Angelimir

Angelimir belonged to the Dúnedain of Gondor, and within that people to the ruling house of Dol Amroth, whose seat lay on the coast of Belfalas. He bore the style of Prince, the title carried by the heads of that house in the later Third Age, and stood twentieth in its succession. No meaning is recorded for his name in the published writings, and no translation of it is offered; in form it belongs with the other names of his kindred — Adrahil, Imrahil, Imrazôr — which follow the Sindarin manner of naming kept up by the high families of Gondor. A caution attaches to the spelling. Unfinished Tales prints the name as Angelimar, in the text of the note and again in its index, whereas the fuller genealogical material behind that note gives Angelimir; the discrepancy is a matter for the account of the drafts rather than for the narrative.

The line he headed reached back, by the reckoning preserved in that same note, to Galador, first Lord of Dol Amroth, and Angelimir was twentieth in unbroken descent from him. Galador was held to be the son of Imrazôr, a Númenórean dwelling in Belfalas, and of Mithrellas, one of the Silvan Elves who had gone out of Lórien in the company of Nimrodel and had become separated from her in the wooded country of the south. By that account Mithrellas bore Imrazôr a daughter, Gilmith, as well as a son, and afterwards departed in secret. The princes of Dol Amroth thus claimed a strain of Elvish blood on the distaff side, a claim their own house maintained and one that others in Gondor treated as an old tradition rather than a settled fact.

Angelimir himself is nowhere named in The Lord of the Rings, and the reader meets his house only in the generations after him. His son Adrahil appears there as the father of Finduilas, who was given in marriage to Denethor son of Ecthelion, and as the father of Imrahil, who held the princedom during the War of the Ring. The tradition of Elvish descent is glanced at rather than argued: Legolas, meeting Imrahil, remarks that the blood of the Firstborn shows in him, a judgement that carries the weight of an Elf's own recognition. What the Appendices supply, then, is the outward standing of the family — a princely house of Belfalas, near in kinship and in service to the Stewards of Gondor — while its origin and the count of its lords are preserved in the later notes alone.

The chronology of Angelimir's house can be fixed at one end. The Tale of Years sets under 1981 of the Third Age the flight of the Silvan folk from Lórien and the loss of Amroth and Nimrodel, and the later account preserved in Unfinished Tales makes the haven upon the Belfalas coast take its name from that king, who was carried out to sea from its roadstead. The same account assigns to Galador, the first lord, a life running from about 2004 to about 2129, so that the founding of the lordship falls within a generation or two of those events. From Galador to Angelimir the succession is reckoned at twenty holders of the seat, and from Galador's birth to the War of the Ring, in which Angelimir's grandson fought, rather more than a thousand years are covered by those twenty and the two who came after them.

Of the lords who filled those centuries, and of Angelimir's own tenure among them, the published narrative records no act. What can be said of the seat itself is drawn from Gondor's chronicle rather than from any deed of its holders. Belfalas lay open to the sea and to the enmity of Umbar: in 2758 long-prepared fleets out of Umbar and Harad fell upon the southern coasts of the realm, and the assault kept Gondor from sending help to Rohan in the winter of that year. The coastal fiefs were reckoned part of the muster of the realm, owing men to Minas Tirith at need, and by the end of the Age the head of the house at Dol Amroth was the only man in Gondor who bore the style of Prince. None of this is attached in the sources to Angelimir by name.

One dated event touches his household closely. In 2976 Denethor, son of the Steward Ecthelion II, took to wife Finduilas, daughter of Adrahil of Dol Amroth, and by that marriage the princely house was bound to the Stewards more nearly than before. Boromir was born to them in 2978 and Faramir in 2983, and Finduilas died in 2988, having lived but twelve years in Minas Tirith; the chronicle remarks that the walled city and the shadow in the east oppressed her, coming as she did from the open shore. Whether Angelimir was still living when the marriage was made is not stated in the published narrative, and no year is given there for his birth, his accession, or his death.

What became of the line after him is recorded in full. Adrahil held the seat next, and after Adrahil his son, who in March 3019 brought his knights and some seven hundred men-at-arms up from the coast to Minas Tirith before the siege closed, the strongest company to answer the summons of the fiefs. He fought in the field before the walls on the fifteenth of that month, and when the Steward had burned himself and his heir lay wounded it was he who took the ordering of the city, and who rode north with Éomer to the Morannon in the days that followed. Not long after the fall of Sauron his daughter Lothíriel was wedded to Éomer King, and their son Elfwine ruled in Rohan after his father, so that Angelimir's descent passed into the royal house of the Mark.

Angelimir's place in the record, then, is that of a fixed point in a count rather than of an actor in events. The note that preserves him does so in order to establish how many generations lay between the founding of the house and the princes known to the story of the War of the Ring, and his name is the marker at which that reckoning is taken. Nothing is told of his rule, his marriage, or the manner of his death; what the reader is given is his number in the line and his standing at the head of the three generations that close it. The fuller genealogical papers offer more, including years, but they belong to the account of the drafts and not to the history as published.

The office Angelimir held was a lordship within Gondor and not a sovereignty apart from it. The princes ruled Belfalas from their seat above the sea and held that rule of the crown, and after the kings failed of the Stewards who governed in the king's name; their fief was counted among the outlands of the realm, whose lords came up to Minas Tirith when the summons went out. What the holder of such a seat could do was therefore bounded on one side by inheritance, since the office passed within the house, and on the other by the obligation of service owed to the capital. Angelimir's own exercise of it is nowhere described. The published sources give his number in the succession and his standing at its head, and attribute to him no ordinance, no counsel and no act of war.

What such a lord commanded can be judged only from the single occasion on which the fief is shown in action. Its strength included mounted knights riding under a token of a ship and a silver swan, a body of horse of a kind uncommon in the muster of Gondor, together with men-at-arms drawn from the coastlands. That strength was not freely disposable. The southern fiefs held back part of their levy against attack out of the sea, so that the companies which answered the summons were smaller than the city had looked for, and the prince who led them came under the ordering of the Steward once he had passed the gate. The power of the office was regional, tied to a shore that had itself to be watched.

Nothing in the record ascribes to the house any faculty not shared by other Dúnedain of high lineage. The Elvish strain in its descent is treated as a matter of lineage and bearing, glanced at once by an Elf's own judgement and otherwise left without consequence; no gift of foresight, of healing or of unusual life is claimed for its holders. Such weight as the princedom carried beyond its own borders came from kinship and from proximity to the ruling family of Gondor, and that weight was influence rather than authority: the direction of the realm and of its host lay with the Steward. For Angelimir the limits are stricter still, since the office is all that the sources give him, and the office itself is known chiefly from the doings of those who held it after him.

The relationships the sources allow Angelimir are almost entirely vertical. He is given a son, and beyond that nothing: no wife, no mother, no brother or sister, and not even a named predecessor, for the reckoning that places him twentieth in the seat passes over the holders between the first lord and himself without naming one of them. This is not peculiar to him. The published writings name no wife of any prince of Dol Amroth, and the mothers of Adrahil and of Adrahil's children are left unrecorded, as the wives of most Stewards are; in the Gondorian genealogies a woman is generally set down only where her marriage joined two houses. Angelimir is therefore known by whom he begot and by nothing else, which is a different silence from that of a man whose deeds went unrecorded.

What that descent produced becomes visible only two generations on, and there it is a matter of conduct rather than of pedigree. Imrahil stood to the Steward's sons as their mother's brother, and the tie was acknowledged openly in the city, where he was spoken of as the Lord Denethor's kinsman. It showed in action when Faramir was borne back wounded from the retreat before the outer wall: it was Imrahil who carried him in and who told his father that the son had come home from great deeds, a formula of courtesy that spared the Steward nothing but softened the delivery. The same habit of attention reached beyond his own house. On the field before the walls it was Imrahil who checked the body of the Lady of Rohan where the others had given her up, and found breath in her.

No adversary of any kind is attached to the house in the sources, and none to Angelimir. Its recorded dealings are all with those on its own side: the Stewards it served and married into, the captains it sat with in council once the city was relieved, and afterwards the King and the King of the Mark. That absence is itself a description of the seat, whose enmities were seaward and general, borne by the fief rather than by a person. For Angelimir the effect is to leave him defined by a single relation, that of ancestor, and by the use later writing made of it: he is remembered because the men who mattered to the story could be counted back to him.

Angelimir is a figure of the working papers rather than of the narrative. He belongs to the body of dated genealogical notes that Christopher Tolkien published as The Heirs of Elendil, a set of tables and annotations in which his father carried the lines descended from Elendil through their generations and fixed years of birth and death for their members. The house of Dol Amroth had no place in the original scheme of those tables, which were concerned with the kings of Arnor and Gondor and with the Stewards; the material on the princes was added to one of the manuscripts and grew out of the need to account for Denethor's marriage to Finduilas, whose father and grandfather had then to be supplied. What resulted was a short table of the descendants of Adrahil, with those members who held the seat distinguished from the rest, and beneath it a note tracing the origin of the house to Galador as its first lord.

It is from these papers that the correct form of the name is known. The note printed in Unfinished Tales gives Angelimar, in the text and again in the index, and that form long stood as the only published one; the genealogical material behind it reads Angelimir, and the discrepancy is editorial rather than a variant of Tolkien's own devising. Beyond the spelling, the drafts differ from the published account chiefly in what they are willing to state: they assign years to the holders of the seat, where the narrative sources give none, and they set the princes in a reckoned sequence rather than mentioning them as the story requires. Their authority is that of a chronologist's working notes, kept for the sake of internal consistency, and they were not written to be read as history.