Lothíriel

Lothíriel belonged to the princely house of Dol Amroth, the daughter of Imrahil, who ruled that fief on the coast of Belfalas and brought its knights to the defence of Minas Tirith in the War of the Ring. She is a figure of the genealogical record rather than of the narrative: her name occurs in the appended annals of the House of Eorl, where her parentage is given, and not in the story of the War itself. By that parentage she stood close to the ruling family of Gondor, for Imrahil's sister Finduilas had been the wife of the Steward Denethor and the mother of Boromir and Faramir, so that the Steward's sons were her first cousins. Her people were thus among the highest of the Dúnedain of the South, though the lordship of Dol Amroth was a princedom and not the stewardship.

Something of the quality of that house is set down in the account of the days after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, when Legolas, seeing Imrahil pass, judged that the blood of the Elves ran in the men of his line, and that they kept a bearing not found elsewhere among mortals. The princes of Dol Amroth held a seaward realm whose lords had long been counted kin to the Elven-folk who once dwelt in those havens, and their names were formed in the Grey-elven tongue rather than in the Númenórean speech more usual among the great families of Gondor. Lothíriel's own name shares that pattern, being Sindarin in shape and accented in the manner of that language.

No gloss of the name is given in the published writings, and any rendering must therefore rest on the elements collected elsewhere. The first part answers to the Sindarin word for a flower, which appears in such names as Nimloth and in the name of the golden wood of Lórien; the remainder is not securely attested and is best left unexplained rather than construed. The tradition behind the house is set out more fully in the later editorial matter, where the line of the princes is traced to a Númenórean lord of Belfalas and to an Elven-woman of Lórien said to have been his wife, from whom the reputed Elvish strain in the family descended. That account belongs to the posthumously edited papers and stands outside the text of the Appendices, but it is the source of the belief that Legolas voiced.

Nothing that Lothíriel did is set down as narrative; her place in the record is fixed entirely by dates that belong, in the first instance, to her husband. Éomer son of Éomund was born in 2991, and on the fifteenth of March 3019 he was hailed King of the Mark upon the Pelennor, where Théoden his mother's brother fell in the great battle before Minas Tirith. He was thus the eighteenth of the line of Eorl, and came to the throne in the midst of a war that was decided within the same month. The annal in which Lothíriel's name occurs stands at the end of the account of his reign, and it places her entry into that history two years after the accession, so that everything the chronicle says of her belongs to the aftermath of the war rather than to the war itself.

The intervening period is recorded in some detail, and it is worth marking what it does not contain. In July of 3019 Éomer came again to Minas Tirith, and later that month a company set out northward bearing the body of Théoden; in August the king was laid in the eighth mound of the western line at Edoras, and at the funeral feast that followed the betrothal of Éowyn, Éomer's sister, to Faramir the Steward's son was made known before the assembled guests. Imrahil of Dol Amroth was among that company, having ridden north with the escort. Lothíriel is not named at any point in these scenes, nor anywhere else in the narrative of the War of the Ring; the meeting that led to her marriage is not described, and no source states when or where it took place.

The one dated event of her life is the marriage itself, which the appended annals assign to the last year of the Third Age, that is to 3021. That year is a boundary in more than one reckoning: in Gondor the Fourth Age was counted from the twenty-fifth of March 3021, while the older tale of years closes with the departure of the Ring-bearers from the Grey Havens in the following autumn. The record does not say on which side of that line the wedding fell, only that it belonged to the closing year, and it gives neither the place nor the manner of it. The union joined the royal house of the Rohirrim to the princes of Belfalas, a match between the Riders and the Dúnedain of the southern fiefs of which no earlier instance is recorded in the annals of the Mark.

Her queenship covered the whole of a long reign. Éomer ruled for sixty-five years, dying in the sixty-third year of the Fourth Age, and only Aldor the Old among the kings before him had held the throne longer. Those years brought peace to the Mark for such as desired it, but not quiet on its borders or beyond them: the oath that Eorl had sworn to Gondor was renewed between Éomer and King Elessar, and Éomer kept it in the field, so that the cavalry of the Mark rode in the wars of the King of the West far to the east beyond the inland sea and southward as well, against enemies whom the fall of Sauron had left unsubdued. The friendship between the two kings, and that between Éomer and Imrahil, are both remarked upon in the same passage that names Lothíriel, and the second of these was of course a bond of marriage as well as of arms. Of her own part in the government of the Mark, of any journey she made, or of the year and place of her death, the chronicle says nothing whatever.

The line was carried on by her son, Elfwine the Fair, who succeeded Éomer as ruler of the Mark; no other child of the marriage is named, and the record breaks off with his accession, giving no account of his reign. His name is worth a word, since it stands in the Old English mode by which the speech of the Rohirrim is represented throughout the book, whereas his mother's name is Sindarin in form and points to the other half of his descent; the two together mark, at the level of naming, the joining of the two houses that the annal reports. That is the whole extent of Lothíriel's recorded history: a parentage, a marriage set in a named year, a reign shared and a son who inherited it. The entry exists to carry the succession forward, and it does not pretend to do more.

Within the legendarium Lothíriel functions as a dynastic joint rather than as an actor, and the appended annals introduce her precisely at the point where two ruling houses are bound together. The closing years of the Third Age are settled, in the record, largely through marriages between the families that had carried the war: the union of Aragorn and Arwen is given a tale of its own at the end of the annals of the Kings, and the single sentence allotted to Éomer's marriage performs the same office in miniature for the Mark and for Belfalas. Nothing in the text assigns her a charge, a household, or a part in the counsels of either realm, and no decision of the reign is said to have passed through her. Her office in the record is to make the connection and to transmit it.

No ability, craft, or deed is attributed to her anywhere in the published writings. She is given no words, stands in no scene, and is credited with no counsel, no journey, and no act of governance; the annals of the House of Eorl treat other royal wives with a comparable economy, as with Morwen of Lossarnach, whom Thengel took to wife during his years in Gondor and who is remembered chiefly for a byname and for the children she bore him. Nor does the Elvish strain reported of her father's house carry any faculty with it: the texts present it as a matter of descent and bearing only, and claim no length of days, no foresight, and no gift of any kind for Imrahil, for her, or for her son. What the appendix withholds is as consistent as what it grants, and the silence extends to the end of her life, which is nowhere dated.

The limits here are limits of documentation rather than a verdict on the figure. Even the posthumously edited papers that enlarge Dol Amroth are concerned with the descent of its princes and with the tradition of their Elvish forebear; they add nothing to the one line that names her, and she is not among the persons whose histories that material recovers. Her significance in the work is therefore entirely relational, resting on three connections — daughter, wife, mother — each of which points toward a man whose acts are set down elsewhere. That is a property of the genealogical matter in which she stands, and it should not be mistaken for a judgement made about her within the narrative, which had no occasion to speak of her at all.

The single line that records her marriage sits within a wider pattern, for the same two years bound the house of Dol Amroth and the house of Eorl twice over and in opposite directions. Faramir, her first cousin on her father's side, had already taken Éowyn, Éomer's sister, so that when Lothíriel in turn married Éomer the two households stood related by a reciprocal match: the King of the Mark was brother-in-law to her cousin, and Éowyn, by then Lady of Ithilien, became her sister-in-law. Reckoned from her side, the effect was to attach the princedom of Belfalas to the Rohirrim directly, without passing through the ruling house of Minas Tirith, while her older tie to the Stewards' line persisted alongside it. The appendices record both unions without comment on their symmetry, and nothing suggests that either was arranged with the other in view.

The friendship between her father and her husband, which the annal sets down as a fact of the reign, has a visible beginning in the narrative even though the narrative never connects it to her. In the days after the great battle before the City, Imrahil held command of what remained of Gondor's strength while Éomer led the Riders, and the two sat in the same counsel with Gandalf and the heir of Isildur when it was resolved to march upon the Black Gate; they led their peoples on that march together. Whatever the marriage owed to that acquaintance is not stated anywhere. It is worth noting, too, that the match was not one between crowns: Imrahil was a vassal prince under the King of Gondor, so a reigning king took to wife the daughter of a lord who owed allegiance elsewhere, and the alliance so formed ran between a kingdom and a fief.

The pairing with Éowyn is instructive in another way. The two women brought into one family by these marriages are treated by the book at opposite extremes of attention: one is given speech, a disguise, a wound, a long convalescence and a change of purpose set out at length, while the other is given a name, a father and a year. The economy of the annals is therefore not a rule applied evenly to royal wives but a consequence of who entered the story and who did not. Every relation the record grants Lothíriel is described from the outside and in the third person of a chronicle — she is a daughter to one man, a wife to another, a mother to a third — and none of them is shown from her side or reported in her own words.