Belegorn

Belegorn belonged to the House of Húrin, the family in which the stewardship of Gondor had become an inherited office. Its ancestor was Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent who served as Steward to King Minardil, and after him the office remained in one kindred; when the line of kings failed with Eärnur, it was these Stewards who ruled the realm without taking the crown, beginning with Mardil. In the roll of Ruling Stewards, Belegorn stands fourth, after Herion and before Húrin I. Appendix A gives that sequence and little else: no father, mother, wife, or child is recorded for him, and since the succession is described only as passing to a son or to the nearest kinsman, it cannot be said from the text which particular links in the chain were father to son.

The name itself is Sindarin in form, which accords with the usage of Gondor: among the Dúnedain of the South Sindarin was the tongue of daily speech, while Quenya was reserved for lore and for high ceremony, including the royal names of the earlier kings. The Stewards, who were not kings, bear names of the ordinary Elvish form of their country, and several of them are names borrowed from the heroes of the Elder Days — Húrin, Túrin, Beren, Barahir, and Hador all recur in the list. Belegorn is not one of these revivals; no bearer of the name is known before him, though it is built from elements thoroughly familiar in Sindarin naming.

Of those elements the first is plain enough. Beleg, glossed as mighty or great, appears in the name of Beleg the archer of Doriath, in Belegaer for the Great Sea, and in the Dwarf-city Belegost. The second element is less secure. If it is orn, tree, the word found in Celeborn, Fangorn, Hirilorn, and mallorn, then the name would mean something like mighty tree; but no gloss for Belegorn is given anywhere in Tolkien's published writings, and the sequence of sounds admits other divisions. What can be stated without inference is only that the name is composed in the manner usual for the men of Gondor, and that its sense is nowhere translated for us.

The years set beside the names in the roll of the Ruling Stewards are years of death, not of accession, so that each steward's tenure is bounded by the figure given for the man before him and by his own. On that reckoning Belegorn took up the office in 2204's predecessor year of 2148, when Herion died, and held it until his own death fifty-six years later. That is a long tenure by the measure of the early stewardship, and it is the whole of what the annals allow to be said about the shape of his life: no birth-year is preserved, no age at accession, no marriage, and no year in which he might have come of age or taken any share in the government before the rod passed to him. The office he received was already three generations old as a ruling one, the kings having failed with Eärnur, whose departure to Minas Morgul in 2050 left Mardil the first to govern in the king's name.

Of what Belegorn did in those fifty-six years nothing whatever is recorded. Appendix A sets down his name and his date and passes at once to Húrin I, and the Tale of Years, which enters even minor matters of the North and of Erebor for other stretches of the Age, carries no entry for Gondor between the beginning of the Watchful Peace and its ending. The narrative of the South becomes circumstantial again only with the stewards of the later centuries: with the assaults out of Mordor in the days of Denethor I, and with Cirion's grant of Calenardhon to the Éothéod in 2510. Belegorn belongs to the stretch of the record that lies between those two kinds of telling, where the succession is preserved but the events are not.

The silence has a cause that can be named. In 2063 Sauron had withdrawn from Dol Guldur and gone into hiding in the East, and from that year until 2460 the chroniclers reckoned the Watchful Peace, a span of some four centuries in which the Shadow made no open move. Belegorn's whole term of office falls within it, and well within it: he came to the stewardship eighty-five years after it began and died two hundred and fifty-six years before it ended. Whatever the borders of Gondor suffered in his day from Harad or from the seaward raiders, the annals record no war for which his name is remembered, and the quiet was in any case not trusted by those who kept watch, since the Wise judged that the enemy of the North had only removed himself and would come again.

What the office itself required of him can be described even where his exercise of it cannot. The Ruling Stewards governed with the full authority of kings but declined the style: they did not wear the crown, and they did not sit in the high seat, but took a black stone chair set below the dais on which the empty throne stood, and their token was a white rod. Their rule was held in the name of a king who might yet return, a formula that had by Belegorn's generation already outlasted a century of absence and would outlast twenty-four more. To govern under it for fifty-six years was to keep a fiction in good order, and the fact that the fiction held is the substance of what such a reign consisted in.

Belegorn died in 2204 and was followed by Húrin I, who held the office until 2244 and gave the ruling family the name by which it is afterwards known. Whether the man who succeeded him was his son the text declines to say, describing the descent only in general terms; what it does establish is that the passage was orderly, and that in the fourth generation of the stewardship the succession was neither contested nor interrupted. Set against the Kin-strife of the fifteenth century of the Age, when a disputed inheritance had cost Gondor a fleet, a province, and much of its strength on the sea, an uncontested handing-on was not a small thing. It is the only historical statement the sources permit about Belegorn, and it is made not by anything said of him but by the unbroken shape of the list in which his name stands fourth.

The power Belegorn held was that of the crown exercised under another name. A Ruling Steward commanded the host of Gondor and its ships, ordered the defence of the borders and the fiefs that furnished the levies, and disposed of the revenues and lands of the realm; that his acts bound Gondor permanently is shown by what later holders of the office did with it, one of them giving away a whole province for ever to a people from the North. Nothing in the sources indicates any authority within the realm competent to overrule him. Gondor had possessed a council of some standing — in the fourteenth century of the Third Age it was that council, with the Steward Pelendur speaking in it, which set aside the claim of Arvedui of Arthedain and gave the crown to Eärnil — but of any such body in the days of the Ruling Stewards the text says nothing at all, and the fourth Steward's fifty-six years are described by no institution save his own.

What the office withheld was not authority but style, and with the style certain things that in Gondor belonged to kingship alone. The Stewards were sworn to hold rule until the king should come again, a formula that made the whole of their power provisional in theory whatever it was in practice, and none of them undertook to end the interregnum by assuming the crown himself. The crown, meanwhile, was not theirs to wear or to bestow: it lay in the tombs of the Silent Street with a dead king, and it was fetched out only when a claimant appeared whom the last Steward acknowledged. Older belief in the city held that the true king could be known by his healing hands, a mark no steward is anywhere said to have borne. Belegorn's authority, then, was complete in the ordinary business of government and stopped precisely at the sacral edge of it.

No personal gift or capacity is claimed for any of the Ruling Stewards beyond what belonged to men of Númenórean descent whose span had long been shortening. The one instrument that might have set them apart was the Stone of Minas Anor, and the discussion of the palantíri preserved in Unfinished Tales treats the constant use of it by Denethor II as a departure — something not reported of the stewards who came before him, though as heirs of the king's authority they may be reckoned its lawful masters. Whether Belegorn ever looked into it is not stated, and no writer asserts that he did. His role in the legendarium is therefore that of a name holding a place: the office worked, the realm was governed, and the powers of the fourth Steward are known only in the abstract, from what the office was, and never in a single instance of their use.

Not one personal tie is recorded of Belegorn: no wife, no child, no friend, no rival. That silence is less a fact about the man than about the kind of record he stands in. For the kings of Gondor the annals do name women and kinsmen, but chiefly where the inheritance turned upon them — the marriage of Valacar to a princess of the Northmen, which the southern lords would not accept, or the claim urged in the right of Fíriel, the daughter of Ondoher, when the crown was disposed of by a council rather than by descent. Where the succession was quiet, the chronicler had no occasion to name anybody, and the stewardship in its fourth generation was quiet. What survives of Belegorn's kindred is a place between two men in a roll, which is a statement about an office and not about a household.

The partners of such a rule were the great houses of the fiefs, and of these the best documented is Dol Amroth, whose princes are traced in the writings published after Tolkien's death from Galador in the early years of the twenty-first century of the Third Age. That line was therefore some two centuries old when Belegorn took the rod, and it outlasted the stewardship itself; a marriage between the two houses is attested only at the very end, when the last Ruling Steward wedded a daughter of Dol Amroth. Whether the fourth Steward had any dealing with the princes of his own day is nowhere said. The sources establish only that the men whose levies he could call on held their lands by inheritance as he held his office.

Outward, the shape of his position can be described by two absences. Northward there was no longer a kindred realm: the North-kingdom had ended some hundred and seventy years before he came to the stewardship, and the heirs of Isildur went thereafter as chieftains of a scattered people, with no recorded exchange between them and the rulers of the South. Southward the old adversary was in an uncertain state, for Umbar had been retaken and the rebel line destroyed in 1810, and the sources do not say whether Gondor still kept the haven in Belegorn's lifetime or had already lost it again to the men of Harad. He is thus a ruler with neither a named ally nor a named enemy, which is precisely what the record of a quiet century looks like from the inside.