Húrin I

Húrin I was a Man of Gondor, one of the Dúnedain of the South Kingdom, and a member of the family that the chronicles of the realm call the House of Húrin. That house took its name not from him but from an earlier Húrin, lord of Emyn Arnen in Ithilien, who served King Minardil as Steward and who is described in the Appendices as a man of high Númenórean blood. From that ancestor the kings afterwards drew their Stewards, so that the office and the family became bound together long before the Stewards themselves ruled. In the reckoning of the Ruling Stewards of the Realms in Exile, Húrin I stands fifth, following Belegorn and preceding Túrin I; his generation therefore belongs to the middle centuries of the Third Age, when Gondor was still governed in the name of a king who had not returned.

The name he bore is Sindarin in form, in keeping with the custom of the Dúnedain, who alone among the kindreds of Men kept an Elvish tongue in living use and named their children in it. It was also an old name among the Edain: in the Elder Days it had been borne by Húrin Thalion of Dor-lómin, lord of the House of Hador. The Stewards' line returned repeatedly to such names, and the same list of rulers gives Túrin, Hador, Barahir, Dior and Beren, all of them names carried by men of the Three Houses in the wars against Morgoth. The numeral attached to Húrin I is a device of the record rather than a title he used; it distinguishes him from a second Húrin who held the Stewardship some centuries later.

Beyond this the sources are sparing. No epithet is attached to Húrin I, as one is to Mardil Voronwë, the first of the Ruling Stewards, and no mother, father or child of his is named. The Appendix states only the general rule of inheritance, that the Stewardship passed as a crown does, to a son or else to the nearest kinsman, without specifying which of the individual successions fell into which case. His place in the sequence is therefore firmly attested while his exact descent is not, and the two should not be confused: to call him the son of Belegorn would go beyond what Tolkien set down. What the record preserves is a name, a rank and a position in an unbroken order of office.

The office that came to Húrin I was not yet two centuries old when he received it. In the year 2050 of the Third Age King Eärnur rode out from Minas Tirith with a small escort to answer a challenge sent to him from Minas Morgul; he passed the gates of that city and no word of him or of his companions ever came back. His Steward, Mardil, took the government into his own hands and held it, and since no heir of the line of Anárion could be produced whose right was beyond dispute, the crown was left vacant rather than given. Authority stayed with the Steward and descended to his heirs after him, so that Gondor was governed not by a new dynasty but in the name of a king who was merely absent. Húrin I was the fifth man to exercise that authority, and by his generation the arrangement had long since ceased to be an emergency measure and become the ordinary constitution of the realm.

The chronicle of the Stewards sets the death of his predecessor Belegorn in 2204, and on that reckoning Húrin I held the rule for some four decades. What that rule consisted of was fixed by precedent rather than by his own choice. The Ruling Stewards took no crown and were not enthroned; their sign of office was a white rod, their banner a plain white cloth without device or emblem, and their seat a chair set below the throne they left empty. Each in turn undertook to hold the rod and govern until the king should return, a formula that had already been repeated four times before Húrin spoke it. His tenure adds nothing to the terms of the office and departs from them in nothing that the record preserves.

The whole of his stewardship falls within the long lull that the annalists of Gondor called the Watchful Peace. It had begun in 2063, when Gandalf went to Dol Guldur to learn who dwelt there, and the power that lay hidden in that place withdrew eastward before him rather than face inquiry; it lasted until 2460, when the same power returned in greater strength. Through those four centuries the Nazgûl kept quiet in Minas Morgul and no assault came against the eastern frontier, so that Húrin I ruled a realm at rest and under no visible threat. The Tale of Years accordingly has almost nothing to enter for Gondor across his lifetime; such notices as it does record for those decades concern other peoples entirely, as when Thorin I forsook Erebor in 2210 and led his folk north to the Grey Mountains. The absence of entries is not a gap in the manuscript but a fair account of the years.

The Gondor over which he presided was already a diminished thing, and the shape of that diminishment had been settled by disasters two and six centuries before his birth. The kings had removed their seat permanently to Minas Anor after the Great Plague, and Osgiliath, emptied by pestilence and never repeopled, stood ruinous astride the river. Minas Ithil had been taken by the Ringwraiths in 2002 and was thereafter Minas Morgul, and in answer to its loss Minas Anor had been renamed Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard, a name it bore throughout Húrin's time. Westward, the wide grasslands of Calenardhon still belonged to the realm on parchment but had been thinly peopled since the plague years, and would not be granted away for nearly three centuries more. In the Court of the Fountain the White Tree planted by King Tarondor was still living, and would outlast Húrin by six hundred years.

His death is entered under the year 2244, and the rule passed to Túrin I, who held it for a further thirty-four years. No battle, no journey, no building work, no embassy and no ordinance is credited to Húrin I anywhere in the writings that Tolkien published. The single sentence the sources yield is the pairing of his name with that year in the roll of Stewards, and everything else that can properly be said of him is inference from the office he held and from the state of the kingdom around him. This is the ordinary condition of the middle Stewards: the annals of the Third Age were compiled with an eye to the fortunes of the Ring, and the men who governed Gondor while nothing touching the Ring occurred were recorded only as a chain of names and dates. The list serves as a frame for chronology rather than as biography, and Húrin I is one of the links that hold the frame together.

The authority that Húrin I exercised was, in everything but title, the authority of a king. The Ruling Stewards administered the law and gave judgement, appointed the officers and captains of the realm, disposed of its revenues and commanded its forces, and what they determined bound Gondor as a royal decree had bound it before. The office was old and had carried weight long before it became a ruling one, for the King's Steward spoke for his master in his absence, and by the last centuries of the kings his voice was heard even in questions touching the crown itself. When Arvedui of the North-kingdom advanced a claim to the southern throne after the fall of Ondoher, the matter was laid before the Council of Gondor, and it was the counsel of Pelendur the Steward that turned the decision against him; the kingship went instead to Eärnil, a commander of the royal kindred. Rather more than a century afterwards the same office was left holding the realm outright.

The limit set upon that authority was equally definite, and it appears never to have been contested. No Ruling Steward was crowned or anointed, none took the style of king, and the annalists kept the two successions as separate lists, so that a man's place among the Stewards said nothing of any right to the throne. The rule was held in trust, and the terms of the trust gave its holder no power to bring it to an end: he could not fill the vacancy, neither with himself nor with another, and was obliged to hand it on as he had received it. That this was a real restraint and not a form of words is shown at the far end of the line, where the last Steward surrendered his office into the hands of the returning king and held it thereafter only by grant.

Of Húrin I personally nothing is claimed beyond the ordinary competence of his office, and no gift, art or faculty is ascribed to him. The Stewards were Men of Númenórean descent and nothing more than that; whatever remained to Gondor of the older heirlooms was attached to the realm rather than to their persons. The Stone of Anor lay in the tower of Minas Tirith throughout their rule, but the later discussion of the seeing-stones concludes that it was Denethor II, at the very close of the line, who first ventured to use it, and there is accordingly no warrant for supposing that Húrin I looked into it or governed by any knowledge so obtained. What may be affirmed of his power is what may be affirmed of the office in his generation: full within the borders of Gondor, unchallenged at home, and stopping short of the crown.

The one bond the record affirms for Húrin I is his membership of the House of Húrin, and that kindred is best understood as a family defined by an office rather than by an estate. Its founder had held lands in Ithilien, but what the house transmitted to its later generations was the Stewardship itself, handed down among kinsmen through many reigns while the kings still sat in Minas Tirith, and afterwards handed down as rule. In practice this meant that his closest attested relations are not parents or children but the two men who flank him in the roll: he took the white rod from the hands that Belegorn had emptied, and gave it in his turn to Túrin I. Whether either transfer ran from father to son the Appendix does not say, and the chain it preserves is one of office, not of blood.

No wife, mother, sister or daughter is recorded for him, and this silence is characteristic rather than particular. Across the whole line of Ruling Stewards the published genealogies name only one such woman, Finduilas of Dol Amroth, and she is named because her marriage joined the Stewards to the princes of Belfalas and because her two sons carry the narrative of the War of the Ring. The house is otherwise a column of men's names and death-dates, so that the domestic life of Húrin I is not lost so much as never entered. What the family did keep visible was its stock of names: a second Húrin ruled some centuries after him, and at the very close of the Third Age a kinsman of Denethor II called Húrin the Tall held the Keys of Minas Tirith.

Beyond his own kindred the sources supply neither ally nor adversary. Gondor in his generation had no treaty-partner whose dealings with it were thought worth an entry, and the enemy whose fortress stood within sight of his tower made no move against him. Nor is there any sign of commerce between the two halves of the Dúnedain: the North-kingdom had fallen some two and a half centuries before his death, its people were led thereafter by Chieftains who kept their descent and their heirlooms quietly, and the annals record no message passing between them and the Stewards who governed in the South. That estrangement outlasted Húrin I by a wide margin, and the first meeting the chronicles report came only when an heir of Isildur served an heir of Húrin under an assumed name in the days of Ecthelion II.