Valandil of Andúnië

Valandil is a name in the High-elven tongue, formed from the element that stands at the head of the name of the Valar together with the common ending -(n)dil, which denotes devotion or unselfish love; the sense is thus something like friend of the Powers, or one given to the Valar. The same ending recurs throughout the house that sprang from him, in Amandil and in Elendil, and the pattern of such names — reverent, Quenya in form, and pointedly turned toward the West — is characteristic of the Númenórean nobility of the earlier centuries, before the later kings set aside the Elven-tongues in their titles. The name was not his alone: a namesake far removed in time, Valandil son of Isildur, held the northern kingdom in the Third Age, and descended in the end from this same line, so that the repetition is a matter of family memory rather than coincidence.

By blood he stood very near the sceptre of Númenor. His mother Silmariën was the eldest child of Tar-Elendil, fourth King of the Isle, but in her day the succession still passed to a son, and the rule fell to her brother Tar-Meneldur; only under a later king was the law altered in favour of the eldest child. From that circumstance the whole later history of his kindred follows: a branch of the royal house, of the direct seed of Elros, yet set aside from the crown and settled instead in a lordship. To Silmariën her father had given the ring that Barahir once bore in Beleriand, and by way of her son that heirloom descended within his house rather than with the kings.

His father was Elatan, a man of Andúnië, and it was that place, on the western coast of Númenor upon its wide bay, that gave the new lordship its seat and its name — a word meaning sunset in the Elven-tongue, fitting for the haven of the land that looked farthest toward the West. As first to bear the title, he stands at the head of a succession whose holders were reckoned among the chief men of the realm, honoured by the kings as kinsmen and seated in their council. Of the many generations that lay between him and the last lords of that house, Tolkien records no names; the gap is a silence in the sources, not a break in the line.

The chronology that can be fixed around Valandil belongs to the middle centuries of the Second Age, in the long quiet stretch of Númenórean history before the shadow fell upon the Isle. His mother was born in the year 521, the eldest of the three children of the fourth ruler, whose reign ran from 590 to 740; her younger brother, born in 543, received the sceptre when their father laid it down. Valandil's own birth is nowhere dated in the records that survive, and no year is given for his death, so that his life can be placed only within this frame and not measured against it. That is characteristic of the material: the compilers of the royal annals counted the years of the kings, and a lord of a western fief entered their reckoning chiefly as a name in a descent.

The single event recorded of him is also the decisive one: with Valandil the lordship of Andúnië begins. He is set down as the first to hold that title in the western region of the island, and the notice is genealogical rather than narrative — no deed, no journey, no dispute with the crown is attached to his name. What the text supplies instead is a standing: the holders of the lordship after him were remembered for their friendship with the Eldar, and that reputation is reported as a property of the house from its beginning. In practical terms the foundation converted a branch of the royal line that had been passed over for the sceptre into a hereditary seat with a territory, a haven, and a place among the great of the realm.

The setting into which that lordship was placed matters for what the house afterwards became. Andúnië lay on the western coast, on the great bay that opened toward Aman, and it was there above all the other harbours of Númenor that the ships out of Tol Eressëa were accustomed to come, bringing the gifts and the counsel of the Elves of the West. In the earlier ages of the Isle such visits were welcomed, and the region kept the Elven-tongues in daily use longer and more willingly than the eastern parts about the royal city. The lords of the place were reckoned among the chief counsellors of the sceptre, and they were kinsmen of the kings besides, so that their position was one of influence without sovereignty. None of this is described of Valandil in particular; it is the pattern of the office he first held, and the later history of his descendants presupposes it.

Within a century and a half of the founding of the lordship the law that had determined his family's position was undone. The sixth ruler, who held the sceptre from 883 to 1075, had it declared that the eldest child of the king should succeed regardless of sex, and his daughter took the sceptre in 1075 as the first of the Ruling Queens. The change came a generation too late to touch Valandil's mother, and it left the branch of the house of Elros seated at Andúnië permanently collateral: descended in the direct line from the first King, and yet fixed in a lordship rather than in the succession. Both the standing and the grievance implicit in it were inherited, and both would tell in the crises of the Isle many centuries afterwards.

After his own time the sources fall silent for a very long stretch and then resume at the end of the story. The line he founded held Andúnië through the centuries of Númenor's growth and its estrangement from the Valar, and its last two representatives, Amandil and his son Elendil, stand at the close of the Second Age. When the Isle was drowned in the year 3319 the survivors of that house were carried east on the storm, and in 3320 the realms in exile were established in Middle-earth, with the sceptre of the North and the South passing at last into the keeping of Silmariën's descendants. Judged by outcome, the foundation at Andúnië preserved the seed of Elros when the kingship itself was destroyed; judged by the record, Valandil remains a figure of one sentence, the point at which a genealogy turns.

In the architecture of the legendarium Valandil functions as a joint rather than as an agent. No act of his is preserved: no speech, no voyage, no judgement, no part in any of the events that the annals of the Second Age otherwise report at length. What the text grants him is a title and a fixed position in a descent, and nearly everything that can be said about him is in truth said about the office he was first to hold, or about the men who held it after him. Any honest account of his role therefore describes a function within a genealogy, because the sources supply no deeds from which a character might be drawn.

The office itself carried standing without authority. In the Isle the right of rule lay with the sceptre alone, and a lordship, whatever the blood of its holder, meant a region, a seat, and rank among the great, but no share in the kingship and no power to bind the realm. What such a lord could exercise was weight of opinion: the claim of kinship upon the ruling house, and counsel that might be taken or set aside. Nothing more than this is attributed to him, and nothing beyond the ordinary gifts of his people — long years, stature, and skill in ships and craft — is implied by his rank.

The boundaries of that position are best seen at the far end of the line he began. His people were mortal, their span longer than that of other Men but not endless and not exempt from death, and their westward sailing was stopped by the prohibition of the Valar, so that even the lords of the sunset haven governed a coast facing a sea they could not cross. When the last holders of the title opposed the policy of the final King, they could not alter it; their strength proved to be the strength to preserve, not to prevent. Even the heirloom that came into the house through him is nowhere credited with virtue or power, only with age and descent.

What the record preserves of Valandil's ties runs almost wholly in one direction: upward to a parent and downward to descendants. He is named as a son and as a progenitor, and in both cases the notice exists to carry a line across a gap. No wife is named for him, no friend, no adversary, no companion in any venture; the sources that mention him at all mention nobody standing beside him. His mother, from whom his whole importance derives, appears in the same passage less as a person in relation to her son than as the eldest child of a king whose birth order came too early to matter. The result is a figure defined by his place between two points of a genealogy rather than by any bond that can be described.

The lateral kindred can be filled in a little from the genealogy of the Kings preserved outside the Appendices. His father was a man of Andúnië, and the marriage that produced him joined a king's eldest daughter to a family of the western coast — the kind of union that gave such a daughter a seat in the provinces when the sceptre passed elsewhere. On his mother's side stood an uncle who took the sceptre, an aunt of whom the annals keep only the name, and a first cousin, the mariner who ruled after that uncle and who, having no son, saw the law of succession altered so that his daughter might follow him. Valandil was thus one degree removed from most of the dynastic business of his century, and is associated with none of it.

In this house kinship behaves less like affection than like an inheritance of obligations. What passes down the line from him is a title, a disposition toward the Elves and the older customs, and a relation to the ruling house that remained close in blood while it grew distant in policy. The connections that finally give his name its weight belong to men born some two thousand years after him, whose loyalties can be traced back to the seat he first held; the intervening holders, unnamed, are simply the medium of that transmission. Read in this way, the most consequential relationship attributed to Valandil is one he never lived to have.