King's Men

The King's Men were not a separate people by blood but a party within the Númenóreans, the descendants of the Edain who had fought beside the Eldar in the First Age and received the island of Andor from the Valar as their reward. Their name is therefore a political label, not an ethnic one. The Akallabêth places the division in the reign of Tar-Ancalimon, after unease about the Gift of Men had spread among the Dúnedain over several generations and had already been voiced openly by his father Tar-Atanamir. The division did not come suddenly. It formalised a quarrel that had long run through the island's great houses.1

The name marks where the larger faction placed its allegiance. They held to the will and the claims of the reigning king and his house, and no longer to the counsel of the Lords of the West or to fellowship with the Elves of Eressëa. The name only makes sense beside the name of the other side. The minority called themselves Elendili, the Elf-friends, taking up a title that in the First Age had belonged to the Edain as a whole, and they were also known as the Faithful. Both factions still acknowledged the line of Elros, so the King's Men did not have sole claim to loyalty to the throne. The difference lay in the loyalty itself: one side's was bound to the West, while the other's turned the crown into an instrument of rivalry with the Valar.2

The party's outlook soon became visible in language. In later reigns the kings gave up the High-elven forms of their royal names and took titles in Adûnaic, the native speech of Númenor, and the Elvish tongues fell out of use at court and were finally forbidden. This preference for the Mannish tongue matches the King's Men's estrangement from the Eldar, while the Faithful kept up the older speech. Through its whole history the party remained the greater part of the population, and for a long time it ruled without open breach of the Ban of the Valar.3

Once the division had taken shape, the King's Men set the course of the realm. The Númenóreans no longer came to Middle-earth as teachers and helpers. They came as lords and gatherers of tribute, and the ships returned laden with goods taken from the coastlands. Great fortified havens were raised on the western shores of the Great Lands, and the King's Men favoured the southern regions for their settlements. The Faithful for their part looked more to the north-west, where the friendship of the Elves of Lindon could still be had. In this way the rift at home was carried across the sea, and each party laid down its own pattern of dominion in Middle-earth.1

At home the fear of death that divided the island shaped the customs of the dominant party. The King's Men gave themselves more and more to pleasure and splendour while their span of years slowly shortened. They also turned their skill to preserving the bodies of the dead and building great silent tombs, as though stone could hold what the Gift of Men took away. The strain was felt within the royal house itself. As the kings drew further from the West, the Elendili were watched with growing suspicion and were no longer free to meet the ships of Eressëa. The Faithful who had lived in the western lands of the island were moved eastward, where they could be observed more closely. Their chief refuge became the haven of Rómenna.2

Once, the course of the realm seemed about to turn. Tar-Palantír, grieving over the estrangement of his forefathers, took up again the old reverence for the West. He restored the neglected rites and cared once more for the White Tree. The King's Men did not follow him. They found a leader in his brother Gimilkhâd and resisted the king for the rest of his reign. The quarrel outlived both brothers. When Tar-Palantír died without a son, Gimilkhâd's son Pharazôn took his cousin Míriel, the rightful heir, to wife against her will and against the laws of the realm. He then seized the sceptre as Ar-Pharazôn, and the King's Men now held the throne without any rival.3

Under Ar-Pharazôn the party reached the height of its power and then its ruin. The king sailed to Middle-earth with a vast host to challenge Sauron. Sauron submitted and was brought to Númenor as a hostage, and within a short time he became the king's chief counsellor. Under his influence the worship of the Valar was abandoned for that of Melkor. A great temple was raised in the city of Armenelos, and the White Tree was cut down and burned on its altar. The Faithful were now openly persecuted, and many of them were accused falsely and put to death in the temple. Only a fruit of the Tree, taken in secret by Isildur, survived the felling.4

In the end the King's Men followed their king into open defiance of the Ban. Ar-Pharazôn assembled an armada greater than any seen before and sailed west to take the Undying Lands by force. The Valar laid down their guardianship and called upon Ilúvatar. The fleet was lost, and Númenor itself was overwhelmed and sank beneath the sea. Of the island's people only the Faithful under Elendil and his sons escaped, in the ships they had kept ready. The King's Men who had stayed at home perished with their land. Those who had already settled in the south of Middle-earth survived, and some of them, still devoted to Sauron, became lords among the peoples of Harad.5

The descendants of these exiles lived on into the Third Age as the people known as the Black Númenóreans. They were a remnant that had settled in Middle-earth in the years of Sauron's dominion and held to his service and his lore. The best-known figure of their race is the Lieutenant of Barad-dûr, called the Mouth of Sauron, who met the Captains of the West before the Black Gate. His lineage shows that the rebellion of the King's Men did not end with the Downfall. It went on among their heirs long after the island was lost.6

What set the King's Men apart most deeply was how they judged the mortal lot of Men. They did not accept the Gift of Ilúvatar as a release. They treated it as something withheld from them, and they set their own brief lives against the deathlessness of the Eldar across the sea. The Akallabêth ties this view to a change in custom. The earlier lords of Númenor married late in their long lives, and when their sons reached full strength they gave up rule and departed of their own will. Tar-Atanamir broke this pattern. He held on to life and kingship far beyond the point of joy, and he kept his son from the throne in the prime of his years. The kings who followed took up his way, so that clinging to life and power became the mark of the royal house and of the party that bore its name.1

Their energies turned outward, toward wealth and command. Númenor's old skill in shipbuilding and craft was bent more and more to the making of arms and to the reach of empire, and the realm's strength grew even while its contentment waned. In their own reckoning the King's Men were masters of Middle-earth, not its guardians. The coastlands learned to fear the ships that had once brought gifts. After Sauron came among them, their dread of death took a darker form. Offerings of human life were made to Melkor in the hope that he would free his servants from mortality. Yet death did not withdraw, and the Akallabêth records that people on the island grew quick to anger and turned their weapons on one another.2

Their relation to the sacred places of the island followed the same course. The Hallow of Eru on the summit of the Meneltarma had been the centre of Númenórean worship from the founding of the realm. Under the later kings it fell into neglect. At last, on Sauron's counsel, Ar-Pharazôn forbade anyone to climb the mountain, even on the holy days that the Faithful still kept in their hearts. In this way the party of the king came to measure its freedom by what it could cast off. The old forms of reverence counted with them as bonds.3

The sources do not divide the King's Men into tribes or clans. The party was held together by allegiance, not descent, and its members came from every region of the island. Its natural head was the reigning king, and its fortunes rose and fell with the royal house of Armenelos. The only lordly house the Akallabêth sets clearly apart in this quarrel stood on the other side. The Lords of Andúnië, themselves of the line of Elros, became the leaders of the Faithful. Seen against them, the King's Men appear less as a kindred than as the following of the crown and of those who hoped to gain by it.1

The division ran through the royal family itself. Ar-Gimilzôr, one of the most bitter enemies of the Faithful, took as his queen Inzilbêth. Through her mother she was kin to the house of Andúnië, and in her heart she held to the Faithful. Their two sons went opposite ways. The elder, Inziladûn, took after his mother and later reigned as Tar-Palantír. The younger, Gimilkhâd, followed his father's mind. From this younger branch came the last leadership of the party. It passed from Gimilkhâd to his son Pharazôn, so the kingship that the King's Men finally took for themselves was held by a cadet line of the house of Elros.2

The difference lay in the loyalty itself: one side's was bound to the West, while the other's turned the crown into an instrument of rivalry with the Valar.

After the Downfall no single house carried on the party's name. What remained were scattered lords of Númenórean blood in the south of Middle-earth, who had long made their homes there and did not share the fate of the island. The account of the Rings of Power names two of them, Herumor and Fuinur. They rose to great power among the Haradrim, the fierce peoples who lived in the wide lands south of Mordor beyond the mouths of Anduin. Nothing further is told of their lineage or their heirs.3

Within the Akallabêth the King's Men carry the weight of the tragedy, and they do so as the majority, not as an alien enemy. The tale is told largely with the sympathies of the Faithful, yet it never makes their opponents strangers: they are the same people, heirs of the same reward, who choose differently. This gives the downfall of Númenor its particular character. The decay begins long before Sauron sets foot on the island, so that when he arrives he finds a will already turned and only needs to give it direction. The narrative thus presents corruption as something grown from within a blessed people, not imposed on them from outside. The King's Men make the story a fall, not a conquest.1

Tolkien himself described the fate of Númenor as a second fall of Men, set in a people that had been raised above others and given a single command to keep. In his account the Ban was a test of trust, and the longing for unending life was the lure that broke it. The King's Men are the shape that this failure takes in the story. What they stand for is less political ambition than a refusal to accept the limits of mortal nature, a refusal that turns gifts into grievances. Their wealth, their long lives and their power do not satisfy them, because each is measured against what they are denied.2

For readers of The Lord of the Rings the party stands behind the story as a warning that is never quite past. Faramir traces the slow waning of Gondor to the same preoccupation with death and ancestry that once gripped Númenor, and the kingdom he describes echoes the island's decline on a smaller scale. The answer comes in the appendices. Aragorn, heir of the Faithful, lays down his life of his own accord when his time is spent, taking up once more the custom that the later kings of Númenor had abandoned. The quiet ending of his reign reads as a deliberate counterpoint to the choice the King's Men made.3

The division between the King's party and the Elf-friends was part of the Númenor legend from the beginning, but it was first told through individuals rather than as a formal split of the realm. In the earliest texts of the Fall of Númenor the last king is still called Tar-Kalion, and the quarrel comes to a head only after Sauron has arrived and won his favour. The abandoned novel The Lost Road shows the rift within a single household. Elendil holds to the old friendship with the Eldar and the reverence owed to the Lords of the West. His son Herendil is drawn to the king's side, finds its promise of power and defiance attractive, and questions his father's caution. Here the later party appears as a pull on the loyalty of the young, not as a named faction.1

A further stage belongs to The Drowning of Anadûnê, a version of the legend written wholly in Mannish terms and furnished with Adûnaic names. In this text the Elf-friends bear the Adûnaic name Nimruzîrim, and the Powers of the West and the Elves themselves are also named in the native speech of the island. The story is told less from the view of Elvish lore and more as the memory of Men, which gives the rebellion of the king's following a sharper human logic. The later Akallabêth took over this concern with the Mannish outlook and, by placing the split in an earlier reign, made the King's Men a long-standing party in the kingdom rather than simply the followers of its last ruler.2