Tar-Anárion

Tar-Anárion belonged to the royal house of Númenor, the line that descended from Elros Tar-Minyatur, first King of the Edain in the Land of Gift. He was born in the year 1003 of the Second Age, the child of Tar-Ancalimë and of Hallacar, who came from Hyarastorni in the Mittalmar, the inland region of the island. That marriage joined two branches of the same stock: Hallacar's house also traced itself to Elros through Vardamir, so that the boy's descent on either side ran back to the same source, though by lines long separated in rank and manner of life. The union of his parents was not a settled one, and the chronicles of the house give him no recorded brother or sister. Of his upbringing the texts say nothing; he enters the record as heir, and the record is genealogical rather than personal.

The name is Quenya, as were the names borne by all the rulers of Númenor in the earlier centuries, before the High-elven tongue fell out of favour with the Kings. The prefix Tar- means simply high or lofty and marked the royal style rather than the individual; it was assumed with the sceptre, so that the name under which a ruler is listed is not necessarily the name given at birth. The second element rests on anar, the Quenya word for the sun, with the ending that denotes a son or descendant, giving a sense of son of the sun. Read beside his mother's name, which is built on the element for light and brightness, it forms part of a small cluster of luminous names within that generation of the house.

The bare form Anárion is also used of him in Númenórean matter, which invites confusion with a far better-known bearer of the name: Anárion son of Elendil, who with his brother Isildur founded the realms in exile many centuries afterwards. The two are unconnected except by the shared word and by common descent from the same island house; the later Anárion belonged to the Faithful, and his name is one instance of a solar and stellar naming habit that persisted in that family. Readers meeting the short form in a Númenórean context should take it as the earlier man unless the setting says otherwise.

The dates preserved for Tar-Anárion describe an unusually long apprenticeship. He was seventy-two years old when his mother received the sceptre in 1075 of the Second Age, and he remained the King's Heir — or rather the Queen's — for more than two centuries, until Tar-Ancalimë laid down her office in 1280. He was then two hundred and seventy-seven, an age at which a Númenórean of that era was still in vigour but no longer young; few of the line waited so long. His mother did not die at once upon surrendering the sceptre: she lived a further five years, until 1285, so that the opening of his rule was passed in the shadow of a predecessor who had been the first Ruling Queen of the island and had governed it for two hundred and five years. Nothing is recorded of what passed between them in those five years.

He held the sceptre for a hundred and fourteen years, from 1280 to 1394, and for that entire span the chronicle of his house sets down no act. No war, no voyage, no building, no ordinance, and no journey to Middle-earth is attributed to him; the entry that names him gives his parentage, his dates, and the manner in which the rule passed on, and nothing more. This silence should not be read as a judgement upon him. The record of the line thins markedly in the generations between Tar-Ancalimë and Tar-Minastir, and several of his successors are treated as briefly, so that what survives is the skeleton of a dynastic register rather than a history of reigns. What he inherited, at least, can be described: a realm that had turned inward under his mother, who had refused to continue the aid her father Tar-Aldarion had given to Gil-galad in Lindon. Whether Tar-Anárion reversed that policy, maintained it, or simply let it stand is not stated anywhere.

The years of his reign nonetheless fall across one of the decisive turns of the Age, though the turning was hidden. Some eighty years before he received the sceptre, about 1200, Sauron had begun his approach to the Eldar under a fair form and a fair name; Gil-galad would not receive him, but the smiths of Eregion did, and the work that would produce the Rings of Power was already in preparation while Tar-Anárion ruled. In the same period the Númenóreans were establishing permanent havens on the coasts of Middle-earth, a change from the older pattern of seasonal voyages and one that would shape everything that followed. None of this appears in the Númenórean royal annals as a matter touching him. The great intervention from the island came only in 1700, when Tar-Minastir sent a fleet to Lindon in the war against Sauron — nearly three centuries after Tar-Anárion had given up the sceptre.

The one episode reported of him concerns the succession, and it is reported from the far side, in the entries for his children rather than his own. Under the law established by his grandfather Tar-Aldarion, the eldest child of the ruler was to receive the sceptre whether son or daughter, and that law had been made precisely so that Tar-Ancalimë might inherit. Tar-Anárion's eldest child was a daughter, and she refused; so did the second, her sister. The rule therefore passed to the third child, his son Súrion, who took the sceptre as Tar-Súrion when his father relinquished it in 1394. The refusals are stated flatly and without explanation, and no reason for them is given in any surviving text; the temptation to connect them with the bitterness that had divided Tar-Anárion's own parents is natural but unsupported. What can be said is that the new law of succession, having been made for one woman, was declined by the next two who might have used it.

He surrendered the sceptre in 1394 and lived a further ten years, dying in 1404 at the age of four hundred and one. In doing so he kept the practice of the earlier rulers of Númenor, who commonly laid down their office while still living rather than holding it until death, and who reckoned the surrender rather than the death as the end of a reign. That custom held for many generations after him and was abandoned only much later, when the Kings had come to grudge their years and clung to rule and to life until it was taken from them. Measured against his line, Tar-Anárion's span was ordinary: shorter than his mother's, longer than his son's tenure would suggest of the men of that generation, and wholly within the great lifespan granted to the house of Elros before the shadow of the Númenórean fear of death fell upon it. He is, in the end, a fixed point in a genealogy rather than an actor in a narrative, and the record is honest about being no more than that.

The office Tar-Anárion held is better attested than his conduct of it. Númenor was a single realm and was never divided in the manner of the later kingdoms in exile: one ruler governed the whole island from Armenelos, the city of the Kings in the Mittalmar, and beneath that rule stood no rival crown, only lordships such as that of Andúnië in the west. The mark of that rule was not a crown but a sceptre, which the Númenóreans reckoned the true token of kingship, and which passed from hand to hand as a physical thing at a moment chosen by its holder. The successor was designated in advance and bore the title of King's Heir, so that authority was never in doubt before it was transferred. Within that frame Tar-Anárion's own powers were those of any of the earlier rulers, and no text records a single occasion on which he used them.

One function belonged to the ruler alone and can therefore be said of him with confidence, since it fell to him by office and not by circumstance. At the summit of the Meneltarma, the mountain that stood at the centre of the island, was the hallow of Eru, unroofed and unbuilt, where no tool was used and where silence was the rule. Three times in the year the ruler climbed it on foot with a great concourse of the people behind him, at the spring prayer, the midsummer praise, and the autumn thanksgiving, and there his was the only voice raised. Númenor in that age had no temple, no priesthood, and no other place of worship; the whole religious observance of the realm ran through the person of the sceptre-holder. Tar-Anárion will have performed this office some three hundred and forty times, and not one of those occasions is recorded.

The limits upon that power were real and of several kinds. The Númenóreans were forbidden to sail westward beyond sight of their own coasts, a prohibition laid on them by the Valar at the founding of the realm and binding on the ruler as on the least of his subjects; the island itself was held as a gift on terms no King could revise. Nor did the sceptre confer anything beyond the mortal: the house of Elros was granted long life, not deathlessness, and Tar-Anárion's four centuries were a gift measured out rather than a power wielded. No craft, lore, or preternatural ability is attributed to any ruler of that period, and none should be inferred. Even in the matter of the succession his authority stopped short, for the law compelled the ruler to offer the sceptre to his eldest child but could not compel that child to take it.

Every named relation of Tar-Anárion belongs to his own family; no counsellor, companion, captain, or adversary is attached to him anywhere in the tradition. The household he entered had been shaped by a quarrel a generation older than his parents'. His grandfather Tar-Aldarion gave his life to the sea and to the coasts of Middle-earth, while his grandmother Erendis, who came not of the royal house but of a family of the western coastlands descended from the people of Bëor, would not share that life; the two parted in bitterness, and she perished in water in 985, some eighteen years before he was born. Aldarion, by contrast, lived until 1098, so that grandfather and grandson were contemporaries for ninety-five years — yet not a word survives of any dealing between them.

In his own generation the record is thinner still. No wife or consort is named for him, and his three children appear in the register chiefly as a problem of inheritance rather than as persons: the two elder daughters are not given names at all, and are remembered only for the thing they declined. It is worth noticing how the women of this stretch of the line are characterised by refusal — his mother had resisted the marriage expected of her before at last consenting, and his daughters in turn set aside the very right her own accession had secured. Whether that indicates a temper running in the family or merely the accidents of what the annalist chose to preserve cannot be settled from the surviving material.

The line moved away from his branch sooner than it might have. His son's daughter, Tar-Telperiën, took the sceptre and became the second Ruling Queen; but she never wed and left no child, so that the rule passed sideways to the offspring of her brother Isilmo, and it was Isilmo's son Tar-Minastir — Anárion's great-grandson — who at length took up again the alliance with the Elven-king that the house had allowed to lapse. Seen from that distance, Tar-Anárion stands at the deepest point of the family's turn inward: grandson of the great voyager, father of two daughters who would not rule, grandfather of a queen who left no heir, and forebear of the king who looked eastward once more.