Barahir

Barahir is counted the eighth of the Ruling Stewards of Gondor, standing in the roll between Hador and Dior. He belonged, as all the Ruling Stewards did, to the House of Húrin, so called from Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent who held the stewardship under King Minardil in earlier days. From that house the office was drawn thereafter, and after the passing of the last king it became hereditary in it, held in the name of an absent monarch rather than in the holder's own right. The appendices state only that the stewardship descended from father to son or to the nearest kinsman, without saying which particular successions were of the one kind and which of the other; consequently no parentage is recorded for Barahir, and his exact relation to Hador before him is not given. Nothing is preserved of his character or manner of rule, and no epithet or by-name attaches to him in the records.

The name itself is Sindarin in form, and its second element is the word for lord or master that recurs in Grey-elven compounds. It was borne long before in the Elder Days by Barahir son of Bregor, chieftain of the House of Bëor and lord in Dorthonion, whose son was Beren. That the Stewards of Gondor should have carried such a name is unsurprising: the roll of their line is thick with names taken from the northern legends of the First Age, among them Húrin, Túrin, Hador, Beren, Dior, Turgon and Ecthelion, a usage that marks the Stewards' claim to the older Númenórean and Elf-friend inheritance without laying claim to the royal style.

The name was used again in the same house at the very end of the Third Age, for a Barahir who was a grandson of the Steward Faramir is named as the author of the fuller account of Aragorn and Arwen from which the appended tale is drawn. The two are not to be confused: the later bearer was a chronicler under the restored kings, while the earlier held the rule of Gondor in the centuries before the Watchful Peace ended.

The roll of the Stewards preserved in the appendices is a bare list of names with a single year set against each, and that year is the year of death, not of accession. Since the office passed at once upon the death of its holder, Barahir's rule is to be reckoned from 2412 backwards to 2395, the year given for Hador before him, so that he governed Gondor for some seventeen years of the Third Age. No date is recorded for his birth, no age at his death, and no length of tenure is stated in words anywhere in the chronicles; the span is an inference from the two death-years standing next to one another in the list. Nothing further is set down of him under his own name.

The rule he inherited had by then been vacant of kingship for three and a half centuries. In 2050 King Eärnur rode out from Minas Tirith to Minas Morgul to answer the challenge of its lord, taking only a small company of knights, and neither he nor any of them was heard of again. He left no heir, and no other claimant could establish a descent that the Council of Gondor would accept without dispute; the memory of the Kin-strife made men unwilling to risk a contested crown. Mardil, the King's Steward, therefore governed in his stead, and the stewardship became hereditary in his house. Barahir held that same charge on the same terms: authority exercised in the name of an absent king, without crown, without the ancient throne, and formally provisional however many generations it lasted.

His years fall wholly within the long quiet that the chroniclers called the Watchful Peace. It began in 2063, when Sauron's power was withdrawn from Dol Guldur in the south of Mirkwood and he passed for a time out of the West, and it ended in 2460, when he returned there with strength increased. Barahir's stewardship lies near the middle of that interval, some three hundred and thirty years into it and rather less than fifty years before its close. Through those decades no assault out of Minas Morgul is recorded, though the Nazgûl still held the city and Gondor still kept watch upon its passes; the vigilance from which the peace took its name was maintained without being tested.

The shape of the realm he governed had been fixed by disasters long past. The Great Plague of 1636 had emptied whole districts and thinned the guard set upon the borders of Mordor; the wars against the Wainriders and the Balchoth in the following centuries had cost Gondor two kings and much of its eastern reach; and in 2002 Minas Ithil had fallen to the Nazgûl after siege, so that the eastern tower became Minas Morgul and the city of the sun in the west was renamed Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard, in recognition of what it now existed to do. The stone of Ithil passed to the enemy with the city. A Steward of Barahir's generation inherited a frontier already drawn back and a population no longer sufficient to press it forward; the business of such a rule was maintenance rather than recovery.

No deed, campaign, building or judgement is attributed to him in any surviving text, and the year-by-year chronicle passes over the whole of his tenure without an entry. This distinguishes him from several of his successors, whose acts drew notes into the record: Cirion, who in 2510 granted Calenardhon to Eorl and received his oath; Boromir, who long held the enemy from Ithilien; Denethor I, in whose time Uruks first came out of Mordor and Osgiliath was ruined past habitation in 2475. That last event followed Barahir's death by only sixty-three years, and it is a fair measure of what his stewardship was: the last stretch of Gondor's later history in which nothing needed to be written down. He died in 2412 and the office passed to Dior, under whom the quiet still held; the shadow returned in 2460, and after that the annals of the Stewards are seldom silent again.

What Barahir held was, in law, a deputyship, and in practice the whole working authority of a kingdom. The Ruling Steward commanded the armies of Gondor and the levies of its fiefs, kept the passes and the river-crossings, gave judgement, and disposed of the revenues and the garrisons; nothing in the surviving records suggests any council or officer with power to overrule him. The outward signs of the office were correspondingly modest: a white rod of office carried in the hand, and a seat of black stone set at the foot of the dais in the hall of the kings, below the tall empty throne that no Steward mounted. No Steward was crowned, none took a royal title or style, and none, so far as the chronicles say, sat in the king's chair. The distinction was maintained through the whole line, and Barahir inherited it as he inherited the rest.

The limits ran deeper than ceremony. A Ruling Steward was a mortal man of Númenórean descent whose line had already lost much of the long life of the earlier kings, and to whom no art, power or hallow of office attached; what force he could bring to bear was the force of Gondor's men, walls, ships and stores, and no more. He could not heal, foresee or command any thing that would not obey a captain. The one instrument of extraordinary reach still left in Minas Tirith was the palantír of the White Tower, and the chronicles record no Steward using it before Denethor II at the very end of the line; whether earlier holders of the office knew of it, or forbore, is not stated. The most durable act ascribed to the stewardship in this period is administrative rather than martial: the revised calendar instituted by Mardil, by which Gondor thereafter kept its years, and in which Barahir's own recorded date is given.

In the legendarium as a whole his function is structural. He is one link in a chain of twenty-six holders whose collective achievement was that the office existed, unbroken and unusurped, when a claimant with an accepted descent at last appeared; the provisional character of the rule, which might have been a fiction after four hundred years, was kept real by men of whom nothing else is remembered. That the arrangement was still understood as provisional is shown at its close, when the last Steward gave up the rod before the returning king and had it returned to him, the office continuing as a hereditary charge under a crown once more occupied. Barahir contributes to that outcome only by having held and passed on what he received.

No person is named anywhere in the records as kin to Barahir. Neither wife nor child nor sibling is set down, and the appendices give him no father in words, so that the whole of his recorded kinship consists in the house to which the office belonged. This is not peculiar to him. The chroniclers of the Stewards' line noted a relationship only where some later matter turned upon it, and for the long middle stretch of the roll they noted nothing at all; a Steward's family appears in the record chiefly when a son quarrelled, a daughter married outward, or an heir did something that had to be explained. Barahir's silence is therefore the ordinary condition of his generation rather than a gap peculiar to him, and it forbids any statement about whom he loved, trusted or fought beside.

The one bond that can be described with certainty is a bond to a man he never saw and who had been gone three and a half centuries when he took up the rod. Every act of a Ruling Steward was performed on another's behalf, and the party to whom he was bound was an absence: a king neither returned nor declared dead, whose chair stood empty in the hall where the Steward gave judgement. That the northern heirs of Isildur were in fact kin to the old royal house was known in Gondor and had been argued in due form long before, and the argument had been set aside; the men of that line lived on unacknowledged in the wilds of Eriador while Barahir governed. His stewardship rested upon that unresolved claim, and its legitimacy consisted in refusing to close it.

As to allies, Gondor in his day had none of consequence outside its own fiefs. The kindred realm in the north had perished in 1974, and no dealings between the two survived it; the horsemen of the upper Anduin, whose oath would bind them to Gondor in 2510, were then a small and distant folk with whom no compact existed. What remained to a Steward were the lords of the coastlands and the mountain vales, who answered his summons and sent their companies when called. Against these stood a neighbour lodged across the river within sight of his walls, ruled by servants of the Enemy who neither treated nor withdrew. It was an adversarial relation conducted wholly by watching, and Barahir's part in it was to hand it on unchanged.