Elentir

The name Elentir is Quenya, and both of its elements are well attested elsewhere in the Númenórean onomasticon. The first is elen, "star", the word that stands behind the whole cluster of star-names borne by the descendants of Elros; the second answers to the root tir, "watch" or "gaze", the same element found in Palantír and in Minas Tirith. Taken together the compound reads straightforwardly as "star-watcher", one who keeps his eyes on the stars — a formation entirely in keeping with the taste of the great houses of Númenor, where names were built from short, luminous roots rather than borrowed from Adûnaic. No gloss of the name is given anywhere by Tolkien himself, so this reading rests on the elements alone and should be treated as a philological inference rather than an authorial translation.

The star-element in particular carries a weight that is not merely decorative. The island itself was called Elenna, the land set starwards, from the star that guided the first Edain westward, and the kingly line reused elen freely — Tar-Elendil among the early rulers, and later Elendil, whose name the Faithful kept in honour. That the same element should appear in the house descended from Silmariën, eldest child of Tar-Elendil, is unsurprising: hers was the line from which the Lords of Andúnië sprang, beginning with Valandil, and that house held to the Eldarin tongues and to friendship with Eressëa long after such loyalties had grown unwelcome in Armenelos. Their seat lay at Andúnië in the western bays of the island, facing the Sea and, beyond it, the Undying Lands.

Of that lordship the published writings name only a scattering of holders — Valandil at its head, Eärendur, whose sister Lindórië belonged to the queenly line, and at the end Númendil and his son Amandil. The generations between are simply not enumerated, and the silence is Tolkien's rather than the compiler's: no roll of the lords of Andúnië was ever set down in the form given to the kings. Within this frame Elentir has no place in the published corpus at all; his name occurs nowhere in the narrative works, and the single manuscript that mentions him — together with the question of how securely it can be read — is treated below under drafts and variants.

No deed of Elentir is dated, for no deed of his is told in the published works at all. What can be set in order is the history of the household in which the later texts place him, and that history is unusually well furnished with years, since the last century of Númenor was recorded closely in the Akallabêth. There the lord of Andúnië in the days of the last king is Amandil, son of Númendil, and it is beside that Amandil, in the same generation of the same house, that Elentir stands. What follows is therefore the frame of a life rather than the narrative of one: the sequence through which any man of that household must have passed, given without assigning him a part in any of it.

The generation before his had lived under open royal disfavour. In the reign of Ar-Gimilzôr the use of the Elven-tongues was forbidden and those who kept the old friendship were compelled to leave the western regions and settle about Rómenna on the eastern coast, so that they might be watched; the lords of Andúnië, though of the King's near kin, were held in suspicion and their counsel set aside. The turn came with Tar-Palantir, who took the sceptre in the year 3177 and ruled until 3255, and who repented of the ways of his fathers, tended the White Tree again in the court at Armenelos and went up once more to the hallow upon the Meneltarma. His repentance came late and was resisted: his brother Gimilkhâd led the party opposed to him, and after Gimilkhâd's death that party passed to his son Pharazôn. Any man of the house of Andúnië who reached manhood in those decades would have known both the long constraint and the brief and uncertain relief that followed it.

The annals give the remaining years in a close sequence. In 3255 Ar-Pharazôn the Golden seized the sceptre, taking to wife the daughter of the late king against the law and custom of the island. Six years later, in 3261, he sailed with a great fleet to Middle-earth and came ashore at Umbar, and in 3262 he brought Sauron back to Númenor as a prisoner; from that year until 3310 the captive worked upon the King and the people until the old reverence was overthrown. In 3310 the building of the Great Armament began, and in 3319 Ar-Pharazôn set out to assail the Undying Lands: Númenor was drowned, and Elendil with his sons escaped over the sea. Fewer than seventy years separate the seizure of the sceptre from the Downfall, so that a single lifetime spans the whole of the decline.

Within that span the published texts follow one member of the house closely. Amandil had been a companion of Pharazôn in their youth and sat for a time as chief among the King's counsellors, but once Sauron's influence was established he was dismissed from the Council and withdrew to Rómenna, where the Faithful gathered about him in secret and kept ships in readiness eastward along the coast. When the persecution grew and men were taken for the altar of the temple, he resolved upon a last errand and put out at night in a small vessel with three servants, sailing first east and then turning west after the manner of Eärendil, to plead with the Valar for his people; no word of him came again. He had charged Elendil to prepare for flight, and it was that preparation which saved nine ships when the sea rose. Of the rest of his kindred nothing is said, and of the woman whom the King had taken it is told only that at the last she strove to climb the holy mountain and was overtaken by the wave.

This is the whole of what the published corpus supplies, and its shape matters for the entry. Out of the house of Andúnië it names and follows Amandil, Elendil, Isildur and Anárion, and no others; every further member of that household, whatever their number, passes unrecorded, whether they drowned with the island or stood among the crews that came east. The account of the King's marriage in the Akallabêth is likewise complete in itself and knows nothing of any prior claim upon the bride. Elentir accordingly has no attested history in the sense this section elsewhere supplies: no year, no act, no death. The single manuscript that says anything of his life, and the question of how far its testimony can be pressed, belong to the discussion of drafts and variants below.

No office is ascribed to Elentir in the works published in Tolkien's lifetime or in the edited posthumous volumes, and what follows therefore describes the standing his house held rather than any authority he is known to have exercised. That standing was considerable but narrowly bounded: the lords of Andúnië were reckoned the chief of the island's nobility after the King's own household, and their power consisted in a hereditary lordship over the western coastlands together with a customary place among the King's counsellors. Its foundation was kinship, for the house descended from Silmariën, eldest child of Tar-Elendil; yet in her day the sceptre went by custom to the eldest son, and so it came to her brother Tar-Meneldur. The law admitting a daughter to the succession was made only afterwards, when Tar-Aldarion obtained it for Ancalimë, too late to bear upon Silmariën's descendants. What the house possessed thereafter was royal blood without any claim upon the sceptre, and an influence that lasted exactly as long as a given king cared to hear it.

The heirlooms attached to the lordship are best understood as tokens of custody rather than instruments of power. The Ring of Barahir, the oldest of the treasured possessions of Men and preserved out of the ruin of Beleriand, was given by Tar-Elendil to Silmariën and kept thereafter in her house; no virtue or property is claimed for it anywhere, and its significance is wholly that of an inherited pledge of an old friendship. From the same line came the exiled realms established in Middle-earth after the Downfall, which is why the ring reappears in later reckonings at all. Elentir's name occurs in none of these transmissions, and the published texts consistently assign the lordship in the last generation to Amandil; the question of precedence within that generation belongs to the manuscript discussed further below.

The abilities of such men were those of their people, and the sources are candid about where these stopped. The Númenóreans held a life-span more than three times that of other Men, along with unrivalled skill in ships, building and the shaping of the land, but no art of sorcery is attributed to the Faithful, and their longevity waned as the fear of death grew upon the island. Even the seven Stones, given by the Eldar to Amandil for the comfort of his people, granted sight over distance and no dominion whatever; they could not compel, and their possession did not preserve their keepers. Above all stood the Ban, which forbade any Númenórean to sail west out of sight of his own shores — a boundary that no rank, kinship or seamanship could cross. Whatever place Elentir may have held, it lay within these same limits, and nothing in the attested record extends them for him.

The relationships that give Elentir whatever definition he has are those of a household rather than of a man, and the first of them is the house's peculiar bond with the crown: kinship close enough to confer honour, but never rivalry, since no claim upon the sceptre lay with it. That bond was renewed once by marriage, and the consequences were considerable. Inzilbêth, whose mother Lindórië belonged to the lords of Andúnië, was given in wedlock to Ar-Gimilzôr, a match in which there was no love on either side; she kept her old reverence privately and taught it to her elder son, so that Inziladûn came in time to the sceptre as Tar-Palantir and turned the island briefly back toward its former ways, while the younger son, Gimilkhâd, held wholly to his father's party. The pattern is instructive. Such influence as the Faithful exerted upon the royal house travelled through marriage and upbringing rather than through any office, and it divided brothers as readily as it divided the realm.

The second defining tie ran outward, to the Eldar of Eressëa. In the earlier centuries their ships came freely to the western havens bringing gifts of birds, flowers and sweet-smelling herbs, and the friendship was a matter of open custom; as the kings grew cold such visits dwindled and at length were made only rarely and by stealth, until the lords of Andúnië were nearly the last in the island who maintained them. A friendship of that kind, once it becomes irregular, ceases to be an ornament and becomes an allegiance, and it was on that ground that the Elendili were reckoned suspect. The enmity that answered it was correspondingly impersonal: the King's Men opposed not particular persons but a habit of loyalty which the house transmitted from parent to child.

In the last generation the ties the sources record are vertical ones, father to son and grandsire to grandson, and they are shown chiefly through shared risk: Isildur went unbidden and in disguise to the court at Armenelos to take a fruit of the White Tree before it was felled, and came away wounded almost to death, and it was in his grandsire's keeping that the fruit was set and sprouted. Collateral kin appear far more seldom. The Akallabêth names a brother only where the narrative requires one, as with Gimilkhâd, and otherwise passes over the wider kindred of both the royal and the Andúnië houses without remark, so that a brother in that generation could exist and leave no impress whatever on the published account. Elentir's relations must be read against that habit of omission rather than as an absence of persons.

Elentir belongs wholly to the drafts. His name is found in a single late manuscript, among the notes attached to the essay on the Fëanorian shibboleth printed in the last volume of the History of Middle-earth. That essay is in the main a piece of Quenya philology, concerned with the divergence over the sounds þ and s among the Noldor and with the quarrels it fed; the Númenórean material enters only obliquely, through digressions on names and on the persons who bore them. In one such digression Tolkien set down an account of the last king's marriage that does not agree with the version afterwards assembled for the published narrative: before Pharazôn took her, the King's daughter had been pledged to Elentir, brother of Amandil, and it is that displaced betrothal, rather than any act of his own, which occasions the whole of his appearance. The story went no further, and nothing of it was carried into the finished text.

The testimony is thin in a second way as well. Where the note describes his standing among his brothers, the editor's reading of the manuscript is marked as doubtful, the word giving his seniority being printed with a query; so even the statement that he was the elder is a conjecture about handwriting rather than a settled fact of the legend. If he was indeed the elder, the note leaves unexplained how the lordship of Andúnië came to rest in Amandil's hands in the last generation, since it nowhere accounts for the passing over. Notes of this period were frequently exploratory, entertained for a page and abandoned without being reconciled with what had already been written, and this one was never worked into any narrative. Elentir is therefore best read as a late idea about the origins of the King's marriage, preserved by an editor and not by the story itself.