Húrin II

Húrin II was a Man of Gondor, of the Dúnedain of the South — that Númenórean stock which kept the rule of the realm in hand after the line of its kings had failed. He appears in the roll of Ruling Stewards preserved among the annals of Gondor as the fourteenth to hold that office, following Hallas and preceding Belecthor I. For him, as for several Stewards of the middle centuries, the surviving record amounts to little more than a name set in its proper place in a sequence: no birth-date is given, and the narrative portions of the appendices pass over him without remark. What can be said of his origin must therefore be drawn from the house he belonged to and from the name he was given, rather than from anything told of him directly.

That name places him in the House of Húrin, the family from which Gondor drew its Stewards. The house was called after Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean race who served as Steward to King Minardil, and after him the office was filled from among his descendants, becoming in time hereditary much as a crown is. The appendices describe the descent of the office in a double form — from father to son, or else to the nearest kinsman — without specifying, for any individual Steward, which of the two applied. The consequence for Húrin II is worth stating plainly: his place in the succession is attested, his immediate parentage is not. He stands after Hallas in the list, but no text calls him Hallas's son.

The name itself was far older than the Stewardship. In the Elder Days it was borne by Húrin son of Galdor, lord of Dor-lómin of the House of Hador, called the Steadfast, and father of Túrin. The Steward-roll shows a settled taste for such names out of the First Age: Túrin, Hador, Barahir, Beren and Dior all recur in it, carried by men of Gondor thousands of years after the Edain who first held them. Húrin II thus bears a name of Sindarin form, of the kind the Stewards generally used, rather than one of the High-elven names favoured by the kings of Anárion's line. The ordinal attached to him is an annalistic device and counts Ruling Stewards only; the ancestor of Emyn Arnen, first of the house to bear the name, is not reckoned in that numbering.

Everything that can be dated in the life of Húrin II rests upon a single line in an annalistic list, and upon the convention that governs it. The roll of the Ruling Stewards sets against each man the year of his death, not the span of his rule; since the office was held for life, the opening of one stewardship is fixed only by the close of the one before it. Hallas stands entered under the year 2605 and Húrin II under 2628. His tenure of the office therefore ran some twenty-three years, from his predecessor's death to his own, and that arithmetic is the whole of his attested career. No campaign, no building, no embassy and no manner of death is recorded beside his name, nor is any wife or child named for him.

The office that came to him had lain with the Ruling Stewards for more than five and a half centuries by 2605, since Mardil took up the government after King Eärnur rode to Minas Morgul and did not return. Its peculiar character was fixed then and altered in no particular afterwards: the Stewards exercised the whole authority of kings but refused the crown and the name, holding that the kingship was in abeyance rather than ended, and that they governed only until its return. The arrangement described for the last of the line — a plain black seat at the foot of the dais, below an empty throne, and a white rod in place of a sceptre — expresses a usage that Húrin II inherited and handed on unchanged. He is thus one of a long series of men whose importance to the annals lies chiefly in the fact that the series was not broken.

The eastern frontier he took charge of had reached, well before his day, the shape it would keep until the War of the Ring. Minas Ithil had fallen to the Nazgûl in 2002 and become the Morgul-city, so that Gondor's chief stronghold in the east faced an enemy fortress across Ithilien. The long Watchful Peace ended in 2460 with the return of the Shadow to Dol Guldur; fifteen years later Uruks issued out of Mordor for the first time and overran Ithilien, and although Boromir, eleventh of the Stewards, drove them back, Osgiliath was finally ruined in that war and its great bridge broken. Húrin II accordingly governed a realm whose river-crossing was rubble, whose eastern province was emptying of its people, and whose defence had reverted to the line of Anduin. Nothing in the record shows what he did about it.

In the west the great change was a century old when he came to office. Cirion, the twelfth Steward, had given Calenardhon to the Éothéod after the Battle of the Field of Celebrant in 2510, and the sworn friendship of Gondor and the Mark dated from that grant; Húrin II is the third Steward to have ruled under it. During his years the throne of Rohan passed from Goldwine to Déor in 2619, and it is in Déor's day that the annals of the Mark place their first serious trouble on the Isen, when Dunlendings raided the Westfold and it was found that the fortress at Isengard had passed out of friendly keeping. Gondor plays no part in that account, and no Steward is named in it; the ring of Isengard remained in name a possession of the southern kingdom, but the record of its loss belongs wholly to Rohan.

For the years between 2605 and 2628 the Tale of Years enters nothing at all concerning Gondor. This silence should not be read as a report of tranquillity. The chronology of the Third Age grows sparse in exactly these centuries, noting the affairs of the Dwarves and the Shire and the beginnings of Saruman's presence in the West while passing over the southern kingdom for long stretches together; a steward could rule two decades of frontier watching and leave no annalistic trace whatever. What the silence does establish is negative and useful: no defeat, no siege, no dynastic quarrel and no severance of the succession fell within his rule, since such things are the very matters the annals do preserve.

He died in 2628 and was followed by Belecthor I, who held the office until 2655. Whether the new Steward was his son the sources do not say, the appendices describing the descent of the rule in general terms only; what is certain is that the transfer took place within the House of Húrin and without recorded dispute. His stewardship falls in the middle of the quiet stretch that separates the wars of Boromir's time from the calamities of the following century — the Long Winter and the invasion of Rohan in 2758, the coming of Saruman to Orthanc, and the plague of Corsair raids upon the coasts. Húrin II belongs to the generation that kept the realm intact between them, and the surviving evidence permits nothing more particular to be said of him.

Whatever Húrin II made of the office, its powers can be stated in outline. A Ruling Steward held the executive government of Gondor entire: command of its armies, the appointment of captains and wardens, the ordering of the river-defence, and the lordship over the outland fiefs. The provinces — Lossarnach, Lebennin, Morthond, Anfalas, the Ringló Vale, Pinnath Gelin — together with the princedom of Dol Amroth answered a summons to the muster of Minas Tirith, as the narrative of the last siege records; that arrangement is described for the end of the age, some four hundred years after Húrin II, and must be assumed rather than attested for his own time. Beyond such administrative and military authority nothing is ascribed to the office. The Stewards were long-lived men of Númenórean blood and no more than that: no faculty of another order is claimed for any of them, and none whatever for Húrin II.

The limit that defined the office was one of title, and it had a legal history. Each Ruling Steward was bound by oath to hold rule and rod in the name of the king until the king should return, and that oath was the ground of his legitimacy rather than a courtesy: he governed as trustee of a kingship reckoned vacant, not ended. When the male descent of Anárion's line failed, the claim urged from the North on behalf of Arvedui, who had married the daughter of Ondoher, was set aside by the judgement of Pelendur and the council of Gondor, which preferred instead a victorious captain of the realm. The claim was refused, not extinguished, and it was pressed again at the end of the age. Húrin II therefore ruled under a title secure in practice and provisional in principle, and there is no sign that any claimant troubled it in his day.

One further limit bears directly on the frontier watch he kept. The Stone of Anor remained in Minas Tirith throughout the centuries of the Stewardship, but the discussion of the palantíri preserved among the later writings holds that the Stewards did not make use of it, and that Denethor II, in the last years of the age, was the first of the house to dare the Stone. If that is so, Húrin II governed his eastern march with no instrument of sight beyond scouts, watchers and beacons, and learned of Mordor only what men could carry to him. The same discussion treats the Stones as belonging properly to the kings, which places a Steward's forbearance towards them among the other things the office left untouched.

No person whatever is named in connection with Húrin II — no wife, no mother, no child, no captain or counsellor. This is less a fact about him than a fact about the document in which he survives, and the shape of that document repays notice. The Steward-roll and the notes that accompany it name families only at its two ends: at the beginning, where the office is traced to Húrin of Emyn Arnen and his service to King Minardil, and at the close, where the record thickens abruptly and gives Ecthelion II, his son Denethor II, Denethor's wife Finduilas, daughter of Adrahil of Dol Amroth, and their sons Boromir and Faramir. Between those poles the annal keeps names and death-years and nothing else. Húrin II belongs to that long anonymous middle, and any account of his relationships must be built from the office rather than from the man.

What can be asserted is institutional. A Ruling Steward stood in a settled relation to the people he governed, and Faramir's account of his own house to Frodo describes it from within: the Stewards were obeyed as lords through many generations, the memory of the kings receding while the rule of the house held, so that loyalty attached itself to a family that never claimed the crown. That is the bond Húrin II inherited and passed on. His adversaries, likewise, were corporate rather than personal — the power across the river had no face that the annals attach to his years, and no enemy captain, no rival claimant and no disaffected fief-lord is named against him.

One relation of a different kind can be shown. The name he carried was still in use in Gondor at the very end of the Third Age, borne by Húrin the Tall, Warden of the Keys, who held Minas Tirith when the host went out to the Black Gate and who stood among the chief men of the City at the coming of the King. Nothing states that this later Húrin was of the ruling house, and he should not be assumed into it; what he shows is that the name had passed from the Stewards into the wider nobility of the realm. Húrin II thus sits between an ancestor of the name and a namesake some six centuries after him, connected to both by usage rather than by any traceable descent.