Dúnedain

The name by which this people is best known is not their own daily speech but Sindarin, the tongue of the Grey-elves, which they kept as a language of lore and courtesy. It joins the element for "west" with the word Adan, plural Edain, used by the Elves for the Men who had been their allies in the elder days; the singular form is Dúnadan. In the Common Speech the same sense was rendered plainly as Men of the West, and a man of that descent could be called a tarkil, from which the Orcs took their coarse byword for a soldier of Gondor. Ordinary folk in Bree and the Shire had no such vocabulary at all and knew the northern remnant only as Rangers, grim wanderers of uncertain business; Bilbo's habit of speaking of Aragorn at Rivendell simply as the Dúnadan shows how the older word survived as a title rather than a description.

Their descent runs back to the three houses of the Edain, the Men who passed westward into Beleriand in the First Age and took the part of the Eldar in the long war against the Enemy of the world. For that service they were granted a land raised in the great sea, westward of Middle-earth and within distant sight of the Elven realm beyond it, and Elros son of Eärendil, who chose the fate of Men, became the first of their kings. From him came the length of years and the strength of body that set them apart from other mortals, and with it the habit of looking west for both memory and legitimacy. The name therefore carries two meanings at once: the island home they once held, and the older allegiance that had won it for them.

The fuller account of the island kingdom distinguishes carefully between the Númenóreans as a whole and those who came to Middle-earth as exiles. As the kings grew great and began to resent their mortality, most turned away from the Valar and from the Elves; a minority held to the old friendship and were called the Faithful, and it was from their line that Elendil and his sons came. The Dúnedain of Middle-earth are thus the heirs of that dissenting party rather than of the realm at its proudest, and their keeping of Sindarin, of Elvish names, and of the westward reverence is a mark of which side of that quarrel they had stood on.

The pattern of exile was laid down long before there was any need of it. From the middle of the Second Age the mariners of the island kingdom returned steadily to the western shores of Middle-earth, at first as teachers and givers of gifts among the lesser peoples of those lands, later as lords who built strongholds and took tribute. Their harbours came in time to reflect the quarrel dividing them at home: Umbar in the south was raised into a great fortress by those who held with the kings, while Pelargir upon the Anduin, built rather later, became the chief haven of the party that kept the old friendships. When the island was swallowed in the year 3319 of that Age, the survivors therefore did not come to an unknown coast but to places their kindred already held. In the following year the realms in exile were established, Elendil holding the high kingship in the north from Annúminas beside the lake, and his two sons ruling together in the south from Osgiliath upon the river.

Barely a century and a half of peace followed. Sauron struck first at the southern realm and took the eastern city of the two guarded passes; the exiles then joined with Gil-galad in the alliance that marched east, won the field before the Black Gate, and besieged the dark tower for seven years. Victory cost them their high king and the elder of his sons, and left Isildur with the Ring taken from the enemy's hand. Two years into the Third Age, riding north to take up the kingship of Arnor and leaving his nephew as king in the south, he was ambushed near the Gladden Fields and slain with his three elder sons; the fuller account of that disaster survives outside the chronicles proper. His youngest son, who had remained a child in Rivendell, succeeded him in the north, but the claim to lordship over all the exiles was never afterwards made good, and the two kingdoms went their separate ways.

The northern kingdom failed first, and failed by division. In the year 861 the sons of Eärendur could not agree, and Arnor broke into the three lesser realms of Arthedain, Cardolan and Rhudaur, which thereafter quarrelled over the tower hills and the boundary of the Weather Hills. Into that weakness came the realm of Angmar in the far north, ruled by a sorcerer-king whose true nature was long unguessed, and its war upon the divided remnant lasted six centuries and more. Rhudaur passed into his control and Cardolan was ravaged, its last prince falling in the defence of the old boundary; the Great Plague of 1636 emptied what was left of that land. Arthedain alone endured until 1974, when its capital at Fornost was taken and its last king fled north to drown in the ice. A fleet came too late from the south, and though Angmar was destroyed utterly in the field the next year, no king was crowned again in the north. In 1976 the heir took instead the title of Chieftain, and the heirlooms of the house were given into the keeping of Rivendell.

What followed in Eriador was not extinction but concealment, sustained for nearly a thousand years. The northern people kept no city and claimed no borders; their chieftains passed the succession in an unbroken line from father to son, and their heirs were commonly fostered in Elrond's house, where the shards of Elendil's sword and the other tokens waited. Their numbers fell steadily, and by the last century of the Age they could be counted in scores rather than thousands, scattered through the empty lands and gathered only at need. They spent that strength guarding the roads and the bounds of settled country whose inhabitants knew nothing of the arrangement and thought them shiftless vagabonds. Long life remained with them, thinned but not lost: their chieftains reached about twice the span of other Men, and the last of them rather more.

In the south the decline was slower, wealthier and more self-inflicted. Gondor grew under a line of seafaring kings until it reached its greatest extent and power in the eleventh century of the Age, holding tribute from Umbar to the inland sea. Its ruin began with the Kin-strife, a civil war fought over the accession of a king whose mother had been of the northern Men and whose blood was therefore held impure; the defeated faction seized Umbar and became for generations the enemy fleet that harried Gondor's own coasts. The Great Plague broke the guard upon the black land in 1636 and left the eastern watch-towers deserted; long wars against the wagon-peoples of the east followed, in one of which a king fell in battle before the Morannon. The eastern city was lost in 2002 and became the seat of the wraith-lord; in 2050 the last king rode out to answer that lord's challenge and did not return. Thereafter the Stewards ruled in the king's name for nearly a thousand years, while the lifespan and lineage of the southern Dúnedain thinned through mingling with lesser Men.

The two remnants were brought together again at the very end. In the war against Mordor a company of thirty from the north rode the length of Middle-earth to reach their chieftain, taking the road under the mountains and turning the tide upon the river below Minas Tirith; their standard, unfurled at that battle, was the token of the old kingship. After the fall of the Dark Tower in 3019 the northern claim and the southern were joined in one crown, and the realms sundered since the Gladden Fields were ruled again under a single sceptre. The Rangers gave up their concealment: Annúminas was refounded, the old northern lands were settled anew, and the small folk of the west were left as a protected country under the king's peace. The Fourth Age opened with the Dúnedain restored as a kingdom and, for the first time in three thousand years, with no rival power in the west to contest them.

Two languages served the exiles at once. The Common Speech, which their own mariners had spread along the western coasts in earlier centuries, remained their daily tongue and through them became the shared language of most of the west; but Sindarin was kept as a living speech, used among the high families of the southern realm and among the northern remnant when they spoke together, so that the Dúnedain were the only Men who ordinarily used an Elvish tongue. Quenya, older and more ceremonious, was reserved for lore, for inscriptions and for the names given to kings at their crowning. With this went an unusual appetite for record. Gondor kept archives in which chronicles, maps and private scrolls lay undisturbed for centuries until someone thought to look; and both realms counted their years by a reckoning brought from the island, its months and weekdays bearing Elvish names, revised by one of the Stewards when the old count had drifted too far from the sun.

Their works were chiefly in stone and on water, and were made for permanence rather than display. They walled cities and set watch-towers on hilltops, paved long roads and bridged rivers that carried traffic for an age after the builders were gone, and cut figures out of cliffs on a scale that survived any memory of what they commemorated. Seamanship came with them from the island and remained the strength of the southern kingdom, whose fleets and havens outlived its landward reach. They also brought the seven seeing-stones, set apart in towers in both realms so that a king in the north and a king in the south could take counsel without a journey; the stones themselves did not fail, but the discipline of using them was lost, and what had been an instrument of government became a danger to those who looked into it unprepared. Their healing craft was of the same kind: a herb of small appearance that they had planted wherever they settled kept its virtue in the hands of one of the true line, and the belief survived in Gondor as a rhyme of old wives long after there was any king to prove it.

What set them furthest apart from their neighbours was their relation to death. Before meat they would stand a moment in silence and turn towards the west, to the drowned land and to what lies beyond it, a courtesy that the Rohirrim found strange in their allies. Their long years were a gift and a burden together, and the older custom of the Faithful was to give life up deliberately at a chosen hour, while the mind was still whole, rather than be taken unwilling — a discipline that the last king of the reunited realm kept, and that his queen, of Elvish kindred, found the hardest thing in mortality to accept. In the centuries of decline the discipline slackened. Men of Gondor came to spend more thought on their tombs than on their heirs, embalming the dead and building silent streets of houses for them within the walls of the living city, and the last of the ruling Stewards ended by burning himself alive in that despair. The northern kin, poorer and without monuments, held to the plainer usage and were the longer-lived for it.

The house from which the exiled kings came was itself a junior branch of the island's royalty. The lords of Andúnië, whose seat lay on the western coast facing the Undying Lands, traced themselves to the eldest child of the fourth ruler, a daughter whose descendants were passed over when the sceptre went instead to her younger brother. Kinship with the throne gave them place on the king's council and standing enough to shelter those who kept the old friendships, so that the lordship became in effect the leadership of the dissenting party, and the westward name of their haven suited the office. The last of the line was dismissed from the council when the reverence he defended became treason; he took ship into the West to plead for his people and was never heard of again, leaving his son to gather the ships that survived the drowning.

In Middle-earth the descent divided into two royal houses, that of the elder son and that of the younger, and the northern and southern crowns thereafter descended separately. The kings in the north kept a form of naming that asserted the wider claim, their names built on an element meaning king or royalty, and when the realm broke apart it was Arthedain that held to that usage and to the heirlooms. The three successor kingdoms were not equally Dúnedain: in Rhudaur the old stock had grown few, and power was seized by a chieftain of the hill-folk who dealt secretly with the enemy in the north, while the people of Cardolan held out longest in the downland of the ancient barrows. In the south the ruling house ended without heir, and a rival branch sprung from the loser of the civil war maintained its claim from the southern haven for generations.

Beside the royal line stood houses of high descent that were not of it. The stewards came of a family of the same blood but no claim to the throne, and the office passed from father to son until the failure of the kings left it ruling in fact; its holders bore a white rod rather than a crown and kept their seat below the empty one. On the southern coast the princes of Belfalas held a fief whose people were reckoned of purer descent than most, less mingled with the lesser Men of the inland vales, and a tradition of Elvish marriage clung to the line; one of the Elvish company in the last war remarked on it in their prince when he saw him.

The narrative introduces this people at their lowest and least impressive, and makes the reader share the misjudgement. At Bree the hobbits meet a weather-stained man in a corner of the common room whom the innkeeper describes as one of a queer wandering sort, of no fixed business and doubtful company; nothing about him suggests descent from kings, and the party's suspicion is treated as reasonable rather than foolish. The withholding is deliberate, and the later disclosure at Rivendell reverses the reader's estimate of the whole people along with the man. Their spokesman explains it himself at the Council: the folk they guard would be frightened if they understood the arrangement, and the guardians accept both the labour and the contempt as the shape of the work. Concealed worth, and the small settled peace that rests on it unknowing, is the first thing the Dúnedain are used to say.

They also serve as the story's instrument for measuring loss. In the conversation above the falls of the Anduin, a captain of the southern realm sets out a scale of Men — the high, the peoples of the twilight, and those under shadow — and then applies it against his own city, admitting that it has slipped down the scale and now honours the warrior above the craftsman and the loremaster, and holds skill in arms as a good in itself. The diminishment is presented as moral rather than merely demographic, and Tolkien described the underlying matter, in his own account of the legendarium, as the Númenórean temptation: long life turned into a grievance against mortality. The Dúnedain are the case in which that argument is worked out.

Finally they are the channel by which the deep past re-enters the present action. Elvish speech, a broken heirloom sword, a rhyme about healing hands, an unused throne: each is a survival that the plot brings back into use at the moment it is needed, so that restoration reads as recovery rather than novelty. The paradox is that the recovery arrives as the Elder Days depart, and the reward for the long watch is that it ends — the vigilance keeping western Eriador becomes ordinary law, and the folk who never knew of it go on not knowing.

Much of the matter of the exiles was written long before the people had their Sindarin name. In the abandoned time-travel story of the 1930s the Númenórean episode turns on a father and son, Elendil and Herendil, quarrelling over loyalty to the king and to Sauron, a pairing mirrored in the modern frame by a father and son of the Errol family whose Lombardic and English names carry the same sense; the sons who were later to found the realms in exile had not yet taken their final shape, and the drowning itself was told in a short annalistic piece rather than in the voice of the survivors. A decade afterwards Tolkien recast the fall as a Mannish tradition, deliberately imperfect, in which the world is not changed in shape and the memory of the Powers has grown confused, and at the same time gave the islanders a native speech of their own for the first time. In that version Elendil bears the name Nimruzîr, and those who followed him are the Nimruzîrim, the Elf-friends in the tongue of the island; the grammar and vocabulary behind the names were set out in a separate report attached to the same cycle of papers.

In the drafts of the narrative proper the northern remnant was a late discovery. The weather-stained figure in the corner of the inn at Bree began as a hobbit called Trotter, known by his wooden shoes, and stayed one through many chapters; only when Tolkien decided that he was instead a Man of ancient descent did the Rangers, the chieftains and the broken heirloom sword follow after him, and the name Aragorn displace the old one, at a stage when the southern kingdom was still called Ondor. The chronicle of the two royal lines was afterwards drawn up at length in a text written for the appendices, in which the count of the kings and a number of their names differ from what was finally printed, and the northern succession is carried out in more detail than the published tale of years has room for. One late and unfinished piece approaches the same people from outside altogether, showing the tall Men coming from the sea through the eyes of a boy of the older inhabitants of the coast, to whom the black ships are nothing but a terror.