Baranor

Baranor belongs to that class of figures in Tolkien's work who exist entirely within another man's name. He is mentioned only through his son Beregond, who introduces himself by his patronymic when he first meets Peregrin Took in the Citadel of Minas Tirith at the opening of the war-book. Nothing in the narrative describes Baranor's appearance, station, age, or whether he was still alive at that time; the reader learns only that a man of that name fathered a soldier of Gondor. Such single-mention patronyms are common in the later books of The Lord of the Rings, where they serve to place a speaker socially without opening a new thread of story.

By people he is a Man of Gondor, and by all indication a man of the City rather than of the outland fiefs, since his son stands in the Third Company of the Guard of the Citadel and is at home in the customs, watchwords and gossip of Minas Tirith. The naming itself supports this. Appendix F records that the Men of Gondor kept names of Sindarin form long after the Elvish tongues had ceased to be spoken daily among them, an inherited usage rather than a living one, and Baranor is such a name. It carries no title, no epithet, and no house-name; he is not attached to any of the great lineages the narrative names elsewhere.

Tolkien nowhere glosses the name, and no note in the published works assigns it a meaning, so any reading of its parts remains inference. The first element resembles the baran- of Baranduin, the Sindarin river-name that the Hobbits reshaped into Brandywine; beyond that resemblance the published material offers no support, and the ending is not securely identifiable. What the name does show plainly is a family habit: Baranor, Beregond, and Beregond's young son Bergil form three generations whose names begin alike, a pattern of alliterative or element-sharing naming that recurs among Gondorian families and, in this case, is all the genealogy the text preserves.

Only a single hour in Baranor's association with the story can be fixed by the calendar, and it is not an hour of his own. On the ninth day of March in the year 3019 of the Third Age, Gandalf and Peregrin Took rode up out of the Pelennor and entered Minas Tirith before the sun was well risen; the Tale of Years sets that arrival on that day, in the last week before the assault on the City. Within a few hours of it Denethor had dismissed the hobbit from audience and set a man of the Guard to attend him, and in the first words that passed between them the guardsman gave his father's name along with his own. That utterance is the whole of Baranor's presence in the narrative. He is not in the room, he is not said to be living, and nothing follows from him afterwards except through the man who named him.

Of the years before that morning the books preserve nothing whatever. The annals of Gondor in Appendix A carry the line of the Ruling Stewards down to Denethor II and name a good many captains, kinsmen and enemies along the way, and the Tale of Years marks the deaths, battles and embassies of the later Third Age in some detail; in neither does the name occur. No office is assigned to him, no service in the earlier fighting at Osgiliath or in Ithilien, no date of birth or death. His lifetime can be bracketed only by inference from his son, who is a seasoned soldier of the Citadel in 3019 and is himself a father; beyond that the record is silent, and it does not even settle whether Baranor was alive when his name was spoken in the Citadel that morning.

The days that followed were the crisis of the City, and they pass without him. On the tenth of March the darkness came out of Mordor and the companies of the outland fiefs marched in through the Gate; on the thirteenth the last men were driven back from the Rammas, and on the fifteenth the Pelennor was fought. Baranor appears in none of it. This is not, in itself, evidence that he was dead or absent, since the great bulk of the defenders in these chapters are unnamed and the narrative follows only a handful of men closely; but nothing in the text asks the reader to look for him either. He remains what he was in the first exchange: a name behind a name.

What history the name acquires, it acquires vicariously, and chiefly on that fifteenth of March. Beregond left his appointed post at the door of the Hallows and spilled blood in the sacred place in order to keep Faramir from being burned alive by his own father, and in doing so he broke two laws of Gondor at once. His young son Bergil, meanwhile, was in the Houses of Healing running errands for the herb-master while the wounded were brought in from the field. Both are set out in the text as sons and fathers in an unbroken chain, so that the household of Baranor is present at the hinge of the war in the persons of a grandson and a son, and in no other way.

The last movement belongs to the settlement of the realm. After the fall of Barad-dûr and the crowning of Elessar on the first of May 3019, the king gave judgement on the guardsman's double offence: he was put out of the Guard of the Citadel and out of Minas Tirith, and made captain of the White Company, the guard of the Prince of Ithilien, to dwell in honour in Emyn Arnen. The sentence is the one durable consequence attached to the line. Baranor's descendants leave the City in which his son had served and are fixed instead in the household of Faramir across the river, in the Fourth Age.

Set out chronologically, then, the history of Baranor consists of one dated morning on which someone else said his name, flanked on either side by blanks that the published works do not fill. This is a normal condition for the minor Men of Gondor rather than an oversight: Tolkien built the depth of the war chapters partly out of such names, which imply households and generations without being given stories of their own. Any attempt to supply him with deeds, an office, or a death would go past what the text will bear, and the honest account of his life is that it can be read only backwards, out of the service and sentence of his son.

Baranor's role in the legendarium is a formal one: he is the fixed point of a name-line, and the line is all that is used. Gondor and Rohan both practise the patronymic style of self-naming at first meetings, but the two differ in what lies behind it. When Éomer names his father to strangers in the fields of Rohan, the father is himself a man of the annals, with a death and a place in the descent of the Mark; when Beregond names his father in the Citadel, the name closes rather than opens. Baranor thus marks the edge of the narrative's attention — the point at which Tolkien's habit of giving men fathers stops being genealogy and becomes texture. His function is discharged entirely in a single act of identification performed by someone else, in a scene whose real business was the watchwords and the ordering of a guest's day.

Of powers in any ordinary sense there are none on record. He is a mortal Man of Gondor in the last century of the Third Age, and no art, craft, skill at arms, office, or authority is ascribed to him anywhere in the published works. Nothing marks him as of the high Númenórean strain whose longevity and bearing the appendices distinguish from that of the common people of the realm, and nothing marks him as outside it either. The middling capacities that would follow from rank — a company to command, a fief, a voice in the Steward's counsels — are equally absent, and the text does not make service in the Guard of the Citadel a thing passed from father to son, so even his son's post cannot be claimed as an inheritance from him.

The limit, then, is total, and stating it plainly is the whole of an honest account. Baranor acts upon nothing and is acted upon by nothing; no event in the war turns on him, and the narrative would lose no incident if the patronymic were struck out. The temptation with such a figure is to read his son's qualities backwards into him — to make the father a steady soldier because the son was one, or a man of conscience because the son proved to be one at cost — and the text gives no warrant for it. What can fairly be credited to him is an effect rather than a power: he is one of the names by which Minas Tirith is made to feel like a city with households in it, inhabited by men who came from somewhere and were not conjured for the siege. That effect is real and deliberate, but it belongs to the naming, not to any deed of his.

Every relationship the text grants Baranor is the same relationship, stated once and from below: he is somebody's father. The line runs male and unbroken through three generations, and the women who must stand in it are wholly absent from the record — neither Beregond's mother nor Bergil's is named, described, or alluded to anywhere, so that the household reaches the reader as a bare succession of sons naming fathers. Nor does the family carry a house-name of the kind the greater lineages of Gondor bear. No seat, no kindred, no cousins or in-laws are claimed on Baranor's behalf, and the one bond that is claimed is asserted by the person on the far side of it.

What can be observed of that household is its conduct towards a stranger, and it is observed at some length. The hobbit put into Beregond's charge is fed, walked out along the walls, told what the trumpets mean and which companies are still expected, and then handed over to the guardsman's young son for the remainder of the day. Bergil, after some initial doubt about who and what the visitor really was, takes him down to see the men of the outland fiefs come in through the Gate and treats him afterwards as a companion rather than a charge. Between them, father and son give Peregrin his only sight of Minas Tirith from among its ordinary people instead of from the Citadel. That courtesy is the sole extended behaviour the text ever shows in Baranor's descendants, and whatever it is worth as a family portrait, it is all there is.

Beyond the family there are attachments but no enmities. Beregond's service binds him to the Steward's house, yet in conversation his warmth settles plainly on the younger son rather than on the Lord of the City, and the crisis he later meets is a collision between an office and a person, not a quarrel with an adversary. No enemy of any kind attaches to the line: no feud, no rival house, no accusation, nothing that would make Baranor a party to anything. Even the place where his descendants finally come to rest is fixed by allegiance rather than by blood, since it is Faramir's service and not any kinship that carries them across the river. The father stands outside all of it — joined to the story by a single word, and to no one in it by anything further.

The one thing the drafts add to this corner of the story concerns the son rather than the father. In the working papers for the Minas Tirith chapter, printed by Christopher Tolkien in The War of the Ring, the guardsman told off to attend the hobbit is not yet called Beregond but Berithil, and the name was altered to its final form only at a later stage of writing. The substance of the scene was settled before the name was: the man is already a soldier of the Citadel, already charged with the watchwords and with showing the guest something of the City, and already the father of the boy who takes the hobbit down to the Gate. What shifted was the label, not the function.

This matters for Baranor only by dependence. Because he exists in the finished text as nothing but a patronymic, his footing in the drafts is no firmer than that of the man who speaks it, and the History does not treat him as a figure in his own right at any stage: there is no earlier conception of him, no discarded office, and no passage in which he acts or is described. The drafts of the war chapters preserve a good deal of Tolkien's trial and error over Gondorian nomenclature, and the renaming of Berithil to Beregond belongs to that process; whether the father's name was reached before, with, or after the son's is not something the published draft material settles.