Turgon

Turgon belonged to the House of Húrin, the family in which the office of Steward of Gondor had become hereditary. Its ancestor was Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent who held the stewardship under King Minardil; from him the later holders of the office took their family name, and after Mardil, who first governed the realm when no king remained, the office passed within that line by inheritance rather than by royal appointment. Turgon thus stood at a considerable remove from the founder of his house, one of a long succession of men who ruled Gondor without claiming crown or kingship, holding authority in trust for a king who did not return. As the register records, his place in that sequence lies between Túrin II and Ecthelion II. Nothing in the annals of Gondor distinguishes his ancestry beyond this: he is named as a Steward in his order, and the record of the line gives the order but not, for every generation, the exact link of father and son.

The name itself is Elvish and belongs to a much older tradition than the stewardship. In the Elder Days it was borne by the Noldorin king who founded and ruled the hidden city of Gondolin, and it is formed from an element meaning power or mastery, the same that appears in the names Túrin and Turambar. The name is therefore descriptive of authority rather than of any particular deed, and its use in Gondor carries the weight of that earlier bearer rather than any new coinage. The name of Turgon's successor, Ecthelion, likewise recalls a captain of Gondolin, so that the two stand together as a pair of borrowed names from the same lost city.

This practice was not peculiar to him. The Dúnedain of Gondor kept the use of the Elvish tongues long after other peoples of Men had lost them, and gave their children names of Elvish form; the Stewards in particular drew repeatedly on the heroes and lords of the First Age, so that Húrin, Túrin, Hador, Barahir, Beren, Dior and Egalmoth all recur among them. Read against that list, Turgon's name is unremarkable in kind, a further instance of a house looking backward for its titles at a time when the realm it governed was itself living on inherited authority. What the sources preserve of him is accordingly slight: his rank, his position in the roll of Stewards, and the house to which he belonged.

The annals set Túrin II's death in 2914 of the Third Age, and from that year the office passed to Turgon. What he inherited was a realm already narrowed by pressure from the east. In his predecessor's day the Uruks of Mordor had begun to raid across Anduin, and the people of Ithilien had steadily abandoned their homes; by 2901 the province was all but empty of settled folk, and the only holds kept there were the secret refuges built by Túrin II, of which Henneth Annûn behind its waterfall was maintained the longest. Gondor in these years fought no great battle and lost no province outright, but it had ceased to expand, and its Stewards governed a frontier rather than a border.

The chronicle of Turgon's thirty-nine years is largely a chronicle of things happening elsewhere, and the annals do not record that Gondor took part in them. In 2930 Denethor II was born to Ecthelion, who would in time hold the stewardship after Turgon; in the following year Aragorn son of Arathorn was born in the north, and in 2933, his father being slain, he was taken to Rivendell and his lineage hidden. In 2939 Saruman learned that Sauron's servants were searching the Anduin about the Gladden Fields, and concealed what he had learned from the White Council. Two years later the Council at last moved against Dol Guldur, and Sauron, whose preparations were already made, gave way and abandoned the fortress; by 2942 he had returned secretly to Mordor. None of this is said to have been known in Minas Tirith at the time.

One connection between Gondor and Rohan does run through Turgon's stewardship, though the sources treat it as a matter of the Riddermark rather than of the Stewards. Thengel son of Fengel, at odds with his father, had gone south and taken service in Gondor, where he remained many years and won honour; there in 2943 he married Morwen of Lossarnach, a woman of high Númenórean blood and much younger than himself. Their son Théoden was born in Gondor in 2948, and the household spoke the Gondorian tongue by preference even after its return north. That return came in 2953, when Fengel died and Thengel was recalled, reluctantly, to take the kingship of the Mark — the same year in which Turgon's own rule ended.

The event by which the histories chiefly remember Turgon's time fell two years before his death. In 2951 Sauron ceased to work in secret and declared himself openly, entering again the land he had long been preparing; Barad-dûr rose again on the foundations it had held before, Orodruin woke and sent up fire, and the last of the Elven-folk who had lingered in Ithilien departed far away. In the same year three of the Ringwraiths were sent to occupy Dol Guldur, so that the shadow was restored in the south of Mirkwood even as it was rebuilt in the east. The Steward is not recorded as taking any action in answer, and the annals name no counter-measure of Gondor's in that year; the entry stands as something that happened in his days rather than something he did.

Turgon died in 2953, and the office passed to Ecthelion II. That year is crowded in the Tale of Years. The White Council met for the last time, and there debated the Rings of Power; Saruman told it that the One had been carried down Anduin and lost long since in the Sea, a report he had contrived to satisfy the others and to leave the search to himself. He then withdrew to Isengard, which had been granted to him as a fastness in the days of an earlier Steward, and took it now as his own possession and fortified it; from that time he set watch on Gandalf's movements and began to keep agents in Bree and in the Southfarthing of the Shire. Gondor, which had committed Isengard to his keeping to guard the passage between the mountains, is not said to have protested. The two entries stand side by side in the annals: the death of the twenty-fourth Ruling Steward, and the loss of a stronghold that had been held in the name of his realm.

The office Turgon held was defined as much by what it withheld as by what it granted. A Ruling Steward governed with the practical authority of a king — the command of the armies, the ordering of the realm and its fiefs, the giving of judgement — yet the outward marks of kingship were denied him by the terms of the office itself. The Stewards did not take their place in the ancient throne of Gondor, and a plain chair of black stone was set for them at the foot of its dais; they wore no crown and bore no sceptre, but only a white rod as the token of their office. The standard flown in their name was likewise white and empty of device, the White Tree with its stars and crown belonging to a king who was not there to display it. Each in turn was bound by the oath of the house, to wield the rod and govern on the king's behalf, holding the office only against his return.

That formula set a real limit, though not one any Steward of Turgon's day is recorded as chafing against. The trust could not be renounced or converted into a crown: the line had governed for centuries without a king to govern for, and the claim of the northern heirs had long since been set aside, yet no Steward moved to close the gap by assuming the title. What the office actually commanded, however, was only what Gondor still possessed, and by the twenty-fourth holder that was a diminished thing. The Steward could garrison a frontier and maintain what his predecessors had built; he could not recover Ithilien, compel the north, or reach beyond his own borders, and the annals credit Turgon with no campaign, no embassy and no counsel taken abroad. The absence is characteristic of the office in its late phase rather than of the man.

One instrument of the office appears to have lain unused in his hands. The Stone of Minas Anor remained in the White Tower throughout these generations, and the later account of the palantíri treats Denethor II's recourse to it as something new among the Stewards, hazarded late and at cost; nothing suggests that Turgon or those before him made any such attempt. Of his personal capacities the sources say nothing whatever — no saying, no decision and no quality of mind is attributed to him, and he survives in the record as a name, a rank and a date. For a figure of his position that silence is itself the most exact statement of what he was: a holder of the trust in a period when holding it was the whole of the task.

The only kinship the sources assert for Turgon is a corporate one. The stewardship descended within a single family, and the rule of descent is stated loosely enough to cover two cases: the office went to a son, or failing that to the nearest kinsman. What follows from that phrasing is that the roll of Stewards is a list of relatives whose exact degrees are nowhere set down; the men standing next to Turgon in it were certainly of his blood, but whether as father and son or at some further remove the annals decline to say. The older attachment of the house was to Emyn Arnen across Anduin, and it is worth noticing that in his lifetime those hills lay among the emptiest ground in the realm he governed. The family's ancestral country was made a princedom and settled again only after the line of Ruling Stewards had ended, when Faramir was established there.

For living connections the record offers one figure, and he belongs to another realm's chapter. Thengel of Rohan spent the greater part of Turgon's rule in Gondor, married and fathered children there, and went north again only when his own crown fell to him; yet the account of the House of Eorl, which treats those years at length, never brings him into a scene with the Steward under whom he served. The same distance holds for Gondor's other outward tie of the period, the wizard who held Isengard in the realm's name and whose purposes were long private before they were declared. Turgon had allies, guests and dependants; what the sources withhold is any dealing of his own with them.

The contrast with the Stewards on either side of him is instructive about the sources rather than about the man. Ecthelion II is remembered largely for the captain he trusted and raised up, the stranger who came to him under the name Thorongil; Denethor II is drawn almost wholly through his relations, with his two sons, with Gandalf, and with the man he had taken for a rival in his youth. For Turgon no wife is named, no child, no counsellor and no adversary. Denethor's birth falls within his rule, and that is the nearest the annals come to setting any person beside him. His single documented relation is to the office, and through the office to a king who did not appear in his lifetime.