Eärendur of Andúnië

The name Eärendur is Quenya, the High-elven tongue that the Númenóreans of the older fashion still used for names of honour. It is compounded of the element for the sea with the ending that denotes a servant or one who serves in office, so that the name may be rendered as one who serves the sea. The same second element appears in other Númenórean names of the same pattern, and it stands beside a related ending expressing devotion or love rather than service, the two being used in near-parallel formations; the more famous mariner's name shares the first element with Eärendur but takes the other ending. A Quenya name is itself a small piece of evidence about the house that bore it, for the use of Elvish speech in Númenor became in later generations a mark of allegiance rather than mere custom.

Eärendur was a Númenórean of the house of Andúnië, whose lords held the westward haven of the island and descended from Silmariën, the eldest child of Tar-Elendil; through her the house carried the blood of the royal line without carrying the sceptre. He is counted the fifteenth to hold that lordship. Between the first lord and Eärendur the sources give no roll of names, so the succession is known as a number rather than as a chain of persons, and the gap belongs to the record and not to the history. Of his own life almost nothing is set down beyond his office and his place in the descent: he was the brother of Lindórië, whose daughter married into the royal house, and he was the grandfather of Númendil, though the generation standing between them is nowhere named.

The name did not remain peculiar to him. Among the Dúnedain who later settled in the northern realm of Middle-earth, a king of Arnor bore the same name, tenth in that succession; such repetition was ordinary among the exiles, who drew on an inherited stock of Númenórean names. Nothing in the published record connects the two men beyond the shared descent of all the Dúnedain from the house of Elros, and the coincidence is best treated as a matter of naming custom rather than of kinship.

No year is set against Eärendur's name. The chronicle that preserves the descent of Elros records for each holder of the sceptre a year of birth, a year of accession and a year of surrender or death, but the lords of the western haven are not treated in that manner: they appear as a numbered succession attached to the royal genealogy, and only the first and the last of them are given a setting in time. For Eärendur, therefore, neither birth, nor the year in which the lordship came to him, nor his death can be stated. What can be recovered is the frame around him, drawn from the dated reigns of the kings with whom his household was connected by marriage, and this is the only chronology the sources permit.

That frame can be fixed within a century or so. Eärendur's sister Lindórië had a daughter, Inzilbêth, and Inzilbêth became the wife of Ar-Gimilzôr, who held the sceptre from the year 3102 of the Second Age until 3177. Their elder son was born in 3035, so the marriage was made well before the king's accession, and Inzilbêth's own generation must be placed in the closing decades of the thirty-first century or a little earlier. Her mother and her mother's brother stand one generation above that. Eärendur's life and his tenure of the lordship thus fall, so far as the reckoning of generations can carry the matter, somewhere in the long stretch of reigns from Ar-Adûnakhôr to Ar-Gimilzôr — the very period in which the division of Númenor hardened into policy.

The character of those years is set down at length, even though Eärendur's part in them is not. Ar-Adûnakhôr, who took the sceptre in 2899, was the first to assume it under a name in the tongue of Númenor rather than in Elvish, and in his day the Elven-tongues were no longer used openly nor taught to the king's heir. Ar-Gimilzôr carried the policy to its end: he forbade the Elvish speech altogether, allowed no ship to come from the west, and gathered those known to be friends of the Elves out of the western part of the island, setting them at Rómenna on the eastern coast under watch. Since the lords of Andúnië were counted the chief of that party, and their haven lay on the very coast from which the Faithful were being removed, the office Eärendur held was by then a position of political exposure rather than of quiet dignity. The record does not say how he bore it.

The one turn of events that the sources attach to his immediate household concerns his niece. Inzilbêth had been taught in secret by Lindórië and held to the older allegiance; she was married to Ar-Gimilzôr against her wish, and the two were estranged. Of her two sons the elder took after his mother and the younger after his father, so that the quarrel of the island was reproduced within the royal house itself. When the elder came to the sceptre in 3177 he took his name in the Elvish fashion again, tended the White Tree at the king's house, and turned the policy of his father back so far as he was able. The Faithful blood that made this possible had come into the line of kings through Eärendur's own kin, and it is for this reason, and not for anything he is reported to have done, that the chroniclers had occasion to name him.

The reversal did not outlast one reign, and the descent that ran downward from Eärendur soon reached the end of both the office and the island. His grandson Númendil held the lordship after the unnamed generation between them, and Númendil's son Amandil was the last to hold it at all; if each generation took the office in turn, as the pattern of the house implies, then only two lords stand between Eärendur and the close of the line. Amandil's son was Elendil, who with his own sons escaped the drowning of Númenor in 3319 and established the realms of the exiles in Middle-earth. Eärendur is thus the great-great-grandfather of the founder of Arnor and Gondor, and the figure from whom the chroniclers reckoned when they wished to explain how the last of the Faithful and the last queen of the older mind were related to one another.

What remains, when the surrounding history is set aside, is a man visible only as a joint in a genealogy. He is placed in the succession by a number, in time by the reigns of others, and in the record by the two persons whose descent had to be traced through him. The sources are not silent about him by accident of loss so much as by the shape of their interest: they were written to account for the origin of the exiled kings and for the presence of the old allegiance in the royal house, and Eärendur was named because both of those accounts pass through his family. Where a life might be expected, the chronicle gives a position, and it is honest to leave it at that.

The lordship Eärendur held was a hereditary fief and not a sovereignty. Andúnië was a haven of the western coastlands, and the lords who governed it ruled it under the sceptre rather than beside it; their house had been founded by a descendant of Elros in the earlier centuries of the realm, and the office passed from father to son thereafter. What raised the lords above other landholders was their place in the counsels of the kings: they are described as having stood, generation after generation, among the chief advisers of whoever held the sceptre, so that the lordship carried a voice at the centre of the island as well as authority at its edge. The blood of the elder line that came to them through Silmariën gave them precedence in dignity, but no claim in law, since the sceptre in her day passed to her younger brother and not to her.

One tangible token of that standing belonged to the house in Eärendur's time. Tar-Elendil had given the ring that had once been Barahir's to his eldest daughter, and it was kept thereafter among the lords of Andúnië, descending with the office until the last of them; whatever ceremony attached to it, it was an heirloom of the First Age carried by a family that held no crown. Beyond this the record credits the lords with nothing out of the ordinary run of Númenórean gifts. They were long-lived as their kindred were, they governed a coast whose people were seafarers, and they were reckoned the acknowledged heads of those who kept the old friendship with the Eldar. No power of foresight, no craft, and no possession of the seeing-stones is attributed to the house in Eärendur's generation; the stones came into it only with the last lord but one, as a gift, and long after.

The limits of the office are as plain as its dignity. Counsel is not command, and the later history shows what the lords could and could not do: the last of them sat in the king's council until his advice became unwelcome, and when the policy of the sceptre turned to open defiance of the Ban he could neither prevent it nor survive it. Whether Eärendur himself ever sat in such a council is not stated; the sources name individual councillors only for the closing reigns, and to place him there is to reason from the practice of his house rather than from any notice of his person. Nothing he said, decided, or refused has been preserved. His role in the legendarium is therefore that of an officeholder whose office is documented and whose tenure is not, and the honest measure of his power is the standing of the lordship in general, claimed for no particular act of his.

The connections recorded for Eärendur run in two directions only: one sideways, one downward. A sister stands beside him; a grandson stands two steps below him, and even that step is taken across an unnamed intervening parent, so that the descent is asserted rather than traced through persons. No wife is given him, no child, no parent, no friend, no follower. This is a conspicuously thin family for a chronicle that elsewhere records consorts and offspring as a matter of routine for those it treats at length. The relationships he has are precisely the two that were needed to fasten other people to one another, and nothing beyond them survived the compilers' interest.

The single tie that reaches from his household to the seat of power is one of affinity rather than alliance, and it was formed against the will of the woman who carried it. Through his sister's daughter the house of the western haven entered the royal marriage bed, and by that match the reigning king became Eärendur's kinsman by marriage — the same king whose policy was directed against the very party his own lordship was reckoned to lead. Nothing suggests that this relation brought him access, protection or influence; the marriage was unhappy, and the sympathies it carried into the royal house worked in secret rather than in council. Whether the two men ever stood in the same room the sources do not say.

What remains, then, are collective relations rather than personal ones. The heads of his house were acknowledged as the chief men of those Númenóreans who kept the old friendship with the Eldar, an allegiance he inherited with the office and passed on with it, and his adversary is a policy rather than a person: no opponent is named against him, and no ally either. The difference this makes is visible in his own line, for two generations later the record does supply named counterparts, telling how his great-grandson had been the close companion of the king who at last broke the Ban, and how that friendship failed. Eärendur is bound to others by descent and by marriage, never by choice — a man known only through the people on either side of him.