Beren

Beren belonged to the Dúnedain of Gondor and to the House of Húrin, the family in whose keeping the Stewardship of the realm had become hereditary. That house looked back to Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent who served King Minardil as Steward; from his kindred the later Stewards were chosen, and after the days of Pelendur the office passed within the family much as a crown would, from father to son or else to the nearest kinsman. In the roll of those who governed Gondor after the kings had failed, Beren stands nineteenth, coming between Egalmoth before him and Beregond after him, so that his tenure belongs to the twenty-eighth century of the Third Age. The Appendices give that succession mainly as names and years, sparing a remark only for the few whose rule turned events; for Beren they say nothing beyond the dates, and nowhere state which of the permitted degrees of kinship joined him to his predecessor; his parentage is therefore unrecorded rather than merely uncertain.

The name is Sindarin in form, as are most of the names borne in this house — though not all of them, and not from the beginning: the Appendices note that it was the successors of Mardil, the first of the Ruling Stewards, who ceased to use High-elven names, so that the earlier bearers of the office had been named in Quenya. Tolkien records that the Dúnedain kept Sindarin in use as a learned and courtly speech and habitually took their names from it rather than from the common tongue. No gloss of the name is offered anywhere in the published writings, so its sense must be left open; what the list does show is a settled family taste for names drawn out of the ancient tales of Beleriand, among them Húrin, Túrin, Hador, Barahir, Dior, Ecthelion and Egalmoth alongside Beren himself.

The older bearer of the name was Beren son of Barahir, a mortal man of the House of Bëor and an outlaw in the north of Beleriand in the years after the siege of Morgoth's realm was broken, whose story is told at length in the traditions of the Elder Days. Such reuse of an ancient name carries no claim of descent: the Stewards of Gondor were of Númenórean stock and their genealogy is quite separate from the Bëorian house of the First Age. The borrowing is a matter of memory and honour, the naming of a child after a figure out of the old lore, and it should not be read as evidence of kinship.

The Stewards' roll dates the death of Egalmoth to the year 2743 of the Third Age, and Beren's rule of Gondor therefore runs from that year until 2763. He took up an office that had governed the realm in the king's name for close to seven centuries, since the failure of the royal line with Eärnur, and he held it in a period when Gondor's strength was measured less by conquest than by what it could still keep. The Appendices give no account of his first fifteen years, and nothing is recorded of any campaign, embassy or ordinance from that stretch of his tenure. The events for which his name is remembered fall within two years near the end of it, when Gondor and its northern ally were assailed at once and the shape of the western marches was altered by a decision made in his name.

In 2758 a great sea-borne attack fell upon Gondor. Fleets manned out of Umbar and the havens of the Harad struck the coastlands, and the assault was heavy enough to occupy the whole force the Steward could raise. In the same season Rohan was invaded from both east and west, the western attack led by Wulf son of Freca at the head of the Dunlendings, who took Edoras and drove King Helm to shelter in the Hornburg. The two blows were near enough in time that the histories treat them together, and the consequence for Beren was that he could send no help to the Mark. Gondor's own coasts were overrun in places, and the realm was reduced for a season to defending itself.

The fighting was then compounded by weather. The Long Winter set in late in 2758 and held the north-west of Middle-earth for some five months, bringing famine after it; Helm died in the frost outside the Hornburg, and both his sons were lost in that war. Gondor suffered under the same season, and the Tale of Years marks the whole of 2758 and 2759 as years of loss rather than of victory. The Appendices record no battle won by Beren himself and name no captain who fought for him, so that his part in the war is visible only in its effects: a Steward whose forces were fully committed at sea and on his own shores, and who could offer his northern ally nothing but survival on its own account.

In the spring of 2759 Fréaláf, sister-son of Helm, came out of hiding, retook Edoras and slew Wulf, and with the passing of the winter the Dunlendish hold on the western Mark was broken. At his crowning there appeared Saruman, chief of the Order of Wizards and head of the White Council, who came with gifts and with praise for the endurance of the Rohirrim. He offered himself as a keeper of the Gap of Rohan, and Beren granted him Isengard, delivering to him the keys of Orthanc; the tower had until then been closed and its keys held on the realm's behalf, for it was a work of Númenórean building that Gondor had never surrendered to any man. The Steward's reasoning is not set out, but the circumstances are plain enough in the record: the ring of Isengard had been occupied by Dunlendings since 2710, Gondor could no longer garrison so distant an outwork, and Rohan had just been reduced to a remnant. Saruman took up his abode there in the same year.

The later writings supply a motive that Beren cannot have known. Tolkien's essay on the seeing-stones states that Saruman sought Isengard because the Orthanc-stone remained in the tower, unregarded by Gondor since the loss of the northern palantíri and the ruin of Osgiliath, and that his desire for the place was from the first the desire for that instrument. On this reading the grant of 2759 was not an alliance sealed but a request granted to a petitioner whose interest lay elsewhere, and it delivered into private hands an object the Stewards had ceased to count among their possessions. Nothing in the surviving accounts suggests that the transaction was questioned at the time; Saruman was then esteemed in both realms, and the arrangement gave the Gap a watchman the two kingdoms could not otherwise provide.

Beren lived four years more after the grant and died in 2763, having ruled Gondor for twenty years. The office passed to Beregond, who follows him in the roll of Stewards, and the recovery of the coastlands from the sea-raiders belongs to that later tenure rather than to his own. The Appendices offer no judgement on him, keeping to the bare sequence of names and years; the assessment implicit in the wider narrative is nonetheless clear enough, since the fortress he ceded became within two centuries the seat of a hostile power on Rohan's western border. What the record shows is a Steward who governed a realm too stretched to hold all it claimed, and who chose, at the one point where the histories catch him deciding anything, to hand a burden he could not carry to the most respected counsellor then living in the West.

The office Beren held carried in practice the authority of a king while withholding its style. A Ruling Steward commanded the armed strength of Gondor, governed as lord of Minas Tirith and of the lands still obedient to it, and could dispose of the realm's fortresses and territories upon his own word; the transfer of Isengard is the single instance in which the record catches him using that last competence. The outward distinctions, however, were kept with care. The Stewards did not occupy the throne but a chair of black stone set at the foot of its dais; no crown was worn, and a white rod served as their sole emblem of office; and the banner they flew was plain white, without the White Tree, the stars and the crown that had marked the standard of the kings.

These reservations were not empty ceremony but the terms on which the rule was held. Each Steward took office under an undertaking to keep rod and government in the name of the king until an heir should come again, and the power he received did not extend to altering that condition: he could not make himself king, and the judgement handed down in Pelendur's day, when the claim of the northern line was set aside, had fixed the crown as the inheritance of the descendants of Anárion alone. Beren's authority was likewise bounded in space by decisions taken long before him. Since Cirion's grant of Calenardhon to the Éothéod in 2510 the whole north-western province had been Rohan's, held by an alliance of mutual aid rather than by Gondor's officers, and within it the ring of Isengard remained the one possession the realm had not relinquished.

Nothing in the writings attributes to him, or to any of his line, ability of another order. The Stewards were mortal men of Númenórean descent whose strength lay in office, counsel and command, and Beren appears in no account as a warrior, a loremaster or a worker of any craft. One instrument of royal power stood within his own tower and went unused: the seeing-stone of Minas Anor remained in the White Tower throughout the Stewards' rule, and Tolkien's essay on the palantíri states that Denethor the Second, more than four centuries later, was the first Steward who ventured to look into it, holding himself entitled as heir of Anárion to do so. The same essay makes plain that Beren's grant left a comparable object in other hands. What may be said of his powers, then, is chiefly what they did not include, and the Appendices, which record his rank and the year of his death and nothing further, leave the rest unmeasured.

Of Beren's kin the Stewards' roll keeps an almost complete silence. No wife is named for him, no child, no brother or sister; the list gives a name and a year and moves on, as it does for nearly every lord of the line in these centuries. That reticence belongs to the source rather than to the man, for the same appendix grows suddenly detailed at the end of the succession, naming Finduilas of Dol Amroth as the wife of Denethor the Second and mother of his two sons, and setting down the marriage that joined the Stewards to the princes of Belfalas. Beren's connection to the lord before him and the lord after him is thus a connection of office only, attested as an order of names and never as a household.

The tie that mattered most in his lifetime was not of his making. Gondor and the Mark were bound by the compact sworn when Calenardhon was given to Eorl, each realm pledged to answer the other's need, and that pledge had stood unbroken for some ten generations before Helm's kingdom was overrun. Beren appears in it only as the ally who could not come, and no rebuke from Rohan is recorded, since the same enemies were then landing on his own shores. His adversaries were inherited in the same way. The hostility of Umbar was older than his office by thirteen centuries, dating from the Kin-strife, when the sons of Castamir escaped south and held the haven against the kings; their descendants and the Haradrim who joined them kept the quarrel alive long after the cause of it was forgotten.

The single personal dealing the histories allow him is with Saruman, and it is oddly one-sided. Nothing shows that the two had met before the wizard came north to Fréaláf's crowning, and nothing shows any correspondence between them in the four years Beren still had to live. No earlier Ruling Steward is recorded as having any commerce with the Order at all; the next such meeting in the annals is Mithrandir's arrival at the court of Ecthelion the Second, four centuries later, and it was welcomed there rather than sought. What passed between Beren and Saruman was therefore a transaction between strangers of great standing, made at a moment when the Steward's judgement of the wizard could rest on nothing but reputation.