneldur was a man of quiet and inward temper, given to the study of the stars, and he had chosen to live apart in the northern uplands of the island for the clearer skies there until his kingship required his presence in Armenelos. Of this marriage came three children, the eldest a son, Anardil, who would afterwards be known as Aldarion, and two daughters, Ailinel and Almiel.

The tale records her beauty as the first thing said of her, and it was for this that she was chiefly praised in Númenor. Her own inclinations, however, ran counter to her father's calling: she had no great love of ships or of the sea, and nothing in her disposition drew her toward the havens. That the longing passed nonetheless to her son, who took after Vëantur rather than after either of his parents, is presented as a matter of temperament running its own course through the generations. Within her household she was indulgent toward that son, and her sympathies in the disagreements of his youth are consistently shown as lying with him rather than with the king.

The chronology of the tale fixes little of Almarian's own life by year, and what it does fix is measured out by the men around her. Anardil, her son, came into the world in Second Age 700, in the reign of her husband's father Tar-Elendil, when Meneldur was still only the King's Heir and the household stood at some remove from the business of the sceptre. The two daughters came afterwards, and the tale, which is concerned throughout with the son, gives no year for either. Her father was in those decades still in the King's service and still the foremost seaman of the island, so that the boy grew up with a grandfather whose reputation had been made by the reopening of the sea-road westward from Númenor to the shores of Middle-earth.

The first turn of events in which her hand can be seen falls in 725, when Vëantur proposed to take his grandson, then five-and-twenty, on the voyage to Middle-earth that would be the young man's first. Meneldur was unwilling; he had no love of the sea for its own sake and less confidence in what his son would make of it. Almarian did not share her husband's reluctance, and the consent that was at length given was won against his own inclination. The ship sailed that spring, wintered in the Elven havens of Lindon, and did not bring Anardil home again until 727. From that voyage the whole of his later course followed, and the queen's part in permitting it is not softened in the telling.

In 740 Tar-Elendil surrendered the sceptre to her husband, and Almarian became queen in fact as well as by marriage, at a time when her son's voyaging was already hardening into a vocation. In 750 he gathered the mariners who followed him into a fellowship of his own, the Guild of Venturers, and thereafter his absences lengthened from seasons into years, while the works he began on the coasts of Middle-earth drew him further from his father's mind. Tar-Meneldur mistrusted the whole enterprise, judging that Númenor had no business entangling itself in the affairs of the mortal lands, and the disagreement between king and heir ran on for decades. Almarian is shown steadily on the side of her son through these quarrels, not as an advocate of his policy, of which she understood little and cared less, but as the one member of the household who would not oppose him.

Her second decisive intervention was domestic rather than political. When Beregar, a landowner of the western part of the island whose family traced its descent from the old House of Bëor rather than from the lords of Númenor, came to the King's house, his daughter Erendis came with him; and Almarian, taking a liking to the girl, kept her in her own household among her women. Erendis therefore dwelt in Armenelos and was seen there by Aldarion, and the acquaintance that grew between them owed its occasion entirely to the queen's favour. Almarian understood well enough where the young woman's heart had gone, and did nothing to discourage it. When the courtship afterwards faltered and Erendis withdrew from the city, it was Almarian who sent for her to return, and the meeting so arranged repaired the breach for a time.

The one recorded change in her attitude comes late. Aldarion sailed again after his marriage and stayed away far beyond the term he had promised, leaving his wife and their daughter Ancalimë at home in Númenor; and when at last he came back, the mother who had been his surest ally in the house met him without her old warmth. The reproach is left implicit, but it is unmistakable in the manner of her greeting, and it marks the point at which the sympathies within the family shifted away from him. Nothing further of her is told: the narrative does not record her death, nor whether she was living when the sceptre passed to her son as Tar-Aldarion in 883, and no other text takes up her name. Like much else in this tale, which breaks off before its end, she is left standing in the middle of events whose outcome is known only from the dry lists of the kings.

Almarian's standing in Númenor was entirely that of a consort. At this period the sceptre passed to the eldest son of the King, and the change by which the eldest child could inherit regardless of sex was made only later, by her own son, and for the sake of his daughter; so the position Almarian held carried dignity but no office and no claim. Nothing in the tale assigns her a share in government: she is never shown in the King's council, never charged with the realm in her husband's absence, and takes no part in the long argument over whether Númenor should establish itself on the shores of Middle-earth, which was the political question of her lifetime. The narrative is explicit that the substance of that quarrel meant little to her. Her rank, in short, gave her access to the men who decided things and no authority of her own.

What she did possess was the ordinary and considerable power of a great household: the ear of a reluctant husband, the disposal of her own women, and the right to invite, keep, or summon whom she chose. Each of her recorded acts works through that channel rather than around it. Persuasion, hospitality, and a well-timed message are the whole of her repertoire, and every one of them required the consent or acquiescence of somebody else to take effect. No supernatural quality is attributed to her anywhere — no foresight, no craft, no lore, not even the star-lore of her husband — and her beauty, which the tale names first, is reported as a fact about her reputation rather than as anything she used. She belongs among those figures whose leverage on events is domestic and indirect.

The limits are as clearly drawn as the influence. Her interventions had consequences far beyond their scale, since the marriage her favour made possible produced the heir whose succession forced the alteration of Númenórean law; but she governed none of those consequences. The reconciliation she arranged held only for a time and then broke past mending, and when she finally set herself against her son she had nothing to bring against him but a cold reception, which changed neither his course nor his voyages. Outside this one unfinished tale she is not developed at all, and the wider legendarium neither builds on her nor contradicts what it says.

The marriage at the centre of Almarian's life is the one the tale declines to examine. Meneldur's absorption in the movements of the heavens is nowhere shared by her, and her own preferences are never reported as touching his; no conversation between them is set down, no quarrel, and no gesture of affection. Their union is instead the quiet backdrop against which the story anatomises the marriage of their son, whose failure is dissected season by season. Where Erendis and Aldarion are shown wearing each other down by degrees, the older couple simply diverge without friction, and Almarian's disagreement with her husband is expressed only by what she permits rather than by anything she says against him. It is a portrait of allegiance withheld rather than opposition declared.

In the line of descent she stands as a conduit for a passion she did not hold. The seafaring temper of her father reappears whole in her son, having passed through her untouched, and her closeness to that son is therefore emotional rather than companionable: she supported an enterprise whose substance she never entered into. Her daughters are treated with corresponding brevity, yet their descent proved to matter more than the narrative's attention to them suggests, since the son born to Ailinel and Orchaldor, Soronto, stood afterwards as a claimant whose existence pressed upon the position of Aldarion's daughter. The queen's least regarded children thus supplied the rival branch to her favourite's line.

Her one recorded bond with another woman is also her one act of patronage, and it worked against itself. By raising a girl of no royal kindred into her own company she made possible both the attachment she wished for and the estrangement that followed it, and when the marriage soured her sympathy moved to the wife rather than remaining with the son she had always shielded. Her coolness at his homecoming is the only sanction available to her, and it registers as the withdrawal of a partiality that had until then been unconditional. Toward her granddaughter Ancalimë the text records nothing at all.