Eradan

Eradan belongs to that class of figures whom the records of Gondor preserve as a name and a place in a sequence rather than as a life. He was a Man of Gondor, of Dúnedain stock, and he held the office of Steward at a time when the kingdom had no king: the second to do so after the line of Anárion failed with Eärnur, and Mardil Voronwë was left to govern in the king's name. In the roll of the Ruling Stewards he stands directly after Mardil and before Herion. Nothing further is set down of his person — no wife, no children, no deed, no word spoken. What the record does establish is his house: he was of the House of Húrin, the family that held the stewardship as an inheritance.

That house took its name not from him but from Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean blood who served as Steward to King Minardil; from his descendants the office was afterwards filled, until in the days of Pelendur it became hereditary in fact as well as in custom. Eradan's own name is Sindarin in form, as the names of the Stewards generally are, Sindarin being the daily speech of the Dúnedain of Gondor and the tongue in which men of rank were commonly named. Tolkien nowhere glosses it. Its second element is the familiar adan, the word for a Man of the Edain that stands also in Dúnadan; the first is most readily read as the element meaning 'one' or 'alone', though this is an inference from the shape of the word rather than an interpretation the author supplied.

His descent is not stated. Appendix A says only that the office passed within the family, to a son or else to the nearest kinsman, and it never specifies which of the successions were father to son; the order of the Stewards is therefore certain where their parentage is not, and Eradan cannot on the evidence be called Mardil's son. Something of the temper of his house may be read from its naming habits, for the later Stewards bore such names as Húrin, Túrin, Hador and Barahir, drawn from the lords and champions of the Edain in the Elder Days — a family looking back, in its choice of names, to the oldest loyalties of Men to the West.

The office that came to Eradan had been improvised out of an emergency thirty years before he held it. In 2050 of the Third Age the Lord of Minas Morgul renewed an old challenge to single combat, and King Eärnur, who had swallowed the same insult once already and was ill-suited to swallow it twice, rode down to the gate of that city with a small company of knights. Nothing certain was ever learned of what became of him. He left no son and no proven death, so that Gondor had neither a king to obey nor a corpse to mourn, and Mardil the Steward took up the governance and kept it in the absent king's name. That was the arrangement Eradan inherited when Mardil died, and its central fiction — that the realm was being held for a lord who might yet come back — was still less than a lifetime old.

The years attached to the roll of Ruling Stewards are years of death, not of accession, and this can be tested rather than merely assumed: Cirion, whose great act of policy is dated 2510 in the Tale of Years, stands in the roll against 2567, half a century later. Read on that principle, the figure 2116 set beside Eradan's name marks the end of his rule and not its beginning, and his tenure runs from Mardil's death in 2080 to his own — some thirty-six years, a span comparable to that of most of his early successors. Herion, who follows him at 2148, held office for about thirty-two. Nothing in the record tells us how old Eradan was at either end of that period, and the frequent assumption that a Steward was already a grown man of middle years at his accession is inference from the practice of the house rather than a statement of the text.

His whole term fell inside a quiet interval that the annals of Gondor call the Watchful Peace. In 2063 Gandalf had gone up to Dol Guldur to learn who dwelt there, and its master had withdrawn eastward and left the wood empty of his presence; from that year until 2460 the Shadow made no open move, and the pressure that had crushed Gondor's eastern frontier through the previous century slackened. This did not mean the frontier was recovered. Minas Ithil had been lost in 2002 and remained in the hands of its new tenants throughout Eradan's life; Osgiliath had been standing derelict since the Great Plague, and the king's house had been at Minas Anor since 1640. Gondor under its second Steward was a realm holding a reduced line and watching a city it could not retake.

For the thirty-six years of his rule the Tale of Years records nothing whatever — no campaign, no embassy, no building, no plague, no year of dearth. The silence is not peculiar to him; the annalists pass over the whole stretch between 2063 and the early third millennium of the Age with only a handful of entries, most of them concerning Dwarves and Hobbits rather than Gondor. It is worth resisting the temptation to read this as a verdict on the man. The chroniclers of Gondor set down wars, successions and calamities, and a stewardship that produced none of the three left them nothing to write. What can be said is that the realm Eradan handed on was the realm he had received, undiminished and unenlarged, which in the century after Eärnur's disappearance was not a small thing.

His true significance is structural, and it lies in the mere fact of his succeeding. Mardil's authority had been personal: he was the man on the spot when the king vanished, trusted and already in office. When Mardil died and the rule passed within his family instead of reverting to some council, election or new royal claim, the emergency measure became a constitution. Eradan is the point at which the government of Gondor by Stewards stopped being one old servant's caretaking and became an institution capable of outliving its founder. He also inherited its careful limits: the Stewards took no crown and no throne, sat on a plain seat below the empty one, carried a white rod as their token, and flew a banner without device, since the white tree, the stars and the crown belonged to a king. Every one of those restraints Eradan observed, so far as the record shows, and passed on intact.

He died in 2116 and Herion took the rod after him. What Eradan had helped make permanent lasted a further nine hundred years, through twenty-odd holders of the office, past the coming of the Éothéod into Calenardhon, past the return of the Shadow to Mirkwood and the long decline of the Steward's realm, to Denethor II, in whose keeping it broke. It ended in 3019, when Faramir gave up the white rod to the crowned king in Minas Tirith and had it returned to him with the office made hereditary again under a restored monarchy. Eradan neither foresaw nor shaped any of that. He simply took an office that had been held once, held it a second time, and gave it to a third man; and the record of Gondor, which remembers so much else, keeps of him only the year in which he stopped.

What the record allows us to describe is the office rather than the man, since no act of governance is set against Eradan's name. The Ruling Steward exercised, within Gondor, the whole working authority of the crown: he governed the realm, commanded its armies and appointed its captains, gave judgement, and dealt with such neighbours as Gondor still had. This was not a regency shared with a council, nor a limited trusteeship over royal property; Appendix A presents the Stewards as ruling, and the annalists treat their years as the years of Gondor's government. In everything that the daily administration of a kingdom required, the second Steward stood where Eärnur had stood, and the only difference was one of style and title.

The limit was placed at a single point, and it was absolute: the office could not turn into a kingship. Beyond the outward restraints of seat, rod and banner already noted, the Steward had no power to crown himself, and none to crown another. Kingship in Gondor belonged to the heirs of Anárion, and after Eärnur rode away there was no claimant of that blood whose right all men would acknowledge — the realm had torn itself apart over such a question once before, in the Kin-strife, and had not forgotten it. Nor was there any procedure by which a king lost without witness could be pronounced dead. The Stewards therefore held rule in the name of a lord whose return no one could arrange and whose death no one could certify, and Eradan's authority rested wholly on that unresolved position.

How far the office could reach in practice is shown by what later holders did with it: Cirion granted the province of Calenardhon to the Éothéod outright, a permanent alienation of the king's land made by a man who was not king, and Denethor II conducted the defence of the realm in the War of the Ring on his own authority alone. Nothing of that kind is recorded of Eradan. Nor do the texts attribute to any Steward capacities beyond those of Men of Númenórean descent — no gift of foresight, no mastery of lore, no long life such as the early kings had enjoyed and their descendants had largely lost. He was a mortal official of a diminished realm, holding an untried office in a quiet interval, and the sources permit no claim about his powers beyond the powers of the office itself.

No personal attachment of Eradan's is recorded anywhere: no marriage, no friend, no quarrel, no counsellor named at his side. The relationships the sources permit are of two kinds, and both belong to the office rather than to the man. The first is the stranger of the two, for the Steward's central bond was to a person who was not there. Appendix A preserves the form of words by which the holders of the office took it up — rod and rule kept in the king's name until the day he should come back — so that Eradan's whole tenure was, in law, a relation between a living official and an absent lord who could neither release him from the charge nor be replaced in it. Every judgement he gave and every command he issued was given and issued on another man's behalf.

The second kind is kinship, which in Gondor after Eärnur did work that elsewhere belongs to law: because the office descended inside one household, the marriages and children of that household were a public matter in a way they are for no private family, and a man's nearest relative was a constitutional fact. Something of what such a house kept for itself can be seen in its heirlooms rather than in its politics. Mardil's father was Vorondil the Hunter, who hunted the wild kine of the eastern grasslands, and from the horn of one of those beasts a great horn was made that passed thereafter to the eldest son of the family and was still being carried into war in the last years of the Stewards' rule. Who held it in Eradan's day the record does not say, which is the difficulty with him in miniature: the family's possessions are traceable where its persons are not.

Outward, the annals set against his years neither ally nor adversary — no embassy, no marriage-alliance with the coastal princes, no named enemy captain. The one foreign friendship that would afterwards define the Stewards, with the horsemen who came south generations later, did not yet exist even as a possibility. The other kinship that might have mattered had been closed off before his time: when Arvedui of the North-kingdom claimed the crown of Gondor, by descent from Isildur and by right of his wife, daughter of the last king to reign, it was the Steward Pelendur whose counsel carried the day against him, and the two branches of the Dúnedain kept apart. That decision is the reason there was no kinsman left to send for when Eradan governed, and why his only relations of record are the two men whose names stand above and below his own.