Belecthor II

Belecthor II belonged to the House of Húrin, the family that held the stewardship of Gondor as a hereditary office. Its founder was Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean blood who served King Minardil as Steward; from his time the office passed within his kin, and after the failure of the royal line at the death of Eärnur it was the Steward Mardil who took the governance of the realm and became the first of the Ruling Stewards. Belecthor stands twenty-first in that roll, after Beregond. The Appendix presents the Ruling Stewards as a numbered sequence with a single date beside each name, and it states only that the office descended from father to son or to the nearest kinsman; it does not say at which points the succession left the direct line. His position in the order is therefore recorded, while his parentage is not, and nothing in the published matter identifies his father.

The name is Sindarin in form, as are the names of the Stewards generally; Gondor's noble houses used Sindarin as a daily tongue, and where the Kings of the older line had often borne names of Quenya shape, the Stewards did not. Nor did they take regnal names, since they never claimed the crown and ruled in the King's stead. The numeral distinguishes him from Belecthor I, the fifteenth Ruling Steward, some two centuries earlier. Such repetition is characteristic of the line: Húrin, Túrin, Denethor and Ecthelion each occur twice among the Stewards, so that a name returning after several generations was itself a claim of continuity.

No gloss of the name is given anywhere in the published writings. Its first element answers to Sindarin beleg, "mighty" or "great", which appears in the names of the Elder Days listed among the recurring elements of Elvish nomenclature; the second element is not explained, and any rendering of the whole would be conjecture. What can be said with more confidence is that the Stewards drew on the older matter of Beleriand for their names — Húrin, Túrin, Beren, Ecthelion, Egalmoth, Orodreth and Turgon all belong first to the First Age — which places Belecthor in a family that named its sons out of remembered history.

The office came to Belecthor II in 2872's reckoning backwards: the Appendix records only that his predecessor Beregond is set at 2811 and he himself at 2872, so that his tenure covers the sixty-one years between those dates. The Gondor he received had been shaped by the crisis of the preceding generation. In 2758 the realm was assailed from the sea and along its coasts while Rohan was overrun from the west, and the Long Winter that followed brought famine and death to both lands; Beregond, then acting for his father Beren, cleared the invaders out of Gondor. In 2759, at the ending of that war, Beren granted the keys of Orthanc to Saruman, and Isengard passed into the keeping of one whom Gondor then reckoned a friend and a warden of the Gap. These were the settled conditions of the realm at Belecthor's accession: peace restored, the alliance with the Mark intact, and the western approach entrusted to a power outside the Steward's command.

Of Belecthor's own acts nothing is set down. The roll of Ruling Stewards gives him a number and a year and no more, and the annals kept for those decades are occupied almost wholly with events far to the north, in which Gondor takes no recorded part. In 2841 Thráin son of Thrór set out from the north and in 2845 was taken and imprisoned in the pits of Dol Guldur, where the last of the Seven Rings was taken from him. In 2850 Gandalf entered that stronghold in secret, learned that its master was indeed Sauron returned, and came upon Thráin as he died. The following year the White Council met upon this news; Gandalf urged an assault on Dol Guldur, and Saruman argued the matter down and prevailed. The consequence of that decision belongs to Belecthor's lifetime even though he had no hand in it, for the attack was postponed a further ninety years, and Sauron sat unchallenged on Gondor's northern flank for the whole of the Steward's rule.

The years were not quiet for Gondor's northern ally, and the annals of the Mark supply what the Gondorian entries omit. In 2851 King Walda was cut off and slain by orcs near Dunharrow after a reign of nine years; his son Folca made and kept a vow to hunt no wild beast while an orc remained in Rohan, and having cleared the land was killed in 2864 by the great boar of Everholt in the Firien Wood. Folcwine, who came to the throne in that year, recovered the marches between Adorn and Isen that had been lost since the Dunlending occupation. No joint campaign of Gondor and Rohan is recorded in Belecthor's time; the first return of the Oath of Eorl in arms after him falls in 2885, thirteen years after his death, when Folcwine sent his twin sons Folcred and Fastred to the aid of Túrin II against the Haradrim, and both fell at the crossings of the Poros.

The one entry that carries his name in the annals proper joins his death to a second loss in the same year. In 2872 Belecthor II died, and in that year the White Tree of the Citadel withered; search was made and no seedling could be found, and the dead tree was left standing where it stood. That tree had been planted in Minas Anor by King Tarondor in 1640, after the Great Plague had killed both the reigning line's tree and much of Gondor's people, and it had stood through the failure of the Kings and the whole succession of Ruling Stewards. Its withering, unaccompanied by any renewal, touched the central claim by which the Stewards governed: they held the realm in the King's name and awaited his return, and the Tree was the emblem of that line. To leave the dead trunk in the Court of the Fountain rather than remove it was a deliberate act of waiting, and it is the nearest thing to a policy that the record attaches to the year of Belecthor's death.

The dead Tree stood in the high court for a hundred and forty-seven years, and it was still there, withered above the fountain and guarded, when Peregrin Took came up to the Citadel in March 3019; it was removed only after the crowning of Elessar, when a sapling of Nimloth's line was found high on the slopes of Mindolluin and the old trunk was laid to rest in Rath Dínen. The stewardship itself passed on without disturbance. Thorondir, the twenty-second of the line, is set at 2882 and so held office some ten years, and after him came Túrin II, in whose long rule the shadow that had merely been watched in Belecthor's time became a matter of arms again: the Haradrim crossing of the Poros in 2885, and by 2901 the abandonment of Ithilien by nearly all who still dwelt there, driven out by the Uruks of Mordor. Belecthor's tenure is thus the last long stretch of the Stewards' peace before the borders began to close in.

What Belecthor II held was not a diminished kingship but a full authority exercised under a formal reservation. The Ruling Stewards governed the realm with the powers of the crown — command of its armies, the ordering of its fiefs, the keeping of its borders — yet the outward marks of kingship were withheld by their own choosing. They were neither crowned nor anointed; their emblem of office was a white rod, and their banner was plain white and bore no device, where the standard of the Kings had carried the White Tree with its seven stars and the crown above. In the throne-hall of Minas Tirith the Steward's seat was a plain chair of black stone set at the foot of the dais, below the empty throne on its high stair. The formula preserved from Mardil's day is that the Stewards would hold rod and rule in the King's name until he should return, and the phrase remained the legal ground of the office through Belecthor's tenure and beyond it.

The practical reach of that authority was bounded on more than one side. Within Gondor the Steward's word ran as the King's would have done, and no institution existed that could check it; but the realm's chief alliance rested on a compact rather than on subjection. Rohan had been granted to the Éothéod by the Steward Cirion in perpetuity, and the sworn friendship between the two peoples obliged each to come at need, so that the Riders were an ally to be asked and not a force to be commanded. Belecthor's own power was that of a mortal man of Númenórean descent, an inheritance by his century much worn down; the long lives of the earlier line had shortened, and nothing in the record suggests he possessed any faculty beyond skill in governance. The single surviving fact of his rule is a date, and the Appendix credits him with no campaign, no building and no decree.

One instrument that later gave a Steward extraordinary reach cannot be attributed to him. The Stone of Anor lay in a secret chamber of the White Tower throughout these centuries, but the later account of the palantíri states that Denethor II was the first of the Stewards to make use of it, and that he did so as a hard-pressed ruler in his own straitened time. Belecthor is therefore to be understood as governing on ordinary report and counsel — messengers, wardens, and the memory of his own house — with no means of seeing beyond his borders that any source ascribes to him.

In the surviving record Belecthor II has kin but no relatives. He is placed within the House of Húrin, and that membership is the whole of his family history: no wife is named, no mother or brother, no child. This silence is not peculiar to him but to the form in which his part of the record was kept. For the Kings of Gondor the Appendix tells marriages, disputed heirs and the enmities that grew out of them, so that a reader can trace who quarrelled with whom and why; for the Ruling Stewards it gives a numbered roll and, only at the very end of the line, a return to persons — the household of Turgon, Ecthelion II and Denethor II, whose sons and wife are described. Belecthor stands in the long middle stretch where the office is remembered and the man who held it is not.

What he did inherit, in place of documented affections, were two standing bonds that came with the rod. The first was to a lord who did not exist: the Stewards held their authority in trust for a king who had not returned, and their own claim to Númenórean descent was one of race and rank rather than of descent from Elendil, which is the reason given for their refusal of the crown. The second was to the Rohirrim, whose friendship with Gondor had been sworn on both sides and bound the descendants of those who swore it. Belecthor's tenure passed without either bond being tested — no summons went north that is recorded, and no claimant appeared in the south.

The relationship most often assumed for him is the one the text declines to make. Because the stewardship normally descended from father to son, Thorondir who followed him is commonly taken for his son and Beregond for his father, and both may well be so; but the Appendix states the rule and not its application, and never marks the places where the office went sideways to a kinsman instead. His attested relations are therefore positional: he comes after one name and before another in a list. It is a thin inheritance for a biography, and an accurate one for an office that had been designed to outlast the men who filled it.