Angamaitë

Angamaitë is named only once in Tolkien's published writing, and there he stands beside another: the account of Gondor's kings in the Appendices introduces him and Sangahyando together as the two who commanded the Corsairs of Umbar. Both names are Quenya in form rather than Sindarin, which is itself a point of some interest, since the high tongue was chiefly kept for lore and for royal titles in Gondor. The first element of Angamaitë is the widely attested anga, 'iron', which recurs across Tolkien's invented languages in such names as Angainor, Angband and Angrist; the second, -maitë, 'handed', appears again in the Númenórean royal name Tar-Telemmaitë, borne by a king remembered for his hunger after silver. Read together the name yields something close to 'iron-handed', though no gloss is supplied in the text itself, and the sense must be taken from the elements rather than from any authorial note.

His descent is given precisely: he was a great-grandson of Castamir, and so belonged, in the fourth generation, to the losing side of Gondor's bitterest internal quarrel. Castamir had been Captain of Ships and a leader of the rising against Eldacar during the Kin-strife, and he held the crown by force until Eldacar returned from exile and killed him at the Crossings of Erui. Castamir's sons did not submit. They held Pelargir for a time, then took the fleet south to Umbar, and there they and their descendants kept a lordship of their own, counting themselves the rightful heirs of Gondor and treating its kings as usurpers in their turn. Angamaitë was thus born into an inherited grievance rather than one of his own making.

By blood he was therefore a Gondorian of Númenórean stock, of the seafaring houses of the coastlands, though his people had been rooted for three generations in a haven that had once been a fortress of the Númenóreans hostile to Elendil's line, taken for Gondor by Eärnil I long before. Nothing else is recorded of him: no year of birth, no mother, no byname, no separate act attributed to him apart from Sangahyando. The pairing is so close that the two function in the narrative almost as a single figure, and what can be said of the one is generally said of both.

Angamaitë enters the annals of Gondor at a single point, but the quarrel he prosecuted can be followed by dates for generations before him. After the Kin-strife the exiles who had made themselves masters of Umbar kept up an intermittent war upon the realm they had left, and their raids are noticed in the record more than once before his own lifetime. In 1540 King Aldamir was killed in fighting against the Haradrim and the Corsairs together; his son Vinyarion avenged that death with a great victory over the Harad in 1551 and took thereafter the name Hyarmendacil, yet the haven itself was not recovered, and it remained in the hands of Castamir's line. The war that fell to Angamaitë and Sangahyando was thus already close to two centuries old when they took command of it, and it had been waged throughout as a feud between kinsmen rather than a war between peoples.

The one dated act set to his name falls in the year 1634. In that year the fleets of Umbar came against Pelargir, the chief haven of Gondor upon Anduin and a town lying well up the river from the sea, and there King Minardil was killed. He had held the crown since 1621. The chronicle does not say whether the king had come down to the port on some errand of his own and was caught, or whether the raid was laid deliberately to take him; it records only that he was slain at Pelargir and that the Corsairs who did it were led by the two great-grandsons of Castamir. What can be observed is that the target was not chosen at random. Pelargir had been the last hold in Gondor of Castamir's sons before they went south, and a stroke delivered there carried a meaning beyond plunder.

The consequence was heavier than the loss of a town or a fleet would have been, because the blow fell upon the king in person and because nothing came after it to answer it. Telemnar, son of Minardil, took the crown in the same year, and his reign was among the shortest in the line of Anárion. In 1636 a pestilence spread westward and reached Gondor, and it fell first and hardest upon the lower lands about the river. The king died of it and all his children with him; the White Tree of Minas Anor withered and died in that season; Osgiliath, already declining, lost so many of its people that its ruin became settled; and the garrisons that had kept the borders of Mordor under watch were withdrawn and never fully restored. In the reckoning of the Appendix the Corsair raid and the plague stand together as the two disasters of those years, the second so far overshadowing the first that no reprisal against Umbar was ever attempted for it.

After 1634 the record closes on him without a further word. No year of death is given, no later voyage, no defeat; the annals simply return to the kings of Gondor and leave the Corsairs offstage. The vengeance that Telemnar's death made impossible was taken at last by a distant successor: in 1810 Telumehtar broke the power of Umbar, stormed the haven, and destroyed there the last descendants of Castamir, and for that he was afterwards called Umbardacil. Whether any of those he killed were Angamaitë's own children or grandchildren is not stated, and the text does not distinguish the branches of the house. That victory did not last either, for Umbar afterwards passed to the Men of the Harad, and the war upon Gondor's coasts continued under other masters, one hundred and seventy-six years after the raid on Pelargir and long after the grievance that began it had lost its heirs.

That Angamaitë should be named at all is itself worth remark, since the chronicle is ordinarily silent about the leaders of Gondor's enemies at sea. When Thorongil raided the anchorage of Umbar in 2980 and killed its lord in the fighting, the man is called only the Captain of the Haven; and the Corsair commanders who brought the great fleet up Anduin in the War of the Ring go unnamed altogether. Angamaitë and Sangahyando are recorded, one may reasonably suppose, not because their raid was the largest but because they were of the blood of Castamir, and the scribes of Gondor were tracing a family as much as a war. The last turn of the account is a symmetry the annalist does not point out: the ships of Umbar came again to Pelargir in March 3019, and were taken there by Aragorn, who was of the line the Corsairs' ancestors had once cast down.

Angamaitë's place in the legendarium is that of a war-leader without an office, and the text is careful in what it does not call him. He is not named king, nor lord of Umbar, nor captain of any named ship; the Appendix says only that he and Sangahyando led the Corsairs, and it says it of both men in the same breath. Joint command of that kind is rare in Tolkien's chronicles, where fleets and hosts are ordinarily set under one head, and it suggests a lordship held between kinsmen of equal claim rather than by a single acknowledged heir. Whatever authority the two possessed rested on descent and on the loyalty of a haven full of exiles, not on any grant or title that Gondor would have recognised.

Such strength as he commanded was of one kind only: ships, and the men who sailed them. The rebellion that made his family had drawn its support from the coastlands and the great harbours, whose people were of mixed blood and whose wealth lay in shipping, and when Castamir's sons were driven out they took south with them what of Gondor's fleet they could man. Three generations later that inheritance still allowed a force to be brought a long way up Anduin against a fortified river-haven and away again. It was a power of reach and speed, capable of killing a king in his own port, and in the chronicle it is measured entirely by what it destroyed rather than by anything it built or held.

Its limits are as plain as its reach. Nothing was taken and nothing occupied; the succession in Minas Anor passed to the dead king's son without interruption, and the claim of Castamir's house was no nearer being granted than it had been at the Crossings of Erui. Angamaitë had no army for the field, no hold in Gondor, and no party within the realm that the record notices. Nor is he credited with any art, weapon, heirloom or deed of personal arms; the sea-lore and long life sometimes ascribed to men of Númenórean descent are nowhere claimed for him. What survives is a name attached to one stroke, and the greater ruin that followed in Gondor came not from him but from a sickness his people had no hand in.

The only living person the chronicle attaches to Angamaitë is Sangahyando, and it attaches him so firmly that no sentence separates them. Neither is given precedence, neither is assigned a squadron or a station of his own, and no disagreement between them is recorded; where one is mentioned the other stands in the same clause. Their names make a matched pair as well. Sangahyando is glossed in Tolkien's list of name-elements as 'throng-cleaver', from the Quenya word for a press of men, and set beside the iron hand of his companion it suggests a house that named its sons for the battle-line rather than for the sea, and that did so in the high tongue long after its exile from the realm where that tongue carried weight. What the partnership tells is that authority in Umbar had by then divided: the claim ran in more than one branch, and it was easier to hold the fleet in common than to settle which kinsman should be called heir.

His relation to Castamir is less a matter of blood than of inherited politics. Castamir had been Captain of Ships before he was anything else, and the party that carried him to the throne was drawn from the havens and the coastlands, whose people cared more for the fleets than for the inland provinces; he was said to have meant to remove the seat of the kings down to the river-port, and to have been harsh in a way that lost him even those who had first supported him. That harshness had already shown itself in one killing within the family: Eldacar's elder son Ornendil was taken at the siege of Osgiliath and put to death by his order. Four generations later the descendant repeated the act upon a descendant of Eldacar, and the pattern of the feud — a king's son or a king killed rather than a realm taken — is the clearest thing Angamaitë inherited.

His enemies were his relatives. Both the house he served and the house he attacked descended from Anárion, and the men of Umbar continued to speak of themselves as the rightful line, which made every raid an argument about succession rather than a war upon strangers. His allies, by contrast, were not kin at all: the Haradrim had become the standing confederates of the haven, and that alliance long outlasted Castamir's blood, since Umbar passed into Haradrim hands after the last of the exiled house was destroyed. Of nearer ties nothing survives — no wife, no child, no captain under him, no friend or rival within the haven is named. The record preserves an ancestor four generations back, a colleague who is never absent, and a victim; everything else has fallen out.

One half of the pair is considerably older than the story it now belongs to. Sangahyando stands already in the Etymologies, the etymological word-list Tolkien compiled in the later 1930s alongside the Quenta and the abandoned Lost Road, where it is glossed as 'throng-cleaver' and given as nothing more than the name of a man. It is entered twice, once under the root that yields the Quenya word for a press or crowd of men and once under the root for cleaving through, and in neither place is there any hint of Umbar, of Corsairs, or of Gondor, none of which existed in the writing at that date. When the genealogies of the southern kingdom were drawn up nearly two decades later, Tolkien took the name up again and fastened it to a descendant of Castamir. The elements from which Angamaitë is built can be found in the same list — the word for iron and the adjective meaning 'handed' are both recorded there — though the compound itself appears to belong to the later work rather than to the early word-list.

The drafting record for the raid itself is thin. The relevant material is the long genealogical roll of the rulers of the two kingdoms printed as 'The Heirs of Elendil', from which the much-compressed king-list of the Appendix was drawn; the annals of the line of Anárion there run in the same order and reach the same events, and Christopher Tolkien's commentary is chiefly concerned with the dates and the sequence of composition rather than with any competing version of the Pelargir attack. No earlier or discarded form of the name Angamaitë has been published, no variant account of Minardil's death, and no draft in which the Corsair leaders are differently numbered, differently descended, or given deeds apart from the one they share. Whatever working out lay behind the figure was done in the genealogies rather than in narrative, and what emerged from it is essentially what the Appendix prints.