Beregond

Beregond belonged to the family that Gondor knew as the House of Húrin, the kindred from which its Ruling Stewards were drawn. The house took its name from Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean blood who served as Steward to King Minardil; his descendants held the office thereafter, and from Pelendur's time onward the office passed by inheritance, in the manner of a crown, running, as the Appendix puts it, from father to son or to the nearest kinsman. Mardil marks a different turn, later and for another reason: with him begins the line of the Ruling Stewards, who governed in the name of a king who did not return. Nothing in the record marks Beregond out as coming from any other stock, and the succession is named outright: the Appendix calls him Beren's son where it tells of his victory over the invaders from the North and the East and records that he succeeded his father, though the bare list of Stewards gives only the order and not the kinship. He was, then, a Dúnadan of Gondor of the ruling family, but not of the royal line of Anárion, whose seat the Stewards kept without claiming.

The name itself is Sindarin in form, which is what one expects of the Stewards and of the older families of Gondor generally, where the Grey-elven tongue remained the speech of courtesy and supplied the names of men of rank; the Kings before them had more often borne names of Quenya shape. No gloss of the name is given anywhere in the published work, and none should be invented for it. What can be observed is that Beregond stands slightly apart from his neighbours in the roll: Beren before him, and further back Húrin, Túrin, Barahir, Hador and Ecthelion, are names lifted straight out of the elder days and worn again in Gondor as a kind of remembrance, whereas his own is not one of those borrowed names.

One further point belongs to the naming rather than to the history. A second Beregond appears in the narrative of the War of the Ring, a soldier of the Guard of the Citadel and son of Baranor, who serves under the last Ruling Steward and is met by Peregrin Took in Minas Tirith. The two are distinct men separated by centuries, and no text asserts kinship between them; the repetition is simply the habit of Gondor, where old names returned in later generations. Readers coming to the Steward through the story of the War should be careful not to carry the guardsman's deeds back to him, for the Appendix records of this Beregond little more than his name and his place in the line.

The first year in which the chronicle sets Beregond down at work is 2758, and it finds him already in the field rather than in the Steward's chair, for Beren still held the office. In that year Gondor was struck from the sea by three fleets that had been long in preparation, coming north out of Umbar and the Haradwaith; the attackers put men ashore at many points along the southern coasts, and the northernmost of their landings was made near the mouth of the Isen. The blow fell in the same season upon Rohan, which was assailed from the east and from the west at once, overrun, and reduced to holding the dales of the White Mountains while the Hornburg was besieged. Neither realm could relieve the other, since each had an enemy standing on its own soil, and the conduct of the war in Gondor fell to Beregond.

The fighting was made worse by the weather. Late in 2758 the Long Winter set in, with cold and heavy snows driving out of the north and east, and it held for something near five months; in Eriador and in Rohan it brought famine and a great many deaths, and it killed Helm and both his sons. South of the White Mountains the season pressed less hard, and Beregond used the advantage: before spring returned he had broken the invasion and cleared the coasts. He then sent help northward to Rohan without delay, where Fréaláf had come down from Dunharrow and cut down Wulf in Meduseld, so that the second line of the Kings of the Mark began in a land that had to be built again from its foundations. The Appendix reckons Beregond the ablest captain Gondor had raised since Boromir the eleventh Steward, who in his own day had won back Ithilien for a season.

Four years after the victory, in 2763, Beregond took up the rod. He came to it with the invasion beaten, the alliance with Rohan renewed by the plain fact that Gondor had sent men when Rohan had nothing, and the treasury and manpower of the realm badly drawn down by a war fought on two fronts in a killing winter. He also inherited an arrangement he had not made. In 2759 his predecessor had given the keys of Orthanc to Saruman, who settled in the ring of Isengard at the northern end of the Gap of Rohan; at the time this was read in Minas Tirith as a strengthening of a flank that Gondor could no longer garrison itself, and nothing in the record suggests that Beregond had cause to think otherwise during his lifetime.

Of the forty-eight years that followed the chronicle says almost nothing, and the little it does say is favourable: from his accession Gondor began to mend its strength. No further campaign is recorded in his time, no loss of territory, and no assault on the scale of 2758. The years themselves were not quiet elsewhere, but their great events lay far from the South Kingdom and left no mark on its annals — the coming of Smaug to Erebor in 2770, the war between the Dwarves and the Orcs from 2793 that ended in the slaughter before the East-gate of Moria in 2799, and, from about 2800 onward, the raiding out of the North that harried Rohan for two generations and killed one of its kings. Gondor's own part in the record of those decades is a silence that ought to be read as recovery rather than as decline.

The roll of the Stewards closes his entry with a single figure, 2811, and gives neither the manner nor the circumstances of his death; the rod passed to Belecthor II, who held it for a further sixty-one years. What Beregond had restored outlasted him by a long while, though not indefinitely: the next great stroke from the South did not fall until 2885, when the Haradrim forced the crossings of the Poros and had to be thrown back with the help of Rohan, by which time three Stewards had come and gone since him. He is, in the end, one of those figures whose whole surviving history is a single winter's campaign and a date, and the proportion is worth noticing, since the campaign was one of the few in the later Third Age in which Gondor met a full invasion and destroyed it inside a year.

The office Beregond held had been fixed long before him and was not altered in his hands. Since Mardil the Stewards had exercised the whole practical authority of the King — the government of the realm, the disposal of its revenues, the command of its armies, the giving of judgement — while refusing every outward token of kingship. They wore no crown, and did not sit upon the throne but upon a chair of black stone set below it; their banner was plain white, where the King's had shown the White Tree with the stars and the crown above it. The oath that went with the white rod bound the holder to rule in the name of the King until such time as he should return, and by the year Beregond took it that undertaking had already stood for more than seven hundred years with no prospect of being discharged.

Within that frame his power was large but strictly territorial. It ran over Gondor and its garrisons and fleets, and no further: Rohan was a sovereign neighbour, holding Calenardhon by the grant of Cirion and bound to Gondor by the oath sworn with Eorl, so that the men Beregond sent north were given as help owed to an ally and not levied as a subject's due, and no more could Rohan have ordered relief south in the same season. Nor did the office carry any power to end the vacancy it existed to preserve. The Steward could not crown himself, and the record shows no Steward attempting to name a King in default of one; the succession of the House of Anárion had been closed by the loss of Eärnur, and nothing in Beregond's authority could reopen it. He ruled a realm whose southern reach was already contested from Umbar, and the invasion of his own day is evidence of how short the arm of Minas Tirith had become in those waters.

Nothing in the sources attaches to him any faculty beyond the ordinary. The Stewards were mortal Men of Númenórean descent, long-lived by the measure of other Men but not otherwise gifted, and the older instrument of power that still lay in the White Tower went untouched by them for most of their line: the account of the palantíri preserved outside the tale states that Denethor the Second, the last of them, was the first Steward who dared to use the Anor-stone, and no attempt by an earlier holder is anywhere recorded. What Beregond could do was therefore what a capable mortal commander with a functioning realm behind him could do — muster its strength, spend it at the right moment, and afterwards let it recover. That he did this well is the whole of his reputation, and it is a reputation of competence rather than of might.

Almost every tie the record grants Beregond is one of office rather than of affection. He enters the chronicle as another man's captain, since the victory that made his name was won while Beren still held the rod, and his authority in those years was therefore delegated and his service that of a subordinate. What stood between the two men personally is not stated, and the roll of Stewards, which keeps the order of the succession without the descent behind it, leaves the question where it found it. What did pass from the one to the other was a set of commitments rather than a bond: chief among them the understanding reached with the wizard who had settled at Isengard, contracted by his predecessor and left to his successor to keep. It is a relationship he entered without having made it, and the annals give no sign that he tried to alter its terms.

The alliance with the Mark is the only bond the record actually shows being tested. Its first result was a failure of mutual aid: bound by the oath sworn between Cirion and Eorl, neither realm could move for the other while both were held down at once, and the alliance proved worth nothing at the moment of greatest need. Its second result was a debt paid late but paid in full, when men went north to a country that had lost its king and its capital and had to be made again from the ground. Fréaláf, who began the second line of the Kings, is the counterpart to Beregond in that exchange, though no meeting between them is recorded. The lesson the episode carries is about the alliance rather than the men: it worked slowly, and slowness nearly undid it.

His adversaries were likewise plural rather than singular — shipmen out of Umbar and the Haradwaith on the southern coasts, and the men of Dunland under Wulf in Rohan — and the chronicle records their assaults in the same season without naming any hand that set them there together. Worth noting is how the southern enmity had changed hands. It had begun as a quarrel within Gondor's own kindred, when the rebel line of the Kin-strife held Umbar against the realm, but that line had failed long before, and the enemy Beregond fought was the Harad, holding the same harbours with a different grievance. Of private relations there is nothing at all: no wife, no child, no companion is named for him anywhere. What survives is a man defined entirely by the peoples he served, aided, and defeated.