Túrin I

Túrin I is known almost wholly from a list. He appears in the roll of the Ruling Stewards of Gondor set down in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, holding the sixth place in that succession, with a single year of the Third Age attached to his name and nothing else recorded of him: no deeds, no named wife or child, no epithet of the kind that clings to Mardil Voronwë. The numeral distinguishes him from a later Steward who bore the same name generations afterwards, the rolls of the Stewards being numbered in the manner of the rolls of the kings. His position in the sequence, following Húrin I and preceding Hador, establishes order but not parentage: the office is said to have descended from father to son or else to the nearest kinsman, and the text nowhere marks which of the transitions were of the one sort and which of the other.

The house to which he belonged took its name and its claim from Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent who served as Steward to King Minardil. Thereafter the kings of Gondor drew their Stewards from his descendants, and the office, at first an appointment, hardened into a hereditary charge held by that one family. By the time of Túrin I the stewardship had already become a rule in fact, for the line of Anárion had failed with the loss of Eärnur, and Mardil had begun the governance of the realm in the name of a king who did not return. Túrin I therefore inherited not a crown but an office and a title, and belonged to a family whose standing rested on long service rather than on royal blood.

The name itself is far older than the man who bore it. Túrin was borne in the First Age by the son of Húrin Thalion of the House of Hador, whose story is among the longest told of the Elder Days, and the Stewards' line repeats a whole cluster of such names — Húrin, Hador, Barahir, Beren — drawn from the Edain of Beleriand whom the Númenóreans counted as forefathers. The list of name-elements appended to the published Silmarillion gives tur as an element of power or mastery, present in Túrin as in Turgon. Nothing in the sources explains why the sixth Steward was so named, and the reasons of taste or family memory behind the choice are not preserved; only the recurrence itself can be observed.

Húrin I died in 2278 of the Third Age by the reckoning of the roll — 2244 stands against his name — and in that year the charge passed to Túrin I. What came to him was an office and not a throne, and its forms were kept with care. Since the loss of the last king the Stewards had governed as though the crown were merely absent and might yet be reclaimed, so they took no crown themselves, carried a white rod as the token of their authority, and flew a banner of plain white without device. In the hall of the citadel of Minas Tirith the high seat beneath the canopy stood empty, and whoever ruled Gondor sat below it upon a chair of black stone at the foot of the dais. Thirty-four years of rule are implied for Túrin I by the two dates that bracket him, and all of them were passed under those conditions.

His whole tenure falls inside the long quiet that the annals name the Watchful Peace. That interval had opened in 2063, when Gandalf went up to Dol Guldur and the power seated there withdrew eastward rather than be found out; the Ringwraiths in their captured city stayed still, and the peace was not broken until 2460, more than a century and a half after Túrin I was dead. The Tale of Years, closely written for the centuries on either side of him, sets down no entry whatever between 2244 and 2278. The absence is therefore not a defect in the chronicle but a description of the age: nothing occurred in Gondor during those years that the keepers of the annals thought worth a line.

The realm he administered had been contracting for six hundred years before he took it up. The Great Plague of 1636 had thinned Gondor grievously and left the fortresses of the eastern border unmanned; in 1640 Tarondor removed the king's house from Osgiliath to Minas Anor and planted the White Tree there, and the older city on the river began its long decay. Worse followed in 2002, when Minas Ithil fell after a siege to the Nazgûl and became Minas Morgul, one of the seeing-stones passing into enemy hands with it. Túrin I thus held a frontier rather than a border: Ithilien lay between two towers that had been built as a pair and now faced each other as enemies, and the task of his generation of Stewards was to keep what remained rather than to recover what had gone.

The record does not treat all the Ruling Stewards alike, and the contrast is instructive. Cirion is remembered for the summons that brought the Éothéod south to the Field of Celebrant in 2510 and for the grant of Calenardhon that followed; Beren for yielding the keys of Orthanc to Saruman in 2759, in the aftermath of the Long Winter; Denethor I and his son Boromir for the fighting that resumed when the Watchful Peace ended and the Uruks came out of Mordor. Each of these has a narrative attached to the name because something happened in his time that the chroniclers were obliged to explain. For Túrin I there is a place in the sequence and a single number, and the number is the whole of it.

That number is 2278, entered against his name as the year of his death, and by the practice of the roll it is also the year in which Hador took up the rod. No cause of death is given, no illness, no battle, no age at dying; the Stewards were of Númenórean descent but their lives were no longer of the old length, and nothing distinguishes his end from an ordinary one. Hador's own year is 2395, so the seventh Steward held the office for well over a century after him, a tenure long enough to swallow the memory of the shorter one before it. Where Túrin I was laid the sources do not say. The Stewards had their house of tombs among the hallows of Rath Dínen behind the citadel, in the silent street where the kings also lay, and nothing in the record suggests he rests anywhere else.

What Túrin I held was the whole executive authority of Gondor, exercised under another man's name. A Ruling Steward governed the realm entire: he had the direction of its armies, the appointment and oversight of its captains, the administration of the fiefs from Anórien to Lebennin and Belfalas, and the ordering of justice and revenue that the older kings had ordered before him. The Quenya title set down for the office in the appendices means, in plain rendering, king's servant, and the meaning was not merely formal; the Stewards of the ruling line swore to govern in the king's name until such time as he came back. By Túrin I's accession that formula had been maintained for more than two centuries, since the disappearance of Eärnur in 2050, and no one had yet proposed abandoning it.

The limits were correspondingly exact, and they were self-imposed rather than contested. No Ruling Steward was crowned, none took the style of king, and none is recorded as having attempted it; the later Stewards, when the question was put to them directly, answered that the kingship was not theirs to assume while any claim to the line of Anárion might yet be advanced, and that a steward's mastery lasted only as long as his lord's absence. The office was therefore powerful in practice and provisional in theory, and its holder could neither found a dynasty in name nor dispose of the one thing his authority was borrowed from. Túrin I inherited that arrangement fully formed and left it unaltered, so far as anything is recorded.

One instrument of rule that lay physically within his reach was not used by him or by any Steward of his time. The seeing-stone of Minas Anor remained in the citadel, and the account of the palantíri holds that Denethor II, five centuries later, was the first of the Stewards to venture upon it, the earlier holders of the office judging the Stone to belong to the kings and its use to be beyond their warrant. Túrin I thus governed with no sight beyond what riders and watchmen brought him. Beyond this, nothing in the sources attributes to him any particular act, ordinance, campaign or judgement: the powers of the office are documented in detail, and his exercise of them not at all.

Of family in the ordinary sense the record grants him none. No wife is named for Túrin I, no son, no brother, no daughter given in marriage to a lord of the fiefs; the men who stand nearest to him in the sources are simply those whose names stand next to his in the column, the one he followed and the one who followed him. The silence is not peculiar to him. Where the appendices treat the kings of Gondor and Arnor they name queens and mothers and younger sons readily, and report the marriages that caused trouble as well as those that did not; where they treat the Stewards they give a bare list, and kinship appears in it only when some episode forced the chronicler to explain a relation, as with Turgon and his son Ecthelion II, or Ecthelion II and Denethor II, or Denethor II and the sons whom the story of the War of the Ring could not do without.

The sources permit one observation about his standing that he himself could not have made. The heirs of Isildur had not died out. Gondor had set aside Arvedui's claim to the southern crown in 1944, choosing Eärnil in his stead; the northern kingdom ended a generation later, in 1975, and thereafter the descendants of its last king lived on as chieftains of a scattered people, their children fostered in Rivendell and their descent kept in memory. In 2278 that family existed, in the far North, with a claim older than the office Túrin I held. Nothing suggests that either party knew of the other, or that any message passed between Minas Tirith and the wandering Dúnedain in those years. The relation is real in the genealogy and absent from the history.

As for allies and enemies, a life of a ruler is usually made of them, and here there are neither. The friendship with the horsemen of the North that would become Gondor's one lasting alliance among Men lay more than two centuries ahead of him, and Rohan was not yet a country. The powers ranged against Gondor — in Harad, in Umbar, and in the captured city east of the river — are recorded as troubling his predecessors and his successors, but no dealing of any kind, hostile or otherwise, is set against his own name. He is the rare case of a governor defined entirely by the persons who preceded and followed him.