Isildur

Isildur belonged to the Dúnedain, the Men of Númenor, and stood in the direct line of the Lords of Andúnië, the house that held to friendship with the Elves when the greater part of Númenor had turned away from it. He was the elder son of Elendil the Tall, and his younger brother was Anárion; through their father the brothers were descended from Elros Tar-Minyatur, first King of Númenor, and so from the mingled houses of Men and Elves of the Elder Days. The family belonged to the party known as the Faithful, who kept the Elvish tongues in use, preserved reverence for the Valar, and drew the suspicion and then the enmity of the King's men in the last generations of the island realm.

The name is Quenya in form, and its elements are transparent: the first is the stem meaning moon, the same that appears in Ithil in Sindarin and in the tower-name Minas Ithil, while the ending marks a masculine agent or servant, so that the whole may be rendered as one devoted to the moon. It stands in deliberate pairing with the name of his brother Anárion, which is built on the corresponding element for the sun; the two names together belong to a naming habit of the Faithful, who favoured High-elven forms over the Adûnaic that the King's men preferred. Tolkien notes in the appendix on writing and pronunciation that the s of such names is always voiceless, as in English so, and that the stress falls on the second syllable here because it is closed by a consonant cluster, giving i-SIL-dur rather than the commonly heard ISS-il-dur.

In later ages he is spoken of by title as well as by name, most often simply as King Isildur, since the realms founded in exile reckoned him among their line of rulers. Chroniclers of Gondor and of the northern kingdom alike refer to him in this way, and the Elvish records preserved at Rivendell keep the plain form of the name without epithet. He was married before the fall of the island, and had four sons; the three eldest, Elendur, Aratan and Ciryon, were born in Númenor, while the youngest, Valandil, was born after the family had come east.

The first deed recorded of Isildur belongs to the last years of Númenor. Sauron, brought to the island as a prisoner and risen to be chief counsellor of Ar-Pharazôn, had persuaded the King to fell Nimloth, the White Tree that grew in the court at Armenelos and whose fate was held by the Faithful to be bound up with the fate of the royal line. Learning of the design before it was carried out, Isildur went by night in disguise to the guarded court and took a single fruit from the tree. He was set upon as he fled and came away with many wounds, so that he lay long in sickness and was thought unlikely to live; when the fruit was planted and the seedling put out its first leaf in spring, he began to mend. Nimloth itself was cut down not long after and burned upon Sauron's altar.

In the year 3319 of the Second Age the island was drowned, and nine ships bearing Elendil and his household were carried east on the storm. Elendil's vessels came ashore in the north, while those of his two sons were driven up the mouths of Anduin, and in 3320 the exiles established their kingdoms: Arnor in the north under Elendil, and Gondor in the south, which the brothers held jointly from Osgiliath as a double lordship acknowledging their father's high kingship. Isildur built Minas Ithil upon a spur of the mountains facing Mordor and planted there the seedling he had brought out of the ruin, while Anárion built Minas Anor further west. In these same years Isildur set upon the hill of Erech a great black stone carried from Númenor, and upon it the king of the mountain people, whose folk had served Sauron in the Dark Years, swore allegiance to him.

Sauron struck before the exiled realms were firmly settled. In 3429 he came out of Mordor, took Minas Ithil and burned the tree growing there; Isildur escaped down the river with his wife and sons and a second seedling saved from the fire, and took ship northward to his father, while Anárion held the enemy back at Osgiliath. The Last Alliance of Elves and Men was made in 3430, and in 3434 its host won the field of Dagorlad and passed into Mordor, where Barad-dûr was besieged for seven years. When Isildur summoned the mountain people of Erech to that war they would not come, and he laid a curse upon them, that they should find no rest until their broken oath was fulfilled. Anárion was killed in 3440 by a stone hurled from the besieged tower.

In 3441 Sauron came forth himself and wrestled with the leaders of the Alliance upon the slopes of Orodruin. Gil-galad and Elendil overthrew him and both perished in the act, and Narsil broke beneath Elendil as he fell. Isildur took up the hilt-shard of his father's sword and struck the Ring from Sauron's hand, whereupon the spirit of the enemy fled and his bodily form was undone. Elrond and Círdan pressed him to carry the Ring at once to the fires in which it had been made, since the mountain stood close at hand and the thing could then have been unmade; he would not, holding it as the price owed him for the deaths of his father and his brother, and he departed with it. So the Second Age ended, and the Ring passed out of the keeping of those who might have destroyed it.

He remained about a year in the south, setting the kingdom in order after the war. He planted a seedling of the White Tree in Minas Anor in memory of his brother, and gave the rule of Gondor to Meneldil, Anárion's son, retaining for himself the high kingship over both realms as his father's heir. Before he left he set down a written account of the Ring: its plain surface, the writing that showed in fire and afterwards faded, and the heat it held when he first took it, which he compared to a brand newly drawn from the forge. The scroll was placed in the archives of Minas Tirith, where it lay unregarded for many centuries until Gandalf sought it out and read it, and by it the Ring found in the Shire was at last identified.

His capacities were those of a Númenórean lord of the Faithful and no more: long life, great stature and strength, seamanship, and the command of men in war. Two of the powers associated with him are properly powers of things rather than of the man. The oath sworn at the Stone of Erech bound the mountain people beyond death, but the binding held because of what was sworn and forsworn, not because Isildur possessed any faculty of cursing; and the palantíri he and his house brought out of Númenor were instruments made by the Noldor in the Elder Days, which any of the line could use but none had made or could remake. The Ring itself he could bear and could turn to invisibility, yet he never mastered it, and the record he left of it shows a man observing an object he did not understand.

The defining bond of Isildur's life was with his father, whose high kingship he acknowledged while ruling in the south and whose sword-shard he took up at the moment of his father's death; the whole of his later claim rests on that relation, and he seems never to have acted against it. Nearly as formative was his standing with Anárion, which the sources present as unusually equal for an elder and a younger brother: the southern kingdom was held between them without precedence, and their two cities faced one another across the river as a pair rather than as seat and dependency. When Anárion was dead, Isildur did not absorb the realm into his own inheritance but committed it to Meneldil, his brother's son, keeping only the overlordship that came to him as Elendil's heir. That act, more than any statement of affection, is the measure of what the brothers were to each other.

Outside his kin his relations were formal and, in two cases, unresolved. With the mountain people of Erech he stood as sworn lord rather than kinsman, a lordship that rested wholly on an oath and failed when the oath was broken. With Elrond and Círdan he stood as the son of their dead ally, and the one recorded occasion on which he set aside their advice is the occasion that mattered. With Sauron the enmity was inherited before it was personal, sharpened by the felling of the tree at Armenelos and the burning of the city he had built; it ended, characteristically, not in a settled victory but in an unfinished one.

The Númenórean legend took shape some years before The Lord of the Rings was begun, and in its first form it had no place for Isildur at all. In the abandoned time-travel story printed in The Lost Road, the man who stands against the King's design and survives the ruin is Elendil, but the son beside him is Herendil, a figure answering to the boy of the modern framing narrative rather than to either of the brothers of the finished work; the matched pair of a moon-name and a sun-name, and the divided lordship that goes with it, had not yet been conceived. The associated texts of The Fall of Númenor already carry the essentials of the catastrophe and already send Elendil east to found realms in exile, but the apportioning of those realms among named sons, and the descent of an heirloom sword through an eldest of them, belong to a later stratum of composition and were worked out as the material was revised.

Within the drafting of The Lord of the Rings the figure arrived late and grew by stages. When the chapter that became The Shadow of the Past was first written, and printed in the History under the title Ancient History, the past of the ring found in the Misty Mountains was still being invented as it was narrated, and the chain running from the hand of the Enemy through a Númenórean king to the river and thence to Gollum settled only in the course of that writing and of the successive versions of the Council of Elrond. The genealogical matter afterwards compressed into the appendices survives in a fuller state in The Heirs of Elendil, where the northern and southern lines are set out with dates and running comment for which the published book had no room; the reckoning there does not always agree with what was finally printed, and the years were adjusted more than once before the text reached its published form.

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy Isildur is played by Harry Sinclair and appears chiefly in the prologue of the first film, which compresses the whole of the Last Alliance into a few minutes of narrated exposition. The most consequential change is that the refusal to unmake the Ring is staged rather than reported: Elrond leads Isildur into the fire-chamber of Orodruin and presses him at the brink itself, and Isildur turns away in silence, so that a decision the book presents through later counsel and hindsight becomes a scene played out on the mountain. The films also make Sauron's ruin instantaneous and physical, his armoured form bursting apart in a shockwave the moment the Ring is cut from his hand, where the written account describes a spirit that fled and a body undone. The ambush by the river is reduced to a brief sequence in which Isildur is alone; his sons, his escort and the esquire who carried away the shards of the sword do not appear, and the fragments are simply shown afterwards in Rivendell. Ralph Bakshi's earlier animated film treats the same material as a stylised narrated prologue in a technique distinct from the rest of the picture, and gives Isildur no speaking part, while the BBC radio dramatisation, for all its fullness, keeps him entirely in report.