Belecthor I

Belecthor I enters the record chiefly as a name in the roll of the Ruling Stewards of Gondor, set down in the list of that office among the Realms in Exile. He is counted the fifteenth of the Ruling Stewards, following Húrin II and preceding Orodreth, and no epithet or byname is attached to him there, as one is to Mardil the Steadfast at the head of the line. The ordinal is a convenience of the chronicler rather than a style he used in life: a later holder of the office bore the same name, and the two are told apart by number in the list. The form of the name itself is Sindarin, which is unremarkable for a man of his station, since the Dúnedain of Gondor kept the Grey-elven tongue in use among the high houses and commonly gave their children names of Elvish shape rather than of the older speech of Men.

No gloss of the name is recorded anywhere in the published matter, and it is worth saying plainly that its meaning is not known. What can be observed is a resemblance: the opening syllables answer to the Sindarin element beleg, rendered as mighty or great in the list of name-elements printed with The Silmarillion, where it is illustrated by Beleg the bowman of Doriath, by the dwarf-city Belegost, and by Belegaer, the sea between Middle-earth and the West. The second part of the name has no such attested parallel, and Tolkien nowhere sets out how the two halves join or what they mean together. The resemblance may therefore be noted, but it should not be pressed into a translation.

By blood he belonged to the House of Húrin, which took its name from Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent who served King Minardil as Steward. From that time the Kings drew their Stewards from among Húrin's kindred, and after the days of the Steward Pelendur the office passed by inheritance in the manner of a crown, from father to son or else to the nearest kinsman. This is the whole of what the record gives concerning Belecthor's ancestry. The list of Stewards names no father for him and no mother, and the general rule of inheritance does not by itself settle which of the individual successions ran from father to son and which passed sideways to a cousin or a brother. His membership of the House of Húrin and his place in the sequence are attested; his immediate parentage is not, and is best left unstated.

The office Belecthor took up at the death of Húrin II in the year 2628 of the Third Age was by then a settled institution some five and a half centuries old. Since the passing of Eärnur the Stewards had held the whole authority of the realm, governing in the name of a king who did not come; and they had shaped a careful etiquette around that fiction. They set no crown upon their heads, took no sceptre, and carried a white rod as the single token of their charge. The ancient throne of the Kings in the hall of the Citadel stood empty in their presence, and the Steward's seat was a plain chair of black stone set upon the lowest step of the dais below it. Belecthor's whole tenure was conducted under those forms, as his predecessors' had been and his successors' would be.

The realm he inherited was smaller and warier than the one the Kings had ruled. Minas Ithil had fallen to the Nazgûl in 2002 and become Minas Morgul, and the shadow of that city lay across Ithilien; Osgiliath, already emptied by the Great Plague, had been sacked by the Uruks who came out of Mordor in 2475 and never truly recovered, its great bridge broken. The long lull that the annalists call the Watchful Peace had ended in 2460 with the return of the power in Dol Guldur, and the Stewards who came after had governed a frontier rather than a heartland. None of this is credited to Belecthor's own doing; it is the inheritance, and it is what any statement about his rule must be measured against.

One arrangement made by an earlier Steward continued to hold through his years: the grant of Calenardhon to Eorl and his people by Cirion after the deliverance at the Field of Celebrant in 2510, and the friendship sworn between the two realms upon it. By Belecthor's day the Éothéod had been settled north of the White Mountains for well over a century, and the Mark had passed to its third and fourth kings. Aldor the Old, whose reign was the longest in that line, died in 2645, within Belecthor's stewardship, and Fréa succeeded him. No dealing between Minas Tirith and Edoras in these particular years is recorded on either side of the chronicle, and none should be supplied.

The plain fact of his history is that the annals are silent for its whole length. The Tale of Years, which notes the killing of Dáin I by a cold-drake in 2589 and Thrór's return to Erebor the year after, then records nothing at all until the pipe-weed of the Southfarthing is put down under the year 2670 — an interval of some eighty years that covers Belecthor's accession, his rule, and his death, and that names no war, no embassy, no building, and no calamity in Gondor. This is not evidence of quiet, since the compilers of that table wrote from a Shire perspective and kept only what bore upon the tale they were serving. But it is the limit of the evidence, and it means there is no deed of Belecthor I to relate.

The single date the roll of Stewards sets beside his name is 2655, which is a year of death and not of accession; the list gives one figure only for each holder, unlike the tables of the Kings of the Mark with their years of birth and death. Reckoned from the corresponding figure for Húrin II, his rule can have run no more than twenty-seven years, and his successor Orodreth held the office some thirty. Nothing is said of how he died, and the unbroken running of the list from name to name gives no hint of a disputed or violent succession. By the custom of his house he would have been laid in the tombs of the Stewards in Rath Dínen, the silent street behind the Citadel, though no burial of his is recorded there or anywhere else.

A caution belongs at the end of any account of him, because the record does contain a Belecthor to whom events are attached, and it is not this one. It was in the days of the second Steward of the name, more than two hundred years later, that the White Tree of the Citadel withered and died, and no seedling could be found to replace it, so that the dead tree was left standing in the court until the crowning of the King. That episode is sometimes drawn back to the earlier bearer of the name by carelessness. For Belecthor I the record yields a house, an ordinal, a place in the sequence, and a year of death; the rest is properly a blank.

The authority Belecthor I held was, in everything but name, the authority of a king. A Ruling Steward commanded the armed strength of Gondor and disposed its garrisons, gave judgement, and received the allegiance of the lords of the fiefs that lay about the capital and along the coasts, from the princedom of Dol Amroth to the mountain vales; the great officers of the City answered to him and to no one else. What the office lacked was not power but title to power. The line ruled under a standing undertaking to keep the rod and the governance only until a king should come again, and each lord in turn took up that charge as his father had left it. The effect of the formula was to make every act of a Steward provisional in theory while leaving it wholly unqualified in fact, and it is under this arrangement, and not under any lesser commission, that Belecthor's rule must be understood.

The limits upon that power were of a constitutional rather than a practical kind. No Steward could enlarge his position into kingship, and none is recorded as having attempted it; the governing question had been decided generations earlier, when the Steward Pelendur and the Council of Gondor set aside the claim of the northern line and gave the crown to a captain of the house of Anárion, so that the succession thereafter ran by that decision and not by a Steward's choosing. Nor was the office one a man might lay down or bestow: it descended by inheritance within the House of Húrin and was held for life. To this must be added the plain shrinking of what there was to rule, since the eastern lands beyond Anduin were held only in name and the northern province had passed by an earlier Steward's grant out of Gondor's keeping altogether.

Of personal capacity nothing whatever is attested. The Stewards were mortal men of Númenórean descent whose length of days had already much diminished by this period, and no gift, craft, or dealing with the Wise is credited to any of the middle bearers of the office. One instrument of rule that did remain in the keeping of the Lords of the City was the surviving seeing-stone of Minas Anor, but the evidence suggests it lay unused through the long middle of the line, and the assertion of a Steward's right to look into it belongs to the last holder of the office rather than to his distant predecessors. It would be wrong, then, to read back into Belecthor I either the reach or the instruments that the record attaches to Denethor II. What can be said is that he held an authority which in its own sphere had no superior, and that the sources preserve the shape of it without preserving a single instance of its use.

Every tie the record permits Belecthor I is a tie of kindred, for in his generation the House of Húrin was at once a family and the government of the realm: his kinsmen were also his predecessors in the office and would be his successors in it. One habit of that house shows in the names it gave its sons, which were drawn from figures of the Elder Days — Húrin and Túrin from the kindred of Hador, Beren and Barahir from the house of Bëor, Ecthelion from fallen Gondolin, and Orodreth, the name borne by Belecthor's own successor, from the Elf-lord who held the tower upon Tol Sirion until the Enemy's servant took it. Nothing is said of who chose such names or why, but the practice binds the Stewards' family to a past much older than Gondor.

Of a household about him nothing survives. No wife is named for Belecthor I, no daughter and no son, though the passage of the rod to Orodreth in 2655 shows that an heir of some degree stood ready to take it. This is the common condition of the middle stewardship rather than anything peculiar to his case: for the long central stretch of the line the compilers kept the man, the number and the year, and let the rest of the family go, so that the only wife of a Ruling Steward whose name comes down at all is Finduilas of Dol Amroth, who belongs to the last generation of the house. The women of Belecthor's own generation are absent from the record altogether.

His adversaries can be described as powers only, never as persons. The realm in his century stood against the servants of the Enemy east of Anduin and against the shipmen of Umbar, the southern haven that had long since passed out of Gondor's keeping; rather more than a hundred years after his death their fleets fell upon the coastlands in the same year that Rohan was overrun from east and west. No king, captain or lord among them is named as an opponent of Belecthor, and no embassy, defiance or battle of his with any of them is set down. What the sources preserve is therefore an impersonal relation: a border kept against neighbours known collectively, and dated by the harm they did before his time and after it.