Vidumavi

Vidumavi was a woman of the Northmen of Rhovanion, the daughter of Vidugavia, who stood first among the princes of that people and took to himself the title of King of Rhovanion. His authority lay in the lands between the southern eaves of Greenwood the Great and the river Celduin, and it had been strengthened by Gondor itself: Rómendacil II, in the years after his victories over the Easterlings, gave him support and favour, judging the Northmen the surest allies his realm possessed beyond the Anduin. Vidumavi therefore belonged not to a scattered folk of the wilderland but to a princely house whose fortunes were bound up with the policy of the South-kingdom, and her father's standing is the reason her name enters the annals of Gondor at all.

Her name is of her father's tongue, not of Westron or of the Elven-speeches, and it is set down in an archaic northern guise, as the speech of the Rohirrim is likewise rendered in an older form of English; the two languages were held to be near akin, the Éothéod being remote kin of the Northmen of Rhovanion. The name pairs an element for wood or forest with one for maiden, so that it may be understood as wood-maiden, and it shares its first element with her father's name in the manner of a house that marked its kindred by such repetition. In Gondor she was known by a Sindarin equivalent, Galadwen, formed of the words for tree and for maiden, which carries the same sense into the language of her husband's people.

By blood she was of a race the Dúnedain reckoned among the Men who had aided the Elder Kindred in the Elder Days, kin in the far past to the houses of the Edain, and for that reason honoured in Gondor above other peoples not of Númenórean descent. That honour, however, did not close the difference between them: the Northmen were shorter-lived than the Men of the West and did not carry the long years of the Sea-kings, a distinction the traditions of Gondor never let fall out of sight. Her lineage thus stood in an ambiguous place — trusted, allied, and yet foreign to the blood of the kings.

The events that brought Vidumavi into the record of the South-kingdom began with a policy, not with a courtship. Rómendacil II, having secured his eastern frontier and having taken the Northmen into his confidence, sent his son Valacar north as an envoy to dwell for a time at Vidugavia's court, so that he might learn the speech, the customs and the counsels of that people at first hand. Such an embassy was in keeping with the older practice of Gondor, which had long used marriage and fosterage among allied houses as instruments of statecraft; what was not foreseen was how far the heir would carry it. Valacar came to love the northern lands and the folk who held them, and he remained among them long past the term his father had intended. In that household Vidumavi met the man who would one day rule Gondor, and the alliance of two realms passed from treaty into kinship.

Their marriage was without precedent in the annals of the line of Anárion. No heir of the crown had taken a wife who was not of Númenórean blood, and the great houses of Gondor received the news with a displeasure that did not fade with the years. The objection was not to the Northmen as allies, whose service against the Easterlings was freely acknowledged, but to the mingling of the royal blood with a people whose span of years was the common measure of mortal men. It was said in Gondor that the majesty of the kings would be lessened and the long life of the House of Elendil abridged, and the sentiment hardened into a party. Valacar had acted within his own right and with no breach of any law, yet from the day the marriage was known the succession stood under a shadow that neither he nor his wife could lift.

A son was born to them in Rhovanion in the year 1255, and among his mother's people he bore the northern name Vinitharya; when in later years he came south he was known in Gondor by the Sindarin name Eldacar. He was thus reared in part among the Northmen and grew to manhood in the knowledge of both his parents' peoples, a circumstance that would afterwards prove decisive. The annals set the death of Vidumavi in 1344, and she did not live to see her husband crowned, for Rómendacil II died only in 1366, after a long reign, and Valacar succeeded him in that year. She was therefore never queen in Osgiliath, and no act of hers within Gondor is recorded; what she left behind her was a son whose claim the realm would contest.

Valacar reigned for sixty-six years, and during that time the discontent gathered rather than dispersed. When he died in 1432 and Eldacar came to the throne, revolt broke out openly, and the Kin-strife began: a civil war fought not over any question of misgovernment but over the blood of Vidumavi in the veins of the king. The rebels were led by Castamir, Captain of Ships, himself descended from an earlier king and supported by the coastlands and the fleets, and their strength lay where Gondor's wealth and shipping lay. In 1437 Osgiliath was besieged and taken and much of the city burned, its great tower thrown down and the palantír kept there lost in the waters of the Anduin. Eldacar's eldest son Ornendil was captured and put to death, and the king himself broke out of the ruin with such force as remained to him.

Eldacar fled north to Rhovanion, to the land of his mother's kindred, and there he was received and sheltered for ten years while Castamir ruled in Gondor as a usurper. The refuge was no accident of geography: it was the direct consequence of the marriage that had cost him his crown, and the mother's people who had made him suspect in the South were the same who preserved him for its recovery. In 1447 he returned at the head of an army in which many Northmen rode, and men of Gondor who had grown weary of Castamir's harshness came over to him. Castamir was slain at the Crossings of Erui, and his sons held out at Pelargir and then withdrew by sea to Umbar, where their descendants became the enemies of Gondor for generations. Vidumavi's marriage had thus set in motion both the war and its ending, and the long enmity of the Corsairs was its remoter issue.

The fear that had been urged against her proved groundless in the one respect that could be measured. Eldacar reigned again until 1490 and died in his two hundred and thirty-fifth year, having held the sceptre longer than most of his forebears, and the line of the kings continued through him without further challenge on that ground. The friendship between Gondor and the Northmen, which her father had cultivated and her marriage had sealed at the cost of a civil war, outlived the quarrel and was renewed in later centuries with their remote kin the Éothéod, whose riding to the Field of Celebrant and settlement in Calenardhon rested on the same long association. Vidumavi herself remains a figure of a few lines only, named for her father, her husband and her son; but the strife that followed her and the alliance that survived it are among the turning-points of the middle years of Gondor.

In the structure of Gondor's annals Vidumavi occupies a place rather than a part: she is the point at which the South-kingdom's policy toward its allies collided with its unwritten law of succession. She held no office, either in her father's house or in her husband's realm, and the daughters of the Northmen are nowhere shown exercising rule in their own right. Power in any of the senses the legendarium ordinarily gives the word — lordship, force of arms, craft, foresight, or dealings with the Unseen — is nowhere ascribed to her. She belonged to a mortal house of Men wholly within the ordinary measure of their kind, and nothing marvellous attaches to her name.

The single form of influence the sources allow her is hereditary, and it lay outside her choosing: what passed through her to the kings after Valacar was descent, and with it the question of years. Even here the annals resist a simple accounting, for the shortening of life among the Dúnedain of Gondor was already in train before her marriage and is set down as a general waning of the strength the exiles had brought out of the West, not as the consequence of any one union. Her blood cannot be isolated from that longer decline, and the chroniclers do not attempt it. The rebellion likewise is presented as rising from the pride of race among the great houses; the power to unmake a peace lay with those who resented her, not with her.

Her standing in the texts is correspondingly narrow. She appears only in retrospective summary, never in a narrated scene, and neither her person nor her manner of life is described. In the later account of Cirion and Eorl her marriage is named in passing within a survey whose proper subject is the long friendship between Gondor and the northern peoples, and it is cited there as the thing out of which the ruinous strife came. That is the whole of her function in that telling: her name serves as shorthand for a dynastic question, and the weight it carries in the record is the weight Gondor's own quarrel placed upon it.

Every tie the annals grant Vidumavi is recorded from the other side of it. She is entered as a daughter when her father's dealings with Gondor are at issue, as a wife when the succession is at issue, and as a mother when the claim of a disputed king must be explained; at no point is a relation described from her own vantage. The marriage itself is a clear instance. Valacar's attachment to the northern country and its people is set down plainly in the chronicle, and it is treated as the cause of what followed; nothing is said of her feeling toward him, of her household, or of any word that passed between them. The asymmetry belongs to the record rather than to the marriage, but it governs everything that can be said of her: she is present in Gondor's history as a connection between houses, and the connection is always measured by what it did to the House of Anárion.

Her opponents stand in an odd relation to her, for she had no dealings with them at all. The great houses that resented the match, and the captain who at last led the realm into open war, framed their quarrel in a generation that had never seen her, and the rebellion that carried her name as its pretext broke out long after her death. No charge is laid against her conduct, no fault of person or bearing; the objection was to her kindred and to the measure of years they lived, and it would have fallen on any woman of that people in her place. Enmity of this kind is impersonal by nature, and it is the reason her name could serve so long as an argument.

What survived her was a double kinship that outlasted the men who fought over it. Through her son the northern house and the line of the kings were joined past undoing, and the kings who came after him in Gondor were of his blood and so of hers; through the same tie the friendship between the South-kingdom and the peoples of the north held, and was afterwards renewed with their remote kin. The relation that the nobility of Gondor had judged a weakening of the royal house proved instead the thread by which both the dynasty and the alliance were carried forward.

The material out of which the published account of Valacar's marriage and its consequences was made survives among the papers printed in The Peoples of Middle-earth, where Christopher Tolkien set out the writing of Appendix A with commentary. What those drafts show is a text worked over rather than a conception altered: the sequence of the embassy to the north, the marriage, the resentment of the great houses and the war that followed stands in the same order and to the same effect as in the published Appendix, and Vidumavi holds the same place in it. No rejected name for her appears there, and no alternative parentage; the drafting concerns the shaping and compression of a dynastic narrative, not the invention of a different one. For a figure named only in summary, this is the ordinary condition of the evidence, and it is worth stating plainly, since the absence of variants is itself a fact about the record.

The one substantial gain from these papers lies in the naming. The published Appendix gives the northern names without explanation, leaving their character to be inferred; the accompanying notes state the principle openly, that the tongue of the Northmen of Rhovanion is represented by Gothic in the same way that the speech of the Rohirrim is represented by Old English, the relation between the two languages of translation standing for the kinship of the two Mannish tongues. Her name is accordingly a Latinized Gothic form meaning wood-maiden, matched by her father's in its first element, and the pairing is a device of representation rather than a detail preserved from any annal. The Sindarin equivalent by which she was known among her husband's people likewise comes from this late matter and not from the Appendix, where it does not appear at all. The linguistic frame that later commentary treats as part of her identity is thus editorial in origin, drawn from Tolkien's working notes rather than from the narrative he published.