Andúnië

Andúnië is a Quenya name, and the Akallabêth gives the reason for it directly. The chief city and haven of early Númenor stood midway along the island's western shore, and it was named for the fact that it looked toward the setting sun. The name therefore records an orientation, not a founder, an event or a quality of the place. No other name for the city appears in the published narrative, and the form stays the same across every mention, whether the city itself is meant or the title of its lords.1

The word rests on the element that the Silmarillion's appendix of name-elements glosses as 'down' and, by extension, 'west'. It lies behind the Quenya word for sunset and the western quarter, from which the city's name is formed, and also behind the Sindarin word for the west. In Elvish usage the setting of the sun and the direction of the west are closely bound together. A name built on this element therefore places the city in the landscape and also turns it toward what lay beyond the western sea. For a haven on the side of the island nearest Eressëa and Valinor, the choice of name suits its position.2

The description of Númenor printed in Unfinished Tales puts the city in the Andustar, the western promontory of the island, on a bay that took its name from the haven. The city's name thus passed to the surrounding waters. In the Akallabêth it also passes to the house that held the region, whose heads are known simply as the Lords of Andúnië. The name that first described a view became, in turn, a geographical term and a title. Throughout, it kept its Quenya form, which marks it as belonging to the older layer of Númenórean nomenclature.3

Andúnië was a coastal city and haven on the western side of Númenor. The Akallabêth places it in the middle of that coast, on the side of the island turned away from Middle-earth and toward the Blessed Realm. Its position is defined mainly by contrast with the island's other centres. At the heart of the land stood the Meneltarma, and near it lay Armenelos, the royal city. On the opposite shore, facing east, lay Rómenna, the haven from which ships set out toward Middle-earth. Andúnië was therefore the western counterpart to Rómenna, and one of the two ends of an island whose political and religious centre lay inland. The Akallabêth marks its primacy as belonging to an earlier age, which suggests that its standing as chief city did not last through the whole history of Númenor.1

The description of the island printed in Unfinished Tales gives the setting more shape. Númenor is described there as having five promontories spreading from a central region. The westernmost of these, the Andustar, was the city's region. The Andustar is described as a hilly and partly rocky country, with wooded uplands and a coast broken by bays. This differs from the gentler farmland of the island's centre and south. The Andustar was separated from the southwestern promontory by the great bay of Eldanna, whose name refers to the Elves. Andúnië was therefore not the only western landing place. The account links another haven in that bay, Eldalondë, with the ships of the Eldar in particular. Taken together, these details show that the whole western shore of the island was oriented toward Eressëa.2

The city's character follows from this position. It was the Númenórean settlement nearest in direction to the Undying Lands. In the Akallabêth, the west of the island is also the part where the old friendship with the Eldar lasted longest, and where the Faithful were most numerous before their removal eastward. The city therefore stood at the edge of the Númenórean world closest to the West, both in geography and in allegiance. It lay far from the mountain at the island's centre and from the harbour that faced the mortal lands.3

The history of Andúnië begins with the settlement of Númenor itself. The Tale of Years dates the arrival of the Edain on the island to about the thirty-second year of the Second Age, and the Akallabêth presents Andúnië as the principal city and port of those first generations. It gives no founding date and no founder. The same account treats this primacy as something belonging to the island's early days, so the city's rank was not permanent. As the kingship took root inland around the royal city and the holy mountain, the centre of Númenórean life moved away from the western shore. Andúnië remained a haven of standing, but it no longer stood first among the cities.1

Its later importance came less from trade or royal favour than from the family that held it. The genealogy of the kings in Unfinished Tales traces the Lords of Andúnië to Silmariën, eldest child of the fourth king, Tar-Elendil. She married into Andúnië, and her son Valandil bore the lordship there. Because the law of succession in her day passed the sceptre to her younger brother, her descendants never ruled the island. They did, however, carry the blood of Elros in a separate line. This made the house the most eminent in Númenor after the royal line itself, and its heads sat among the foremost counsellors of the realm. Through them the western city stayed linked to the governance of the whole island long after it had lost its leading place.2

The Akallabêth never sets a scene inside the city: no council meets in its halls, no ship is described leaving its quays, and no speech is placed there.

The district around the city also took on a place in royal memory. According to the same genealogy, Tar-Minastir, the king whose navy came to Gil-galad's help against Sauron around the year 1700, built a tall tower on the hill of Oromet near Andúnië. From it he looked westward over the sea. Centuries later the Akallabêth has Tar-Palantir climbing to this old tower. He was the one king of the late line to turn back toward the ancient friendship, and he stood there looking west in the hope of seeing a ship from Eressëa. The tower thus framed a long stretch of Númenórean history, from a king who still longed for the West to one who tried, too late, to recover that longing. Both kings looked toward the West from the neighbourhood of Andúnië.3

The division of the Númenóreans into the King's Men and the Faithful shaped the city's later centuries. The Akallabêth describes how, as the kings grew hostile to the Eldar, those who kept to the old ways were strongest in the west, and the Lords of Andúnië counted as their natural leaders. Under Ar-Gimilzôr this became open persecution. The king forbade the Elvish tongues, and visits from Eressëa were no longer tolerated. He also moved the Faithful out of the west and settled them in the east of the island, where they could be watched. The Lords of Andúnië were among those uprooted, and from then on they lived at Rómenna. By an irony the account notes, Ar-Gimilzôr's own queen, Inzilbêth, came from the house of Andúnië and quietly held to its sympathies.4

Nothing more is told of the city after the removal of its lords. The last lord was Amandil, once a friend of Ar-Pharazôn in their youth. He kept his place in the royal council until Sauron, brought to Númenor as a captive in 3262, turned the king against him. He then sailed secretly into the West to plead for his people and did not return. His son Elendil led the Faithful who escaped in nine ships. In 3319, when Ar-Pharazôn's armada broke the Ban and Númenor was cast into the sea, Andúnië went down with the rest of the island. What survived was the lineage and not the place: through Elendil the house of Andúnië became the royal house of the realms in exile in Middle-earth.5

The people of Andúnië were Edain, descended from the Elf-friends who had crossed the sea to Númenor at the start of the Second Age, and the sources describe them only as members of that single nation. They record no separate folk, no foreign settlers and no count of inhabitants. What distinguishes the city is the house that governed it. According to the genealogy of the kings, Silmariën took as her husband Elatan of Andúnië, so the lordship joined a local family to the blood of Elros. The Lords of Andúnië who descended from this marriage held the western region as a hereditary seat under the kings of Armenelos. They never held it as an independent realm.1

The Akallabêth names only a few of these lords, and it names them only where their lives touched the royal house. One was Eärendur, lord in the time of Ar-Gimilzôr. His sister Lindórië was the mother of Inzilbêth, and Inzilbêth in turn bore Tar-Palantir. The king who tried to restore the old ways was therefore a grandson, through his mother's line, of a daughter of the western house. The account also presents the lords as keepers of Elvish speech and learning in a time when the court was turning away from both. Their people, the Faithful, called themselves Elendili, the Elf-friends. The lordship was therefore defined as much by loyalty as by land. Its relation to the throne moved from close kinship to open suspicion, even while its heads kept their places in the royal council.2

A trace of this rule outlasted the island. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings record that the royal sceptre of Arnor had first been the silver rod of the Lords of Andúnië. It was carried out of Númenor and became the chief token of kingship in the northern realm of the exiles. A sign of office from a subordinate western lordship thus became the emblem of a crown in Middle-earth. In this way the house's regional authority was carried into the royal line founded by Elendil.3

Andúnië matters to the tale of Númenor more for where it points than for anything that happens in it. The Akallabêth never sets a scene inside the city: no council meets in its halls, no ship is described leaving its quays, and no speech is placed there. Its role in the narrative is to fix a direction. Where Armenelos stands for the crown and the Meneltarma for the worship of the One, the western haven marks the side of the island that still faces the Blessed Realm, and the account uses it as the point from which the Númenóreans' changing attitude to the West can be measured. When the city is mentioned, the reader is being shown which way a character is turned.1

For most of the story Andúnië appears as a title rather than a setting. The phrase Lord of Andúnië follows its bearers to court, into the king's council and finally into exile on the eastern shore, so the name stays in the narrative long after the city has dropped out of it. The effect is quiet but deliberate. A family keeps the name of a view it can no longer see, and the reader hears the West named in scenes that take place facing Middle-earth. The two late kings who look out from the tower near the city are presented in the same spirit. They are not remembered for any deed done at Andúnië, only for standing near it and turning toward the sea.2

Read against the whole legendarium, the city stands at the start of a reversal. The people who first landed on the side of the island nearest the West end by sailing east, and the line that kept the western name founds kingdoms in the lands its ancestors had left. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings trace the heirs of Isildur back through this house, so the story of Andúnië does not end with the island. It passes into the history of the exiled realms as a memory of orientation, a reminder that the kingship restored at the end of the Third Age descends from those who had kept looking west.3