Númenóreans

The name Númenor, in the Elven tongue given to the island, means "West-land" or "Land in the West" — a designation fixed by its position, the westernmost dwelling of Men, set by the Valar in the ocean between Middle-earth and Aman as reward for the Edain's part in the war against Morgoth. Its inhabitants called themselves Dúnedain, "Men of the West," a name that marked their descent from the three houses of the Edain and their singular favor among mortal kindreds, distinguishing them from the Men who had remained in Middle-earth and never crossed into the light of the Elder Days. In their own high speech, derived from Elvish learning, they were also named Númenóreans, and this form remained current among Elves and other Men alike as the ordinary word for the islanders throughout the Second Age.

Their ancestry lay wholly with the Edain, those Men of the Elder Days who had allied themselves with the Noldor and Sindar against Morgoth and had thereby earned the friendship of the Valar and the Eldar. Of the three houses of the Edain — the people of Bëor, of Haleth, and of Hador — the Númenóreans descended chiefly from the latter two, and something of the mingled blood and memory of all three passed into the founding generation that sailed to the new land. This inheritance set them apart from other Men from the outset: they were reckoned kin to the Eldar in stature, wisdom, and life-span, though not of Elven kind, and their arrival on Númenor was itself understood as a continuation of the Edain's story rather than the beginning of a new people.

Beyond Dúnedain and Númenórean, the exalted status of the islanders found expression in further names current in the tradition of Middle-earth, where they were remembered as Kings among Men, a title reflecting the reverence in which their realm was held by the lesser peoples with whom they later came into contact. Such names were bestowed as much for what the Númenóreans represented — an unbroken line of Men uplifted by the Valar — as for the island itself, and the various appellations of the people accordingly track their standing rather than mark successive stages of settlement or renaming.

Elros, brother of Elrond and the elder of the two sons of Eärendil, was chosen to remain among mortal Men and became the first king of the new island under the name Tar-Minyatur, founding the royal city of Armenelos and establishing the line of kings from which all later rulers descended. His reign, and those of the kings who followed him in unbroken succession for many generations, spanned an age of building and settlement in which the island's harbours, roads, and high places were raised and the Númenórean state took its lasting form. For centuries the realm prospered under this line without division or rebellion, its kings ruling from Armenelos while the people spread across the island's several regions, and the memory of this founding era was preserved by the Númenóreans themselves as the root of their later greatness.

In the centuries that followed, Númenórean ships began to return to the coasts of Middle-earth, at first rarely and then with growing frequency, bringing skills in craft, agriculture, and building to the Men who dwelt there and receiving in turn goods and knowledge from the mainland. Havens such as Vinyalondë in the west and later Pelargir near the mouths of the Anduin grew from these voyages into permanent footholds, and through them the Númenóreans maintained contact with the Elves of Lindon and with Gil-galad, whose realm bordered the sea nearest their own island. When Sauron began to move openly against the Elven-smiths and the free peoples of Eriador in the middle centuries of the Second Age, Númenórean strength was sent to Middle-earth in support of Gil-galad, and the arrival of their forces proved decisive in turning back Sauron's armies and driving him from the coastlands.

As the generations passed, a change crept over the temper of the kings and their people. Long life had been granted them as a gift, yet increasingly they measured it against the deathlessness of the Eldar and grew resentful that old age and death remained their lot, chafing against the Ban of the Valar that forbade them to sail west into sight of Aman. Later kings took names in the Adûnaic tongue of Men rather than in Elvish, turned their favour from Elves and Valar toward proud rule for its own sake, and used their power in Middle-earth increasingly for tribute and dominion rather than aid. Out of this drift arose a lasting division among the Númenóreans themselves, between the greater number who followed the kings in their estrangement from the West, called the King's Men, and a remnant who kept faith with the old friendship of Elves and Valar, known as the Faithful.

Under Ar-Pharazôn, the last and mightiest of the kings, this estrangement reached its crisis. Alarmed by the rise of Sauron's power in Middle-earth, Ar-Pharazôn led a great host east and compelled Sauron's surrender, bringing him back to Númenor nominally as a hostage; within a short time, however, Sauron had made himself the king's closest counsellor and turned the court toward the worship of Melkor, for which a great temple was raised in Armenelos. Under this new order the Faithful were persecuted, their traditions of reverence for the Valar suppressed, and human sacrifice was practised in the temple, while Sauron worked steadily on the king's fear of death to press him toward open defiance of the Valar's ban.

The end came when Ar-Pharazôn, persuaded by Sauron that to seize the Undying Lands would grant him and his people deathlessness, launched a great armada westward in breach of the Ban, landing his host upon the shores of Aman itself. In response the world was remade: the straight road into the West was removed from the circles of the world, the island of Númenor was overwhelmed by the sea, and the greater part of its people perished in what came to be remembered as the Downfall or Akallabêth. Only those ships of the Faithful that had earlier put out from the island's western coast, bearing Elendil and his sons and the loyal remnant of the people, escaped the destruction and reached Middle-earth, where their descendants continued the Númenórean line in exile as the Dúnedain.

The Númenóreans built their common life on skills unmatched among other Men of the age: shipbuilding and the arts of the sea above all, but also stone-work, husbandry, and healing lore drawn in part from long contact with the Eldar. Fellowships of venturers organized the exploration and mapping of the coasts of Middle-earth, sending expeditions that charted havens and river-mouths well before settlement followed in their wake; the most renowned of these captains, Tar-Aldarion, gave his name and patronage to a guild of seafarers devoted to this work. On the island itself the people cultivated vines and grain on terraced ground, raised towers and harbours of dressed stone, and were noted for their skill in the growing and healing use of herbs, crafts that marked them out from the Men who had never left Middle-earth.

Adûnaic, a tongue of Mannish origin distinct from the speech of the Eldar, served as the daily language of the island, spoken in streets, markets, and households; alongside it, Quenya and Sindarin were preserved as tongues of learning, ceremony, and record, used at namings, in titles, and in inscriptions set upon monuments and tombs. Kingship passed by a law of succession admitting the eldest child of the ruling monarch regardless of sex, so that women held the sceptre as ruling queens in their own right, a custom without close parallel among the Men of Middle-earth in that age.

Death itself the Númenóreans at first regarded, after teaching handed down from the Elder Days, as a gift appointed for Men by Ilúvatar rather than a punishment to be feared: the aged among them, when their strength began to fail, would lay down their lives freely and in peace, passing from the world before infirmity overtook them, and this was long counted a mark of wisdom and trust rather than sorrow. Only as the centuries wore on, and envy of the Eldar's deathlessness spread among the people, did that trust give way to dread; tombs and houses of the dead multiplied across the island, and the embalming and preservation of the departed became an anxious craft, a change that traced the slow turning of the Númenóreans away from their earlier acceptance of mortality.

Beyond the royal succession of the Kings of Númenor, tradition names only one other lineage as a house set apart: the Lords of Andúnië, seated in the chief haven of the island's western coast. Appendix A records that Elendil descended from Silmariën, elder child of Tar-Elendil, the fourth King, and that her line held the lordship of Andúnië in unbroken succession down to Amandil, father of Elendil, remembered as the last of the Lords of Andúnië.

The fuller genealogy, preserved as "The Line of Elros," explains that Silmariën did not receive the sceptre under the succession customs of that earlier age and was given the lordship of Andúnië instead, a house ranking second only to the King's own. As later kings turned from the old reverence for the Valar and the Eldar, the Lords of Andúnië became the natural head of those who held to earlier custom, called the Faithful, or Elendili, "Elf-friends." Amandil used this standing to shelter the Faithful under Sauron's ascendancy at court, and from his preparations his son Elendil led the remnant of the house into exile when the island fell, so that the Lords of Andúnië, rather than the elder line of Elros's kings, became ancestors of the ruling houses of Arnor and Gondor.

Within the legendarium, the Númenóreans function above all as Tolkien's sustained meditation on mortality — not as abstract doctrine but as a people whose entire arc dramatizes what happens when a gift is mistaken for a grievance. Granted life spans far beyond other Men and settled in a land visibly nearer the Undying Realm, they are placed in the one position where the difference between Elvish deathlessness and Mannish death could be felt most acutely, and the narrative uses that proximity to stage the temptation at the heart of the tale: the desire to seize immortality by force rather than accept it as unknown. Their slow turning from gratitude to resentment gives the reader, long before Ar-Pharazôn's fleet ever sails, the emotional logic behind the Downfall.

For readers of The Lord of the Rings, the Númenóreans also serve a structural purpose distinct from anything in the Silmarillion tradition: they are the lost standard against which the Third Age is constantly, elegiacally measured. Gondor's crumbling statues, the empty thrones, and the diminished stature of later Men all draw their meaning from an implied comparison with a greatness the story never shows directly but keeps invoking, so that Aragorn's return and Denethor's despair alike are legible only against the memory of what Númenor once was. The people thus operate less as characters in their own right within the War of the Ring than as a historical horizon that gives the Third Age its sense of decline and its stakes of recovery.

Finally, the split between the Faithful and the King's Men gives the Númenórean story its function as moral parable within a mythic frame recognisably close to the Atlantis legend, an association Tolkien acknowledged as a conscious, long-standing preoccupation of his own imagination. By dividing one people into those who keep faith under pressure and those who follow power into ruin, the narrative rehearses in advance the choices later offered to individuals in Middle-earth, where loyalty to an older, unglamorous order is repeatedly set against the seduction of strength without limit. The catastrophe that follows falls on the whole people rather than on villains alone, making Númenor's ending less a punishment story than a warning about what any community risks when it lets fear of death curdle into a claim on eternity.

The Númenóreans first take shape not within the developing Silmarillion tradition but in The Lost Road, an unfinished time-travel novel begun in the mid-1930s in which a father and son of the modern age, Alboin and Audoin Errol, are drawn back through successive incarnations of their own names toward the island at the hour of its fall. In this earliest telling, the counterpart of Elendil is a young man still dwelling on Númenórë, opposing the drift of the king's counsel alongside his own son, called Herendil rather than Isildur or Anárion, so that the later division between the Faithful and the King's Men appears in embryonic, more intimate form, centred on one household's resistance rather than an organised party. The identity of the tempter who turns the king toward defiance of the Valar had likewise not yet settled into the Sauron of the finished legendarium, and the novel breaks off before the Downfall itself is reached.

Tolkien returned to the same ground a decade later in The Notion Club Papers, a second abandoned frame-narrative in which a club of Oxford-like dons is drawn by dream and vision into the island's last days, preserved together with an associated prose retelling, The Drowning of Anadûnê, in Sauron Defeated. This reworking is notable chiefly for what it added to the Númenóreans' own self-understanding as a people: Tolkien here first developed Adûnaic as a working language of the island rather than a name only, supplying vocabulary, the wording of Ar-Pharazôn's men's oath, and a letter from the last king, together with the Adûnaic name for the island itself, Anadûnê, and for its inhabitants, the Adûnâim. Much of this philological material, worked out for an unfinished novel rather than for any narrative Tolkien carried to completion, never entered the published Silmarillion account and survives only in this draft form.