Númenor

The island carried several names at once, and each preserves a different view of how it came to be. In Quenya it was Andor, the Land of Gift, a name that records its character as something bestowed by the Valar upon the Edain rather than a country won by conquest or found by wandering; the people's own Adûnaic speech kept the same sense in Yôzâyan. Elenna, Starwards, looked instead to the crossing itself, for the Edain were guided over the Great Sea by the light of Eärendil's star, and the fuller form Elenna·nórë, the land named Starwards, survived in formal and ceremonial speech long after the island's own age had passed. The name that came to stand for the realm in general use is the plainest of them: Númenórë, the westland, shortened in ordinary speech to Númenor, with the Adûnaic Anadûnê carrying the same meaning in the tongue the islanders themselves spoke.

Naming within the island followed the same descriptive habit. Its five great promontories and the land between them were called after the directions they faced — the northern, western, south-western, south-eastern and eastern lands, with the central region named simply for lying inland — so that the map of Númenor reads in Quenya almost as a set of bearings rather than as a gazetteer of remembered persons or deeds. The sacred mountain at the island's heart was the Pillar of Heaven, a name that states its function in the religion of the Númenóreans as directly as the regional names state geography. Harbours and towns were named on the same principle: the eastern haven that looked toward Middle-earth took its name from the east, and the western haven from the setting sun. Only later, as the tongues of the island diverged in status, did Adûnaic forms begin to displace Elvish ones in daily use, a shift of language that was also a shift of allegiance.

In the English of the Red Book tradition the realm is rendered Westernesse, an archaic-sounding word chosen to match the register of the old romances rather than to translate any single element of the Quenya name. Alongside it stands the epithet Land of the Star, which keeps alive both the star that led the Edain west and the shape of the island itself, and which explains why the emblem of a star remained the chief token of Númenórean descent among the exiles in Middle-earth. The pronunciation is regular: the acute accent marks length, so that the first syllable holds a long u and takes the stress, and the final consonant is sounded. Where later chronicles of Gondor and Arnor speak of the kings of the Sea, of the men of Westernesse, or of the Land of the Star, they mean this one island and no other.

Númenor lay alone in the Great Sea, west of Middle-earth and east of Aman, and it was set nearer to the shores of the Undying Lands than to the coasts from which the Edain had come; from the summit of the Meneltarma, in clear weather, the keenest-sighted claimed to catch the white tower of Avallónë on Tol Eressëa far off in the west, though others held this to be no more than a tale. In outline the island resembled a five-pointed star, five great promontories running out from a raised central region, so that its shape and its emblem were one and the same thing. Much of its rim was sea-cliff, with few easy landings, and the land climbed inward from the headlands to the highland at its heart.

The central region, Mittalmar, stood above the promontories and was largely without woods: open grassland, and within it the downs of Emerië, which were the chief sheep country of the island. Out of its middle rose the Meneltarma, whose lower slopes were gentle enough that a road wound about it in a spiral to a summit that was not a peak but a wide shallow hollow, unroofed and unbuilt upon, kept as a hallow where silence was the rule. Eagles nested on the heights near the mountain, and at its southern foot opened the valley of Noirinan, in which the kings and queens were entombed. From springs about the mountain the river Siril ran southward through Mittalmar to a marshy delta and the fishing town of Nindamos on the southern shore. Armenelos, the city of the kings, stood not far from the mountain; in the east, the deep firth of Rómenna, looking toward Middle-earth, became the chief haven of the later realm.

The five promontories differed sharply in soil and use. Forostar in the north was the most barren, a country of moor and stone with quarries in its uplands and the tall cliff-mountain Sorontil standing above the northern sea. Andustar in the west was partly wooded with fir and birch, and its coast was broken by small bays, at the head of one of which stood Andúnië. South of these the Bay of Eldanna faced the warmth of the setting sun, and the land about it, kept moist by sea-mists, bore the fragrant evergreens brought as gifts out of Tol Eressëa, whence the region was called Nísimaldar; there lay the green haven of Eldalondë. Hyarnustar was rocky along its western coast and given over to vineyards in its warm southern lowlands, Hyarrostar in the south-east grew the timber that fed the shipyards, and Orrostar, cooler but sheltered from the north, was the corn-land of the island. It was on this varied and well-watered ground, rather than on conquest, that the wealth of the realm first rested.

The island was raised out of the Great Sea by the Valar at the end of the First Age, after the War of Wrath, and set aside for the three houses of the Edain who had crossed into Beleriand and fought against Morgoth. Guided west by the light of Eärendil's star, the Edain came to it in the thirty-second year of the Second Age, and Elros son of Eärendil, who had chosen the doom of mortal Men where his brother Elrond chose otherwise, took the sceptre as the first king. With the gift came a prohibition, afterwards called the Ban of the Valar: the Númenóreans might sail where they would, but not so far westward that their own coasts passed out of sight, and they might not set foot upon the shores of the Undying Lands. Elros ruled his people for four hundred and ten years and surrendered his life in SA 442, having lived five hundred; the long lease of years granted to his line, and its slow shortening in later generations, is one of the constants against which the whole history of the realm is measured.

For the first centuries the Númenóreans looked outward chiefly as mariners and craftsmen. Their ships were first seen off the coasts of Middle-earth about SA 600, and for a long age they came as friends and teachers, bringing seed, wine, metalwork and knowledge to the peoples of the western shores, who remembered them long afterwards in tales of sea-kings out of the west. Under Tar-Aldarion, the sixth ruler, seafaring became something like a policy: he founded a fellowship of mariners, drove voyages ever farther east and south, and set a haven at the mouth of the Gwathló to serve as a base for felling and shipping the timber his fleets required — the beginning of the long deforestation of that coast. Having no son, he caused the law of succession to be altered so that the eldest child should inherit whatever the sex, and his daughter Tar-Ancalimë became the first Ruling Queen. The naval strength thus built was decisive in SA 1700, when Tar-Minastir sent a great fleet to Lindon and Sauron's armies, which had overrun Eriador and destroyed Eregion, were broken and driven out of the west of Middle-earth.

From about SA 1800 the character of the westward traffic changed. The Númenóreans ceased to be visitors and began to plant permanent dominions on the coasts, exacting tribute where they had once given gifts, and the wealth that flowed home did nothing to console them for their mortality. The chroniclers set the beginning of the shadow in the days of Tar-Ciryatan and his son Tar-Atanamir, who took the sceptre in SA 2251: Atanamir spoke openly against the Ban, grudged the Valar the deathlessness of the Eldar, and was the first king to cling to rule until he died, refusing the old custom of laying down the sceptre before age had taken him. From his reign the people divided. The greater part, the King's Men, grew hostile to the Eldar and to the Valar; a minority, the Faithful, kept the old friendship, and among their leaders were the lords of Andúnië, kinsmen of the royal house. The division was written into the map as well: Umbar was made a great fortress of the realm in SA 2280, while Pelargir, built upon the Anduin in SA 2350, became the chief haven of the Faithful.

The breach widened into policy under the later kings. Ar-Adûnakhôr, who took the sceptre in SA 2899, was the first to assume his royal title in Adûnaic rather than in Quenya, a step the Faithful regarded as open rebellion. Ar-Gimilzôr went further, forbidding the use of the Elven-tongues, refusing all traffic with the ships of Tol Eressëa, and compelling the Faithful to leave the western coasts and settle about Rómenna in the east, where he could watch them. His son took the Quenya name Tar-Palantir and repented, tending the White Tree in the King's Court and turning again toward the west, but the King's Men were too strong and his reign ended in civil strife about SA 3175. He left one child, Míriel, the rightful heir; on his death his nephew took her to wife against her will and against the law, and in SA 3255 seized the sceptre as Ar-Pharazôn the Golden.

In SA 3261 Ar-Pharazôn sailed with an armament to Umbar to challenge Sauron's claim to lordship of Middle-earth. Sauron, judging that he could not win by arms, submitted and was carried to the island as a hostage in the following year; within a few years he was the King's chief counsellor. Under his teaching the worship of the Dark was established, a great domed temple was raised in Armenelos, and men were burned in it, chiefly of the Faithful; Nimloth, the White Tree that stood before the king's house, was felled and burned as fuel for its first fire, though Isildur had already stolen a fruit from it at hazard of his life. From SA 3310 Pharazôn built the Great Armament, and in SA 3319 he set foot upon the shores of Aman to wrest deathlessness from the Powers by force. Amandil, last lord of Andúnië, had sailed west before him to plead for his people and was never heard of again; his son Elendil kept nine ships ready in the eastern haven, and these the storm bore away to Middle-earth. The Valar laid down their guardianship, and by the act of Ilúvatar the sea opened and swallowed the island with its ships, its towers and all its people, and the Meneltarma went down with them.

The Downfall reshaped the world as well as the realm. Aman was removed from the circles of the earth, the seas were bent and the lands made round, so that mariners who steered west afterwards came only back to their own hemisphere; the straight way was left open to the Elves alone. The host that Pharazôn had landed in the Blessed Realm was buried under falling hills, there to remain, so the tradition ran, until the last battle. Sauron's body perished in the ruin, but his spirit returned to Middle-earth, and he never again took a shape that could seem fair. Of the Númenóreans only those already overseas survived: the Faithful about Pelargir, from whom Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anárion founded Arnor and Gondor in SA 3320, and the King's Men of the southern havens, who became the Black Númenóreans and long remained enemies of the exiles. Later mariners told that the summit of the sacred mountain had risen again as a lonely isle above the waters, but none who sought it ever found it.

The islanders were drawn from the three houses of the Edain that had fought against Morgoth in Beleriand, and the distinctions between them were not at once effaced. The folk of the houses of Bëor and of Hador made up the greater part of the settlers, while the survivors of the people of Haleth were few; with the last of these came a remnant of the Drúedain, who dwelt in the western lands, kept to their own ways, and at length grew uneasy and asked to be carried back to Middle-earth, saying that they would not remain to see what was coming. To all the Edain the Valar granted length of days beyond the measure of other Men — a span held to be about three times theirs, with health and undiminished vigour for most of it — together with the grace of laying down life willingly when its end drew near. The chroniclers are careful to mark that this was long life and not deathlessness, a distinction that the Númenóreans themselves came in time to resent.

Authority rested in a single house, that of Elros, and the roll of that line runs to twenty-five names from the first king to the last. The token of office was a sceptre rather than a crown, surrendered by the ruler to the heir; one of the line, Vardamir, is reckoned among the rulers although he never sat upon the throne, yielding the sceptre to his son at once and keeping only the count of years. Three women held the sceptre in their own right after the law of succession was altered — Tar-Ancalimë, Tar-Telperiën and Tar-Vanimeldë — and Míriel, had her right been honoured, would have been the fourth. Below the royal house the highest rank belonged to the lords of Andúnië, whose line sprang from Silmariën, eldest child of Tar-Elendil, and who sat in the king's counsels and long spoke there for the older friendships; to Silmariën her father gave the ring of Barahir, an heirloom that descended through her house and outlasted the island itself.

Having no land frontier, the realm dealt with others only by sea, and in two directions. Westward the traffic was with the Eldar of Tol Eressëa, who came in their own ships bearing gifts and teaching arts, and whose visits the early kings valued as the chief mark of favour from the Blessed Realm. Eastward the standing connection was with Gil-galad in Lindon, and the friendship was practical as well as ceremonious: it was he who wrote to Tar-Meneldur of a shadow gathering in the east of Middle-earth and asked for help against it, a warning that lay behind much of the shipbuilding and coastal enterprise of the following reigns and was answered in force generations later. With the lesser Men of the western shores the relation was at first that of teachers and benefactors and only afterwards that of overlords, a change of footing that the Númenóreans themselves seem never to have described in those terms.

As a setting the island functions less as a country than as a test. Everything given to its people — long life, the finest ships in the world, sight of the Undying Lands from their own mountain — is arranged so that the one thing withheld stands out, and the narrative of the Akallabêth follows the slow work of that single refusal upon a whole people. The turn of the tale comes not with a battle but with a prisoner: Sauron enters the story as a captive brought home in triumph, and the triumph is what destroys the captors. What he offers is an argument rather than an army, that death is a wound inflicted by the Powers and not a gift, and the island's wealth and skill serve chiefly to make that argument persuasive.

In The Lord of the Rings the island never appears; it works instead as the thing behind the characters. It survives in objects — the seeing-stones, the tree in the citadel, the daggers taken from the barrow that were made by men of Westernesse against the Witch-king's master and so, unknown to their bearers, are the right weapons at the last — and in gestures, as when Faramir's company turn in silence toward the west before eating. It survives as an idea of decline: Faramir measures his own city against what came out of the sea, and finds it wanting. It returns most directly in his dream of a dark wave rising over green land, a memory in a man who never saw the thing remembered. Aragorn's claim rests on descent from the survivors, and his death, willingly laid down at the end of his years, closes the pattern that began there.

Not all of its material is on this scale. The one substantial story set on the island itself is domestic: a mariner-king who cannot stay ashore and the wife who will not go on waiting for him, a quarrel in which the sea is a rival and the estrangement of two people prefigures the estrangement of a realm from its own good. Tolkien described the Downfall as his Atlantis legend and traced it to a dream of a great wave that had followed him since childhood, a dream he passed on to Faramir; the island exists in his letters chiefly as the place where he could write about mortal men and the fear of dying.

Númenor entered Tolkien's work in the mid-1930s not as a chapter of the Silmarillion but as the far end of a time-travel story. The Lost Road was to carry a succession of fathers and sons backwards out of modern England, and its Númenórean chapters — the only ancient setting drafted there at any length — show Elendil arguing with his son Herendil while the King's party gathers strength about them. Written beside it, the short narrative The Fall of Númenor survives in two versions and already holds the essential shape of the later account: the gift of the island, the ban on sailing west, the temple, the great armament, and the remaking of a flat world into a globe. The names, however, are not yet fixed. The last king is Tar-kalion, and Sauron appears under the names Thû and Sûr.

Tolkien returned to the matter about a decade later within another unfinished frame-story, The Notion Club Papers, in which members of an Oxford club recover the drowned island through dreams and scraps of a lost tongue. Out of this grew The Drowning of Anadûnê, a retelling cast deliberately as a Mannish tradition: the Elves recede almost out of sight, the teaching that the world had once been flat is left as something Men could not verify, and Adûnaic names carry the story, Zigûr for Sauron and Nimruzîr for Elendil. Christopher Tolkien sets these texts beside the later Akallabêth to show how much of the published version descends from this Mannish account rather than from the Elvish one. A late and separate fragment, Tal-elmar, turns the perspective round entirely, showing the coming of Númenórean ships to the coasts of Middle-earth through the eyes of a native people for whom the tall strangers out of the sea are simply a terror.