Gondor

The name belongs to Sindarin, the Elvish tongue that the Dúnedain of the Second Age had learned in Númenor and carried with them into Middle-earth. Its first element is the ordinary word for stone or rock, gond, joined to the element that denotes a land, dôr; the compound therefore describes the country's ground rather than its people, and may be rendered as land of stone. The same first element stands in Gondolin, the hidden Elvish city of the Elder Days, and in the personal name Gondobar-like formations of that earlier lore, so the word was old and widely used long before it was applied in the south. The account of the realms in exile is careful in its phrasing: the sons of Elendil are said to have established their kingdom in lands that were afterwards called Gondor, which suggests a name that settled upon the country through use rather than one conferred at a single ceremonial founding.

In the chronicles of the Third Age the name rarely stands alone. Gondor is habitually set beside Arnor, the two together forming the realms in exile founded in the same year, and from this pairing comes the usual descriptive title, the South-kingdom, against the North-kingdom of Elendil's own seat. The genealogical matter of the Appendices keeps the same frame, treating the southern realm and the line of Anárion as one subject; the label is thus less a second name than a way of placing the country within a divided inheritance. Among its own people the plain form sufficed, and formal usage spoke simply of the Kingdom of Gondor.

Neighbours had names of their own. The Rohirrim, whose speech is represented throughout by an archaic form of English, called the land the Stoningland, a direct translation of the Sindarin sense into their own idiom, just as they gave Minas Tirith the name Mundburg. Within Gondor's borders, however, not every name is Elvish or Númenórean: a few, among them Erech, Arnach and Umbar, are noted as survivals from tongues spoken in those regions before either people came, and their meanings were no longer understood. The naming of the realm thus records two layers at once, an imported Elvish word laid over ground that had been named already.

Gondor is a realm rather than a city or a single district, and its shape is set by two great features: the Anduin and the White Mountains. The river comes down out of the north, passes the bleak hills of the Emyn Muil and falls at Rauros, and thereafter runs in a long southward course to a broad delta at the sea; the kingdom grew up along its lower reaches and on both its banks. The mountains run east and west and end eastward in the peak of Mindolluin, dividing the country into unequal parts: the wide coastlands and river-plains to the south, and the narrower province of Anórien between the range and the river to the north. East of Anduin lies Ithilien, rising to the Ephel Dúath, the shadowed wall behind which lies Mordor, so that the realm's most dangerous frontier is a river backed by a mountain barrier.

These lands were only the core. At the height of its power the realm stretched north to the Field of Celebrant and the eaves of the great forest, eastward to the inland Sea of Rhûn, and south beyond the River Poros to the Harnen, while its coastal authority reached as far as the haven of Umbar. Nearly all of that was lost by degrees. The northern province beyond the mountains passed to the Riders and became Rohan, its border afterwards running along the Mering Stream at the edge of the wood below the last beacon-hill; the southern lands became a debatable ground fought over with the Haradrim; and Umbar fell to enemies who used it against the realm that had built it.

What remained was a country of many small fiefs, each with its own lord and levy: Lossarnach in the vales under the mountains, Lebennin of the many streams, Lamedon and the Ringló Vale, the dark valley of Morthond, the long shore called Anfalas, the green hills of Pinnath Gelin, and Belfalas with its haven at Dol Amroth. It is a hard, stone-built land in its eastern parts, greener and richer westward and along the coast, and its chief havens stood on the river above the delta rather than on the open sea. Before Minas Tirith spread the walled farmland of the Pelennor, and along the Anórien ridges a chain of beacons could carry word of war to Rohan in a day. Ithilien, once the garden of the realm, kept its woods and flowers long after its people had withdrawn across the water.

The realm was founded in the year 3320 of the Second Age, when Elendil and his sons came ashore after the drowning of Númenor and set up two kingdoms in exile, the northern under Elendil himself and the southern under Isildur and Anárion together. Their chief city was Osgiliath, built astride the Anduin, and to either side of it they raised guardian towers: Minas Ithil under the mountains of the east, and Minas Anor beneath Mindolluin in the west. The peace was short. In 3429 Sauron came out of Mordor and took Minas Ithil, and Isildur fled by ship to seek his father while Anárion held the river crossings. The answer was the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, whose siege of Barad-dûr lasted seven years; Anárion was killed before its walls in 3440, and Sauron was overthrown in 3441, at the cost of Elendil's life and Gil-galad's. Isildur then gave the southern kingdom into the hands of Anárion's son Meneldil and rode north, and was slain on the way in the second year of the Third Age, so that Gondor was ruled thereafter by the line of Anárion alone.

The first thousand years of the Third Age were a time of growth. Ostoher rebuilt Minas Anor, and from his day the kings kept summer residence there rather than in Osgiliath; in his reign came the first assault out of the east, driven off by his son, who took for it the name Rómendacil, victor of the East, and fell in a later attack in 541. There followed the four who are remembered as the Ship-kings, under whom Gondor turned its strength seaward: Eärnil I took the great southern haven of Umbar in 933, his son Ciryandil died defending the conquest, and Hyarmendacil I broke the Harad utterly, so that by the middle of the twelfth century the realm reached from the eaves of Mirkwood to the far south and eastward to the inland sea. Under Atanatar the Glorious the kingdom was at its wealthiest and least watchful, and the chroniclers date the beginning of the decline to his ease rather than to any defeat.

Three disasters undid what the Ship-kings had won. The first was internal: the Kin-strife of 1432 to 1448, a rebellion against King Eldacar because his mother had been of the Northmen and not of Númenórean blood. Osgiliath was stormed and burned, its great tower thrown down and one of the palantíri lost in the river, and though Eldacar returned and slew the usurper Castamir at the crossings of Erui, the rebel's sons held out at Pelargir and escaped with the fleets to Umbar, where their descendants became the Corsairs who preyed on Gondor's coasts for centuries. The second was the Great Plague of 1636, which killed King Telemnar and all his children, withered the White Tree, and emptied Osgiliath so thoroughly that it was never fully resettled; worse, the garrisons along the borders of Mordor died or were withdrawn, and the watch upon that land was never afterwards restored. The third was invasion: the Wainriders out of the east killed Narmacil II in 1856 and tore away the eastern provinces, and in 1944 they killed King Ondoher and both his sons at the Morannon, until Eärnil, captain of the southern army, destroyed their host in Ithilien.

In 2002 the Nazgûl took Minas Ithil after a long siege, and with it a third palantír; the captured tower was renamed Minas Morgul, and its western twin became Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard. Eärnil's son Eärnur came to the throne in 2043 and was twice challenged to single combat by the Lord of Morgul; in 2050 he accepted, rode to the gates of that city with a small escort, and was never heard of again. No heir could be proved and none was accepted, and the rule passed to the Stewards of the House of Húrin, who governed in the king's name without claiming his crown or his throne. Under them the realm shrank steadily. Osgiliath was finally ruined and its bridge broken in 2475; in 2510, after the Balchoth were destroyed on the Field of Celebrant by the timely riding of Eorl's horsemen, the Steward Cirion granted the wide northern province to the Éothéod and gained a sworn ally in place of an unheld frontier. Later Stewards fortified what remained: Ecthelion I rebuilt the White Tower in 2698, and in 2980 a captain serving under Ecthelion II burned the Corsair fleets in Umbar itself.

The final crisis came in the last years of the Third Age. Sauron's forces drove Gondor's garrison from the eastern shore at Osgiliath in June 3018, and in March 3019 the assault fell in full: the outer wall of the Pelennor was breached, Minas Tirith was besieged and its gate broken, and Denethor II, the last Ruling Steward, burned himself in despair upon a pyre. The siege was lifted by the Rohirrim and by Aragorn's coming up the river with the men of the southern fiefs, and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields ended with the Lord of the Nazgûl slain and the besieging host destroyed. Rather than defend the victory, the captains of the West marched to the Black Gate to draw Sauron's eye, and the Ring was unmade while they stood there. Aragorn was crowned in Minas Tirith on the first of May as Elessar, the line of the kings was joined again with that of Isildur, and a sapling of the White Tree was found upon the mountain and planted in the court. Gondor thus neither fell nor merely endured: it was reunited with the northern kingdom under one crown, and its lost frontiers were restored in the age that followed.

The people of the realm were never Dúnedain only. The ruling stock descended from Númenor, but along the coasts and in the mountain vales dwelt folk who had been settled there before Elendil's ships came; the Appendices reckon the men of the White Mountain valleys akin to the Dunlendings and to the shades that Isildur cursed at Erech, and the northern folk of Rhovanion as a kindred people whom Gondor long counted friends. Speech preserves the mixture. The Common Speech, grown out of the Númenórean tongue and enlarged from the languages of the coastlands, served everywhere, while Sindarin remained the household language of those of least mingled descent, chiefly in Minas Tirith and in Belfalas, and the kings took their names from the high Elvish tongue of Númenórean learning. In Anórien a remnant of another people altogether, the wood-dwellers of the Drúadan Forest, kept apart from the realm's authority and were remembered by it only dimly, until their headman guided the Riders past the enemy's watch in 3019.

The crown descended in the male line of Anárion, and the strictness of that rule shaped the realm's later government. When Ondoher and both his sons were killed in the same battle, Arvedui of the North-kingdom claimed the sceptre both as Isildur's heir and as husband of Ondoher's daughter Fíriel, but the Council of Gondor, guided by the Steward Pelendur, held that the inheritance belonged to Anárion's male descendants and gave the crown instead to the victorious captain Eärnil, himself of the royal house. From Pelendur onward the Stewardship itself passed by descent within his family, that of Húrin of Emyn Arnen, and when the kingship failed the Stewards took the whole governance without taking its emblems: no crown, no throne, a white rod of office, a seat below the empty dais, and a banner of plain white with no device. They ruled in the name of a king who might yet return, and the last of them, Denethor II, was known within his city simply as its Lord.

Beneath the Steward stood the lords of the fiefs, who held their lands with their own men and answered a summons to muster with companies of very unequal size; foremost among them was the Prince of Dol Amroth, whose house was said to carry Elvish blood and whose knights were the chief mounted strength the realm could raise. Beyond its borders Gondor's dealings ran in two directions. Northward the alliance with the Riders, sworn between Cirion and Eorl, held unbroken for five centuries and was honoured by both parties at the last crisis; eastward and southward the realm faced enemies of long standing, the Haradrim who paid tribute only while they were beaten, the Easterling peoples, and the lords of Umbar, who were of Númenórean descent themselves but of the faction that had hated Elendil's house since before the Downfall. With the North-kingdom, after Arvedui's rejected claim and its own ruin, ordinary intercourse effectively ceased; when it resumed it did so in the person of a claimant rather than an embassy, and the Stewardship then passed, undiminished in honour, to Faramir, who received with it the princedom of Ithilien.

In The Lord of the Rings the southern realm is heard of long before it is seen, and it arrives first as a man rather than a place. Boromir comes to Rivendell out of a hundred and ten days' journeying, sent by a dream that had troubled him and his brother, and at the Council he speaks less of his country's antiquity than of the daily cost of holding a river-line that no one else in the West has to hold. That grievance becomes the story's most searching temptation: if a weapon lies to hand, why should the men who bear the brunt not use it? His attempt on Frodo at Amon Hen and his death among the fallen orcs set the terms early, and the same test is repeated with a different answer when Faramir, hearing at Henneth Annûn what his brother had wanted, declines even to look at the thing and lets the hobbits go. Gondor is thus introduced as a case rather than a landscape — a proud and hard-pressed people asked whether necessity licenses anything.

The country itself is entered through borrowed eyes, and never once through the eyes of a native. Frodo and Sam walk its eastern province as trespassers, cooking a stolen meal in a place of abandoned gardens, watching a Southron ambush from cover, and passing at the Cross-roads the seated figure of an old king whose head has been struck off and mockingly replaced, while the true head lies at the roadside wearing a crown of flowering weeds. Pippin sees the capital instead, and sees mostly its emptiness: streets and great houses with no one in them, a courtesy so formal it feels like ceremony over a grave, and a small boy and a guardsman of the Citadel to explain the city to him. Neither hobbit's account has any authority; both are the impressions of strangers, which is precisely how the reader is made to receive the realm.

Structurally, Gondor carries the loud half of the plot while the decisive half happens unseen elsewhere, and the narrative keeps insisting on the disproportion: the greatest battle of the age is fought to buy time for two travellers nobody in the city has heard of. It is also where the book stages its argument about rule. Denethor, who has looked too long into a stone and seen only what his enemy allowed, chooses fire for himself and nearly for his son, and his despair is contrasted with the returning claimant, who is recognised not by battle or by lineage but in a sickroom, when an old nurse's proverb about a king's healing hands is remembered and found to be true. The last chapters gather every thread there — the crowning, the marriages, Faramir's investiture as prince of the eastern province — before the hobbits ride north again, so that the realm serves as the point where the war's many stories are resolved and displayed.

Through a long stretch of the writing the southern realm was not Gondor but Ondor. The form stands in the drafts of the chapter that became the Council of Elrond and on the first map drawn for the story, and for a time Tolkien wavered between the two spellings before the initial consonant was fixed. The change was slighter than it looks. The word-list he had compiled in the 1930s sets down a single root for stone, from which the High-elven form begins with a vowel and the Noldorin, later Sindarin, form with the hard g; Ondor and Gondor are therefore the same compound taken from the two branches of one word, and neither was ever an alternative name in the fiction. Something similar governs other names of the realm. Minas Tirith had already been used in the Elder Days matter for the fortress that Finrod raised on the island in Sirion, and only afterwards was it transferred to the Tower of Guard beneath Mindolluin, so that a reader of the drafts meets the name in an entirely different place first.

The realm's internal history was worked out largely after the narrative was finished. A long text called The Heirs of Elendil gives an annal to every king and steward of both exile kingdoms, often with more detail about a particular reign than survives in the published genealogies, and its dates were adjusted more than once before the tables were settled; the drafts for the historical appendix show the same matter being cut and compressed rather than invented. The narrative chapters themselves grew by discovery. The outlines that precede the Ithilien episode contain no younger brother for the man who came to Rivendell; Faramir arrived unplanned while the chapter was being written, and the argument between the brothers over the use of the Ring, which shapes so much of how the realm is presented, is a consequence of that late arrival rather than a plan carried out.

Peter Jackson's three films give the southern realm more attention than any other version, and the greater part of it falls in the last of them. Sean Bean plays Boromir, David Wenham his brother Faramir, and John Noble the last Ruling Steward. Two of the realm's central episodes are altered. Faramir does not release the hobbits at his refuge but sends them under guard toward Osgiliath, so that the contrast the book draws between the brothers is deferred and then settled by a change of heart; and the warning beacons of Anórien are kindled against the Steward's will rather than at his command, which turns a piece of military routine into an act of defiance. Denethor is deprived of his seeing-stone, so that his despair appears as temperament rather than as the outcome of a contest with the Enemy, and he dies by falling from the citadel instead of upon a pyre. The Dead of Dunharrow, dismissed at Pelargir in the book, are carried on to the Pelennor and end the battle themselves, which leaves the levies of the southern fiefs out of the victory. The healing in the Houses, on which the recognition of the king turns, was cut from the cinema release and only partly restored in the longer version.

In the older versions the realm is thinner. Ralph Bakshi's animated film breaks off after Helm's Deep, so Gondor exists in it only as Boromir's report at Rivendell, voiced by Michael Graham Cox, who took the same part again in the radio dramatisation three years later. The Rankin/Bass television film takes up the final volume alone and compresses it to about ninety minutes, with William Conrad as Denethor and John Huston as Gandalf; the Paths of the Dead, the fleets and the muster of the fiefs are dropped, and much of the war is carried by narration and song. The twenty-six-part radio serial has room for what the screen versions cut, and Peter Vaughan's Denethor is given the long arguments with Gandalf and with Faramir at length.