Pelargir

Pelargir is a Sindarin name, and the index to The Silmarillion renders it as the garth, or enclosed yard, of the royal ships. The gloss can be followed through its parts. The first element belongs to a root meaning to go round or to encircle, the same root that underlies Pelennor, the fenced land before Minas Tirith, and the Pelóri, the encircling mountains of Aman. The middle syllable carries the sense of high, noble or royal that recurs throughout Elvish names of lordship. The closing element is the Sindarin word for a ship, familiar from Círdan, the Shipwright of the Havens. Read together, the name describes a sheltered anchorage set aside for the vessels of a king, not a harbour in the ordinary trading sense.1

The choice of language suits the people with whom the haven is associated. The Akallabêth describes the Faithful of Númenor as those who went on using the Elven-tongues and keeping the old friendship with the Eldar, while the King's Men increasingly turned away from them. A Sindarin name on the Anduin therefore agrees with the loyalties of the Elf-friends who came there. The sources, however, name no founder of the word itself, and they give no Adûnaic or Quenya equivalent. Who first spoke the name, and whether an older form stood behind it, remains unrecorded. The royal element should not be pressed too hard either: it describes what the place was meant for and says nothing about any particular reign.2

The name is remarkably stable. Where Pelargir appears in The Lord of the Rings, both in the account of the war in the south and in the historical appendices, it carries the same form found in the Silmarillion material, with no variant spelling or later rendering in another tongue. This continuity sets it apart from many places in Middle-earth that are known by several names in different languages. The haven's name seems simply to have passed from the Númenórean founders to the realm that later held the river.3

Pelargir was a river haven, not a harbour on the open coast. The Akallabêth places it above the mouths of the Anduin, upstream of the point where the Great River divides into the channels of its delta before reaching the sea. Ships coming from the west could therefore sail into the river and lie at anchor on firm ground, sheltered from the open Bay of Belfalas. The same account sets it against the southern lordships of the King's Men. Those lay far down the coasts beyond the river, while Pelargir faced north toward the lands where the Elves still dwelt. Its position marks it as a gateway into the interior of Middle-earth by way of the Anduin, and not only as a landing on its shore.1

The Lord of the Rings adds the chronology and the later setting. The Tale of Years records that the Faithful built the haven in the middle of the Second Age and that it became their principal port in Middle-earth, long before Elendil's ships came ashore after the Downfall. When the realm of Gondor was founded, Pelargir lay within it, south of the White Mountains and downstream from the royal cities. The historical appendices describe it as an ancient haven by the time of the ship-kings. One of them, Eärnil I, repaired it and made it the base of a great fleet that he turned against Umbar in the south. The place thus kept its seaward character under a new realm, and Gondor's power on the water rested on it.2

In the narrative of the War of the Ring, Pelargir belongs to the province of Lebennin on the western side of the Anduin. Aragorn's company rides through that country from the south-west and fights at the crossings of the Gilrain before coming to the haven, as Legolas and Gimli relate. The fleet of Umbar is found lying at Pelargir. This makes plain why the haven mattered: whoever held it controlled the lower river and the open waterway north toward Minas Tirith. The text gives no measured distances and describes neither walls, quays nor the extent of the town. Its standing rests wholly on its place between the sea and the heart of the realm.3

The recorded history of Pelargir begins in the long estrangement among the Númenóreans. The Tale of Years places its building in the year 2350 of the Second Age and names it the chief haven of the Faithful from then on. The date is best read beside an earlier entry. Seventy years before, in 2280, Umbar far to the south had been turned into a great Númenórean stronghold, and it later became the base of the King's Men on the coasts of Middle-earth. The two havens therefore stood for the two parties into which Númenor was dividing: one in the south where the lordships of the King's Men grew, the other on the river that led north toward the Elves. The Akallabêth confirms that it was the Elf-friends who used Pelargir, and it gives no account of its building.1

After the Downfall and the founding of the realms in exile, the haven passed into the keeping of Gondor. The appendices say little of it for the first centuries of the Third Age. It comes back into view under the ship-kings, when the refitted harbour served Eärnil I in his war against the south. In 933 his fleet and army took Umbar from its lords and made it a fortress of Gondor. Three years later Eärnil was lost at sea in a storm off the southern coast, together with many of his ships. Gondor's hold on Umbar, and the naval power built at Pelargir to win it, continued under his successors.2

The haven became a place of civil war during the Kin-strife of the fifteenth century. Castamir, who had seized the crown from Eldacar, had been captain of the ships of Gondor. His chief support lay among the people of the coasts and the great havens, Pelargir and Umbar among them. When Eldacar returned in 1447 and defeated the usurper at the Crossings of Erui, Castamir fell there. His surviving kin and followers withdrew to Pelargir and were besieged in it. In the following year they escaped by sea with a large part of the fleet and took Umbar for themselves. From that time Umbar was a rival power in the south, and the haven that had launched Gondor's fleets now faced a navy manned by Gondor's own exiles.3

The rebels of Umbar did not forget the river. In 1634 the Corsairs came up the Anduin, sacked Pelargir and killed King Minardil. According to the appendices, the raid was led by descendants of Castamir, so the war of the Kin-strife reached the same haven where their forebears had been besieged. The Great Plague struck Gondor two years later, and the realm's losses of those years weakened its defence of the southern shores for a long time. In later centuries the Corsairs remained a threat to the coasts and the lower river, and Pelargir stood in the path of any fleet sailing north from Umbar.4

The last events recorded at the haven belong to the War of the Ring. In March 3019 the fleet of Umbar lay at Pelargir while Mordor's armies closed on Minas Tirith. Aragorn, arriving through Lebennin with the Dead, took the ships on 13 March, as the Tale of Years records. Legolas and Gimli describe what followed. The oath of the Dead was held to be fulfilled, Aragorn released them, and the captives chained in the ships were set free. The fleet was then manned from the southern fiefs and sailed up the Anduin to the Pelennor. The sources say nothing of Pelargir's fate in the Fourth Age, and its history closes with that voyage.5

In the Second Age the haven belonged to one party among the Númenóreans, and the Akallabêth defines that party by its loyalties. Those who used Pelargir were the Elf-friends, the minority who still honoured the Eldar and took their side in the long struggle with Sauron. They are the opposite of the King's Men, whose settlements lay further south and whose relations with the peoples of Middle-earth were those of lordship and tribute. The sources name no governor, captain or founding house for the haven in this period. What they record is a community held together by allegiance, not by a line of rulers. Its northward ties ran toward the lands of Gil-galad rather than toward the southern coasts.1

Once the realms in exile were founded, Pelargir had no separate lordship of its own in the records. It was a possession of the Kings of Gondor, and the appendices speak of it only through their deeds, as a haven the crown repaired, garrisoned and fought over. Its people appear once as a political force, in the Kin-strife. The appendices trace that rebellion partly to resentment of Eldacar's northern descent through his mother, and they place the usurper's strongest following among the dwellers on the coasts and in the southern havens. The seafaring population of Pelargir thus had interests of its own and could side against the reigning king. The texts give no figures for its numbers and no account of its later governance.2

This makes plain why the haven mattered: whoever held it controlled the lower river and the open waterway north toward Minas Tirith.

Among Pelargir's neighbours, Umbar and the lands of Harad counted most. After the Kin-strife, Umbar was held by Gondor's own exiles and their heirs, and the haven's relationship with the south was one of lasting enmity, not of trade. In the War of the Ring this threat still shaped the realm's defence. Beregond explains to Pippin that the southern fiefs could spare fewer men for Minas Tirith because the Corsairs were menacing the coasts. Pelargir's immediate surroundings were the fiefs of Lebennin and the outlands of the south, whose men later came to crew the captured fleet. Beyond these links, the sources say nothing specific about the haven's dealings with its neighbours.3

In The Lord of the Rings the reader never stands in Pelargir. The haven enters the story as a destination and is then passed over, and its events are learned only in retrospect. When Aragorn resolves to take the Paths of the Dead, he explains that a danger from the south, which he has perceived by means of the Stone, threatens to draw Gondor's strength away from its capital, and that he must meet it before the city falls. The narrative then leaves the Grey Company and returns to it only after the battle, when Legolas and Gimli recount the ride to the river to their friends in Minas Tirith. This telling at second hand keeps the haven off the stage while its outcome is still unknown. It also lets the episode appear through two very different witnesses, one moved by the terror of the Dead and the other by the nearness of the sea, whose longing wakes in the Elf on this southern road.1

Seen from the Pelennor, Pelargir is the hidden hinge of the battle. Its effect reaches the field before any explanation does. The defenders see the black-sailed ships of the south coming up the river and take them for the final blow of the enemy, and hope fails on the walls and among the Rohirrim. Only when the royal standard is broken out on the leading ship does the meaning of the fleet reverse. The reversal depends entirely on what has happened downstream, out of the reader's sight, so that the haven works in the plot as a place of concealed preparation.2

In the Akallabêth the haven plays a smaller but sharper part. It is mentioned once, in a passage that sets the two parties of Númenor side by side, and it serves there as the single fixed point of the faithful minority against the far-flung dominions of their opponents. The account names no deed done at Pelargir; its function is to show where the loyalty of the Elf-friends touched the shores of Middle-earth. Read alongside The Lord of the Rings, the brief entry gains an echo that the texts do not spell out. The haven of those who kept faith is also the place where an heir of the Faithful releases the oathbreakers of an older age from their debt and turns the enemy's own ships to Gondor's defence. That link is a reader's observation, not a statement of the sources.3

Pelargir figures in the screen adaptations only through the episode that the book sets there, the seizure of the Corsair fleet, and no adaptation gives the haven a role of its own. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 does not reach this point at all, because it breaks off after the battle at Helm's Deep, before the story turns south. Peter Jackson's The Return of the King (2003) retains the capture of the southern ships on the Anduin but changes both its course and its outcome. In the novel Aragorn rides with the Grey Company, including the Rangers of the North and the sons of Elrond, who do not appear in the film. There Aragorn, played by Viggo Mortensen, comes to the river with only Legolas and Gimli beside him and the army of the Dead. The largest departure concerns the oath. In the book the Dead are released once the fleet has been taken, and the ships are then manned by men gathered from Lebennin and the other southern fiefs. The film leaves out these reinforcements and has the Dead themselves sail upriver and fight on the Pelennor before they are freed. The victory the book credits to living allies thus becomes the work of the Dead. Because the film shows these events directly, the second-hand account of Legolas and Gimli also drops away, and with it the haven's place as a scene the reader learns of only afterwards.1