Thorondir

Thorondir belongs to the House of Húrin, the family that held the Stewardship of Gondor as a hereditary office. Its founder was Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent who served as Steward to King Minardil; from him the office passed within the family, and after Mardil it became hereditary in fact as well as in practice, the Stewards ruling in the King's name once the line of kings had failed. The published annals set Thorondir in the sequence of Ruling Stewards between Belecthor II and Túrin II, but they do not say how the office came to him. Appendix A states the general principle that the rule passed from father to son or to the nearest kinsman, without recording which of the individual transmissions were of the one kind and which of the other; on his parentage, therefore, the sources are silent rather than uncertain, and nothing beyond his name and his place in the list is set down.

The name is Sindarin in form, as are the names of the Stewards generally, in contrast to the High-elven names borne by many of the earlier kings of Gondor. Its first element is thoron, 'eagle', a word attested within the text of The Lord of the Rings itself: the by-name Thorongil, taken by Aragorn during his service in Gondor under Ecthelion II, is glossed there as Eagle of the Star. The second element, -dir, is not explained in any of the published texts, and the sense of the compound as a whole is nowhere given; the eagle-word may safely be identified, the rest may not.

The same element carries the name of Thorondor, lord of the Eagles of the Crissaegrim in the Elder Days, and appears in the place-name Cirith Thornath, the Eagles' Cleft above Gondolin. This is naming-practice, not kinship: the Stewards of the later Third Age repeatedly drew on the older store of names, and the rolls of the House of Húrin carry such names as Túrin, Húrin, Turgon, Ecthelion and Egalmoth, all of which had been borne by figures of the wars of Beleriand. Thorondir's name sits within that habit of deliberate archaism, and implies nothing further about him.

The roll of the Stewards records for each holder of the office a single figure, the year of his death, and Thorondir's is 2882 of the Third Age. His tenure is therefore bounded rather than described: it began with the death of Belecthor II in 2872 and ended ten years later, which makes it one of the shortest in the whole line, matched only by a few of the earlier Stewards and far outrun by such rules as those of Hador or Cirion. No year of birth is given for him, nor for any of his predecessors after Mardil, so his age at accession and at death cannot be recovered. Everything that can be said about the period of his rule must be assembled from the annals of the realm rather than from any account of the man.

The year in which he came to the rule was marked by a loss that the chronicles thought worth setting down. In 2872 the White Tree of Minas Tirith withered and died, and though search was made no seedling of it could be found. The dead trunk was not removed but left standing in the Court of the Fountain against the return of a king, an act of deliberate waiting rather than of neglect. Thorondir is thus the first of the Ruling Stewards to have held office for his whole term beside a dead tree, and each of his successors down to Denethor II inherited the same barren emblem; it was more than a hundred and forty years after his death before a living scion was brought down from the slopes of Mindolluin.

The wider situation he inherited had shifted decisively only two decades before he took office. In 2850 Gandalf had entered Dol Guldur a second time and learned that its master was Sauron himself, gathering the Rings of Power and seeking word of the One; at the meeting of the White Council in the following year he pressed for an assault on the stronghold, and was overruled by Saruman. Saruman had by then held Orthanc for well over a century, the keys having been given to him by the Steward Beren in 2759, and Isengard was a friendly garrison in name and an independent power in fact. None of this was known in Minas Tirith. From the Steward's chair the frontier looked as it had for generations: Minas Ithil in enemy hands since 2002, Osgiliath a ruin astride a broken bridge, and Ithilien thinning of its people.

To the north the alliance sworn by Eorl and Cirion held, and Rohan in these years was ruled by Folcwine, who had come to the throne in 2864 and had recovered the western march between Adorn and Isen that had been overrun in the disorders of the previous century. Gondor and the Mark were therefore both in a period of recovered strength, and no war is recorded between the death of Belecthor II and the death of Thorondir. This is the chief fact about his decade: the Tale of Years, which lists battles, plagues, births and the movements of the Wise, has nothing to enter under any year from 2872 to 2882. The silence is not a gap in transmission but a record of quiet, and it is the only characterisation of his rule that the sources permit.

The quiet ended almost at once after him. Thorondir died in 2882 and Túrin II took the rule, and in 2885 the Haradrim, stirred up by emissaries out of Mordor, crossed the Poros and attacked. Folcwine sent aid under the terms of the old oath, and both his sons, Folcred and Fastred, were killed in that campaign, though the invaders were driven back; the Steward sent gold to Rohan as weregild for them. Túrin's later years saw the defences of the east bank strengthened, the last inhabitants of Ithilien withdraw before raids of orcs out of Minas Morgul, and the hidden refuge of Henneth Annûn made in 2901. The pressure that would define Gondor's last century of Stewards began, on the evidence of the annals, in the third year after Thorondir's death.

What survives of him, then, is an ordinal, a date, and the negative testimony of a decade without entries. No deed is attributed to him, no marriage or child is named, and no episode of the narrative touches him; he is not mentioned anywhere in the body of the tale, only in the list appended to it. This is the ordinary condition of the middle Stewards, most of whom appear solely as names with years attached, and it should not be read as a judgement on the man or on his government. The historian of Gondor can say with confidence when Thorondir ruled and what was true of the realm while he ruled it, and nothing further.

The office Thorondir held was, in everything but title, the government of Gondor entire. By the later Third Age the Ruling Steward commanded the armed strength of the realm, appointed and answered to no superior in the disposal of its fiefs, and directed its dealings with such neighbours as remained, and the appendices record no council or assembly with power to check him. What distinguished the office from kingship was formal and carefully maintained: the Stewards took no crown, did not sit in the throne but in a lesser seat set below it, and bore a white rod as the sign of their authority. Their banner was plain white without any device, the White Tree, the silver crown and the seven stars being the arms of the royal house and not theirs to display. Each ruled under his own name, none taking a name of kingly form on accession.

The limitation was thus one of claim rather than of competence. The Steward held rod and rule in the name of a king who had not returned, and the office contained no provision by which its holder might declare the interregnum ended or the succession lapsed; only the coming of an heir could do that, and none came in Thorondir's lifetime or in the six generations after him. The one recorded act by which a Steward exercised an unmistakably royal prerogative lay some two centuries before his time, when Cirion granted Calenardhon outright to the Éothéod, alienating a province of the realm in the King's name; nothing comparable is set down for the middle Stewards. Within these bounds the rule was hereditary and unelected, passing within the House of Húrin without any recorded confirmation by others.

Of powers personal to Thorondir the sources say nothing whatever. He was a mortal man of the Númenórean strain as it survived in Gondor, and no faculty, craft or possession is attributed to him. The Stone of Anor lay in the White Tower throughout his tenure, but no Steward is recorded to have looked into it before Denethor II, and where that use is discussed it is treated as an unusual assumption of a right belonging properly to the Kings. Whatever authority Thorondir wielded is therefore inferred from the office rather than attested of the man, and the distinction should be kept: what a Ruling Steward could do in 2872 is well documented, what this one did with it is not documented at all.

Of Thorondir's own kindred nothing is set down beyond his membership of the ruling family. No wife is named for him, no child, no brother, no kinsman of any degree. This is less a peculiarity of his case than a property of the document: the roll of the Stewards is a list of office-holders, not a genealogy, and it records neither marriages nor daughters nor the collateral branches that the rule of succession implies must have existed. Where a relation does appear it appears because the narrative requires it, as with the marriage of Denethor II to Finduilas, daughter of Adrahil of Dol Amroth, whose sons carry part of the story. Measured against that practice, the blankness around Thorondir supports no inference that he was unmarried or without issue.

What the roll does show is a family that named its sons out of its own past as well as out of Beleriand. The ordinals attached to Belecthor, Túrin, Turgon, Ecthelion and Denethor mark names borne more than once within the line, and Thorondir's two neighbours in the sequence each carry a predecessor's name and a number; his own name is used only once. Beyond that, his one demonstrable relation is not to a person at all but to the office, and through it to a king absent for more than eight centuries by the year he took the rule, with no heir then in view. A deputyship of that length is a relationship of a kind, and in his case the only one the sources will bear.

The standing external bonds of his house — the sworn friendship with the horsemen of the north, the loyalty of the southern fiefs and their lords — belonged to the office rather than to any one holder, and none of them is attached to his name in particular; nor is any adversary. The line into which he was born continued past him until the direct descent of Ruling Stewards ended with Denethor II, after which Faramir gave up the rod to the returning King, received the office back from him, and held it as a servant rather than a ruler, with the lordship of Ithilien besides. Thorondir stands in the middle length of that descent, joined by evidence to no one except the two men whose death-dates lie on either side of his own.