Tar-Súrion

Súrion is a name of High-elven form, and it belongs to a period in which the rulers of Númenor still bore and used names in Quenya. The published texts do not gloss its meaning, and no interpretation is attached to it in the chronicle where it stands, so it is best left unglossed; what is certain is only its language and its shape. The prefixed title Tar-, borne by every reigning lord and lady of the island from the earliest days of the realm, is the Quenya element meaning high or lofty, related to the adjective tára, and it marked the ruling name assumed with the sceptre rather than the name given at birth. This convention held unbroken through the middle centuries of the kingdom; only much later, when the tongue of the Eldar fell out of favour among the Númenóreans, did rulers begin to take their titles in Adûnaic instead.

By kindred he was a Númenórean of the house of Elros Tar-Minyatur, the first lord of the island and the son of Eärendil who had chosen the fate of Men. Through that descent his people were the Edain, the three houses of Men who had fought against Morgoth in the Elder Days and were rewarded with the land raised for them in the Great Sea, together with a span of life far beyond the measure of other mortals. In the nearer generations he stood close to the most disputed part of that lineage: his father was Tar-Anárion, his grandmother the wilful Tar-Ancalimë, first Ruling Queen of the realm, and his great-grandfather Tar-Aldarion the Mariner.

He was born in the year 1174 of the Second Age, the third of his father's children and the youngest, his two elder siblings being daughters. Under the law of succession as Tar-Aldarion had altered it, the eldest child of the ruler, whether son or daughter, was heir to the sceptre; the crown was therefore not his by birth-order. That both his sisters set the office aside is recorded plainly and without explanation in the roll of the kings, and it is this double refusal, rather than any claim of his own, that brought the inheritance down to the third child of the house.

The whole of his youth and early manhood fell under the rule of others. When he was born the sceptre was held by his grandmother, who had taken it in 1075 and kept it for two hundred and five years; he was therefore already a hundred and six years old when she laid it down in 1280 and his father succeeded her, and she herself lived five years beyond her abdication. Tar-Anárion then ruled for a hundred and fourteen years. Of what the king's son did in that long interval nothing at all is preserved: the roll of the line sets down birth, accession, surrender and death, and for these middle generations of the kingdom it seldom sets down more.

The sceptre came to him in 1394, when he was two hundred and twenty years old and had waited through two reigns for an inheritance that the law had not marked out for him. His father did not die in that year but lived a further ten, until 1404, for it was then the settled practice of the house that a ruler should yield office while still unspent and pass his last years apart from it. Counted among the rulers Súrion stands ninth, and he stands ninth also in direct descent from Elros, the two reckonings running together because the sceptre had gone from parent to child in every generation before him. He held it for a hundred and sixty-two years, one of the longer tenures of the early kingdom, and to the whole of that span the record attaches no event whatever — neither war, nor dispute over the succession, nor any voyage thought worth the setting down.

Beyond the island, in those same centuries, matters were moving that would in time bear on Númenor, though no text connects him with any of them. The Tale of Years places about the year 1200 the coming of Sauron to Eregion in fair form and under a friendly name, and about 1500 the beginning of the forging of the Rings of Power by the Elven-smiths who had taken his teaching; the ruling Ring was wrought about 1600. The middle of those dates falls near the end of Súrion's reign, and the last a little after his death. His years thus cover, without any recorded contact, the whole of the quiet interval in which the deception in Eregion ripened.

Of his household two names survive, and both bear on what followed. His eldest child was Telperiën, and to her the sceptre passed when he set it aside in 1556; she became the second Ruling Queen of the island, the first woman to hold the office since his grandmother had held it, and by then the law that admitted a daughter to the succession was no longer new or contested. His second child was Isilmo, of whom the chronicle says only what is needed to trace the descent. Nothing is told of the circumstances of the resignation, and nothing suggests that it was other than the customary act performed at the customary point.

He died in 1574, eighteen years after laying the sceptre down, at the age of four hundred. That is close to the full measure granted to the earlier kings of his line, and it was not much exceeded by those who came after him. Outliving his own reign by nearly two decades was in his day unremarkable rather than notable: the voluntary surrender of office before the end was still kept without argument, and a ruler who died in possession of the sceptre would have been the anomaly. Only generations later did a king refuse the surrender and cling to office until death overtook him, and the Akallabêth reckons that refusal among the first signs of the change that came over the Númenóreans.

Telperiën took no husband and left no child, so that at the close of her long reign the succession turned aside from her and returned to her brother's line: the sceptre came to Minastir, son of Isilmo and grandson of Súrion. It was under Minastir that Númenor sent its first great armament to Middle-earth on behalf of the Eldar, the fleet that broke Sauron's assault upon Lindon and Eriador; the Tale of Years dates that relief to 1700, which falls some years before he received the sceptre from his aunt, and the two records are not readily brought into agreement on the point. What is not in doubt is the shape of the descent. The refusal of Súrion's sisters had carried the inheritance to a third child, and the childlessness of his own eldest carried it on through his second; twice in three generations the line held only because it could pass sideways before it passed down.

The office Súrion held was defined by a small number of plain functions rather than by any personal endowment. The sceptre itself was the token of authority in the island kingdom, and the act that mattered was its handing over: a ruler received it from a living predecessor and was thereafter lord of the whole land and of the havens its ships had made overseas, governing with a council of the realm whose consent the earlier rulers had been accustomed to seek in weighty matters. Alongside this the ruler carried the one religious duty the Númenóreans recognised. On the summit of the Meneltarma, which was open to the sky and held no building, no altar and no image, the reigning lord alone spoke aloud, three times in the year: at the opening of spring in petition, at midsummer in praise, and in autumn in thanksgiving for the harvest. There was no priesthood to share the office and no other voice was raised on the mountain, so that the duty was less a privilege than a solitary obligation attaching to whoever bore the sceptre.

The limits of that authority were sharp and were not, in his century, contested. The Númenóreans were Men and remained mortal; what they had been given was length of days, greater stature and skill, and a land of extraordinary bounty, not any power of a different order, and no text ascribes to a ruler of the line any faculty beyond the human. Westward their reach was closed altogether by the prohibition of the Valar, which forbade them to sail out of sight of their own coasts toward the shores in the West or to set foot on land there; the ban was still kept without argument in his time, and the questioning of it belongs to reigns long after his. Eastward the authority of the sceptre ended at the water. Númenórean vessels came to Middle-earth in these centuries as builders of harbours, teachers and givers of aid to the lesser Men of the coasts, not as claimants of territory or takers of tribute, and the turn from friendship to lordship over those lands lies well beyond Súrion's death.

Within the legendarium his function is structural rather than active: he is a point through which the sceptre and the descent from Elros both pass, and the single source that names him is a dynastic register, concerned with years of birth, accession, surrender and death and with little else. That silence should not be read as a verdict on the man. The same document is nearly as sparing with several of his neighbours in the roll, and it records no deeds for rulers whose reigns are known from elsewhere to have held them. Nor does the length of his tenure imply anything in itself; in a house where office was laid down voluntarily and long life was ordinary, a long reign is a fact of arithmetic rather than a measure of what was done with it. What can be said of his power is therefore only what the office conferred on anyone who held it, and of its exercise nothing at all survives.

The relationships that fix his place in the record are largely inherited ones, and they are not peaceable. In the two generations immediately above him the history of the house is dominated by domestic estrangement: Tar-Aldarion and Erendis parted after a long quarrel over his voyages and never came together again, and their daughter was taken by her mother to be raised inland among the sheep-farms of Emerië, deliberately apart from the sea and from her father's household. Ancalimë came late and unwillingly to marriage, took Hallacar of Hyarastorni, who was himself descended from Elros through Vardamir, and lived with him in open contention; Súrion's father was the only child of that union. Nothing of the kind is reported of Súrion himself.

The silence of the register about his own household is therefore worth marking. No wife is named for him, which is the ordinary practice of the roll once it has passed the generations whose marriages bore on a dispute or on the descent, and it should not be read as evidence that he had none. More striking is the pattern the entries disclose without comment: across three successive turns of the sceptre in his immediate family the disposal of the office was settled by what the women of the house chose to do with it, twice by declining and once by accepting. He stands at the meeting-point of those decisions, and the source neither credits him with arranging them nor shows him resisting any.

One further connection belonged to him as it belonged to every lord of the island, though no text applies it to him by name. Elros had a brother, Elrond, and at the end of the Elder Days the two were granted a choice between the kindreds; Elrond took the fate of the Firstborn and remained in Middle-earth, so that he was living there throughout Súrion's four hundred years and for an age after. The rulers of Númenor were thus the mortal half of a divided house, kin across the sea to one who did not age. That kinship goes unremarked in the dynastic chronicle, which is concerned with the descent of the sceptre and not with the branch that had turned aside from mortality.