Ar-Pharazôn

Ar-Pharazôn was born in the year 3118 of the Second Age, a scion of the House of Elros through his father Gimilkhad, himself son of the twenty-third ruler, Ar-Gimilzôr. He grew up within the party later called the King's Men, the faction of Númenórean society that had grown estranged from the Eldar and the Valar and favoured the island's own Adûnaic speech and customs over the older Elvish traditions still upheld by the reigning line. This upbringing shaped both his outlook and, in time, the very name by which he ruled.

His given name, Pharazôn, is Adûnaic and means "Golden," the source of the byname by which he is often remembered, Ar-Pharazôn the Golden. The prefix Ar- was the Adûnaic royal title adopted by those sovereigns of the King's Men party who broke with the older custom of ruling under a Quenya name prefixed Tar-. Even so, the royal house preserved an Elvish equivalent for its records, and Ar-Pharazôn's name was rendered in that older tongue as Tar-Calion, a form built on the same root of gold and light that underlies Pharazôn itself.

That a king of the increasingly anti-Elvish party should still be given, and evidently accept, a Quenya throne-name alongside his Adûnaic one reflects the unsettled state of Númenórean custom in this late period: Elvish naming had not yet been abandoned outright, even as the sentiments behind it were. The two names, Adûnaic and Quenya, thus stand as companions rather than rivals in his case, both proclaiming the same quality of gold that marked his person and, later, his reputed magnificence as ruler.

When Tar-Palantir died in the year 3255 of the Second Age, the succession should by ancient custom have passed to his daughter, Tar-Míriel. Pharazôn, who as head of the King's Men commanded the loyalty of the mightier part of the realm, would not suffer an heir of the Faithful line to sit upon the throne. He compelled his cousin into marriage against her will and against the law of the Valar, which forbade the union of such close kin among the royal house, and so took the sceptre for himself under the name Ar-Pharazôn. His accession completed the ascendancy of the King's Men and marked the point from which Númenórean estrangement from the Valar became outright defiance.

Ar-Pharazôn proved the most powerful in arms of all the kings of Númenor, and his pride grew to match his strength. Hearing that Sauron had begun to style himself King of Men and was pressing hard upon the last free lands of Middle-earth, Ar-Pharazôn could not endure that any power should claim a title greater than his own. In 3262 he crossed the sea with a fleet of such size and splendour, the Great Armament, that its masts were said to darken the coasts of Middle-earth as it came ashore at Umbar. Sauron's own forces dared not stand against so great a host, and Sauron himself, judging open battle hopeless, abased himself before the king and was taken back to Númenor, ostensibly as a hostage but in truth by his own design.

Within a few years Sauron had made himself indispensable to the king, flattering his pride and playing upon his fear of death until Ar-Pharazôn had become in all but name his student and instrument. At Sauron's urging the king abandoned the old reverence for the One and turned the island to the worship of Morgoth, and about the year 3310 he ordered the felling of the White Tree of Númenor and the raising of a great temple where sacrifices, including of the Faithful who resisted the new cult, were offered in Morgoth's name. Amandil, chief of the Faithful and Ar-Pharazôn's former counsellor, was driven from the king's presence for his protests, and the persecution of the old faith intensified across the realm.

As old age at last began to creep upon him despite all his glory, Ar-Pharazôn's dread of death overmastered him entirely, and Sauron persuaded him that the Valar withheld deathlessness from Men out of envy, and that the Undying Lands themselves could be seized and held by force. Deaf to the counsel of Amandil, who himself secretly sailed into the West to beseech the aid of the Valar while his son Elendil remained behind at Rómenna, Ar-Pharazôn spent years gathering the mightiest armament Númenor had ever raised, arming it for war not against any power of Middle-earth but against the Valar themselves.

In 3319 Ar-Pharazôn broke the Ban of the Valar and led his fleet against Aman, landing his warriors upon the shores of the Undying Lands in open rebellion. In answer, the Valar laid down their guardianship and called upon Eru, who tore open the world and cast the seas over Númenor, drowning the island and its people. Ar-Pharazôn and the warriors of his host who had set foot upon Aman were not slain outright but entombed alive beneath the falling hills, imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten until the Last Battle at the end of days, and by this doom his story in the Second Age comes to its close.

Within the larger pattern of the legendarium, Ar-Pharazôn stands as the culminating figure of Númenórean pride, the mortal counterpart to the overreaching that had earlier destroyed the Noldor and, before them, corrupted Melkor himself. Where the Elves of the First Age had sought a permanence and mastery not granted to them and paid for it in exile and grief, Ar-Pharazôn sought a deathlessness reserved for beings of a wholly different order, and paid for it in the ruin of his entire people. His story completes the arc of Númenórean history begun with Elros: a line raised up by the Valar in reward for faithfulness ends, in his person, in outright rebellion against them, so that he functions less as an isolated villain than as the last and largest instance of a recurring temptation that runs through the tales of both Elves and Men.

As king, Ar-Pharazôn's power was real but strictly worldly: it lay in command of arms, wealth, and the loyalty of a maritime realm at the height of its craft, not in any innate or spiritual authority. Among all the rulers of Númenor he is remembered as the mightiest in dominion and in the forces he could muster, able to overawe even Sauron's armies in Middle-earth without a battle being fought. Yet this same passage shows the ceiling of that power: his strength was sufficient to intimidate, but not to command the allegiance of a being such as Sauron, who submitted only in seeming and soon turned that very submission into an instrument against his captor. Ar-Pharazôn could compel the obedience of Men and bend Númenórean custom to his will, but he possessed no defense against subtler forms of persuasion, and his wisdom never matched the scale of his authority.

The clearest limit on his power was mortality itself, the one condition his kingship could not alter despite every other honour it brought him, and his inability to accept this bound proved the lever by which he was ultimately undone. Even at the height of his strength, gathering the greatest fleet Númenor ever built, his authority extended only to the ordering of Men and ships; it carried no weight whatsoever against the Ban set upon the Undying Lands, which no army, however vast, could annul by force. His downfall accordingly came not through any rival power of arms but through a direct act belonging to an order entirely beyond his reach, confirming that his rule, for all its splendour, remained a dominion of the earth rather than of the fate the Valar and Eru alone commanded.

His marriage to Tar-Míriel never became the partnership its royal titles implied, and nothing in the record suggests the queen was ever reconciled to a union forced upon her to secure his claim. Husband and wife met different ends even within the same catastrophe: while Ar-Pharazôn led his warriors onto the shores of Aman, Tar-Míriel remained behind in Númenor and, as the great wave overtook the island, strove in vain to climb to the sacred height of the Meneltarma before being overtaken and drowned. That the woman he had wronged to win the sceptre perished apart from him, in the ruin his own defiance had unleashed, stands as the final measure of a marriage that had never been more than an instrument of conquest.

Ar-Pharazôn's rise cannot be separated from his father Gimilkhad, who led the King's Men in their opposition to the reigning line for years before his son ever laid hand upon the sceptre. Gimilkhad died before Tar-Palantir, never living to contest the crown himself, and it was this ready-made following, built up over a generation of court rivalry, that passed to Ar-Pharazôn largely intact and gave him the strength to overturn Tar-Míriel's claim without meaningful resistance. His usurpation was, in this sense, less a sudden seizure than the final step in a struggle his father had already all but won.

Two men held the office of counsellor to Ar-Pharazôn in his last years, and his regard for them could not have differed more. Amandil, head of the Faithful and a kinsman of the royal house through descent from Elros, had stood among the king's trusted advisers by right of blood and long service before his warnings against the new cult cost him that place entirely. Sauron, by contrast, arrived at court as a captive with every reason for suspicion, yet within a few years had displaced every rival for the king's confidence, his counsel prized precisely because it answered Ar-Pharazôn's fears and appetites rather than his true interest. The two relationships reveal the same flaw from opposite sides: he trusted whichever voice told him what he wished to hear, and turned against the one that did not, regardless of which counsellor had actually earned his confidence through years of faithful service.

Before he bore the name Ar-Pharazôn, the same figure appears under other names in Tolkien's earliest continuous account of Númenor's fall, composed in the 1930s as background to the abandoned time-travel novel The Lost Road: Angor in the first draft, Tar-kalion in the fuller version titled “The Fall of Númenor.” Under that later name the essential outline of his story was already in place — a proud and mighty ruler, the taking captive of Sauron and submission to his counsel, the launching of an armed fleet against the Undying Lands, and the drowning of the island that followed — but the elaborate apparatus of Adûnaic naming that would later distinguish a King's Man's throne-name from his birth-name did not yet exist, nor had the political rift between the King's Men and the Elf-friends been worked out in the form it would later take.

That apparatus took shape only in the 1940s, alongside Tolkien's invention of the Adûnaic language itself, in the related texts of the Notion Club Papers and "The Drowning of Anadûnê," both later published in Sauron Defeated. It was in this phase of drafting that the king's Adûnaic name Pharazôn and the royal prefix Ar- first appear together, as Tolkien reworked the old tale of Tarkalion into a fuller account of Númenórean linguistic and political self-division. The same drafts also expanded considerably on Sauron's manipulation of the king, setting out at greater length the arguments by which fear of death was turned into defiance of the Valar, groundwork that fed with comparatively little further change into the final narrative preserved in the published Akallabêth.