Umbar

The name Umbar enters the record as one already in use. When the Akallabêth first brings the war-fleet of Ar-Pharazôn to this southern coast, it does not name the place through a founding act or a naming king. It presents Umbar as the name the site already carried. The same passage describes the great haven there as one that no hands had shaped, so the name belongs to a natural harbour and not to a work of builders. The texts therefore leave no clear namer on record. They show only that the Númenóreans knew the place by this name when they used it as their foothold.1

In the appendices to The Lord of the Rings the word covers more than one feature. It names the great cape that juts into the southern sea, the enclosed firth sheltered behind it, and the haven and stronghold on its shores. The same word thus serves for the headland, the water, and the settlement, much as a single name often spreads across a stretch of coast. Later ages tied the place to the people who held it, and the phrase Corsairs of Umbar became the usual name for the sea-raiders based there. For readers of the chronicles of Gondor, the name came to suggest a hostile harbour more than a plain landmark.2

No work published in Tolkien's lifetime explains the name. One point of comparison is available all the same. Appendix E lists the traditional names of the Fëanorian letters, and among them is umbar, glossed there as fate. The place-name and this Quenya word match exactly in form. Neither the appendix nor the narrative texts state that the harbour was named for this meaning, so the match is best recorded as an observation and not as an etymology. Given how little the sources say, the safest description of Umbar is as a name without a stated origin, preserved in the histories of the Faithful and of Gondor.3

Umbar lies on the southern coasts of Middle-earth, well beyond the Bay of Belfalas and far south of the mouths of the Anduin, in the regions the chronicles of Gondor call Harad. Between the southern fiefs of Gondor and Umbar lay a broad, contested land. Its northern edge was the Poros, and it stretched southward to the Harnen, the river that Gondor at the height of its power treated as its southern limit. Umbar itself lies south of that frontier, so even in Gondor's strongest years the haven was an outpost beyond the settled realm rather than part of it. For the South-kingdom it was the nearest great harbour that could threaten Pelargir and the coasts of Belfalas from the sea, and much of the history the appendices record for the place follows from this position.1

The Akallabêth presents the haven as a natural harbour, as the account of its name already noted. It was deep and sheltered enough to take in the whole war-fleet that Ar-Pharazôn brought out of the West. When that fleet arrived, the lands around it seem to have been empty of people, and no force opposed the landing. The same work sets Umbar within a wider pattern of Númenórean settlement. The Faithful kept mainly to the region of Pelargir above the Anduin's mouths, while the King's Men went further south and founded lordships and strongholds there. Umbar was the chief of these southern holdings, and that places it on the opposite side of the divide that later split the Númenóreans of Middle-earth.2

The appendices treat Umbar as old Númenórean land and describe it as a stronghold of the King's Men, whose heirs came to be known as the Black Númenóreans. On the highest hill of the headland the Númenóreans set up a white pillar to mark the humbling of Sauron that had followed Ar-Pharazôn's landing. After Sauron rose again, the place passed to his servants and the monument was cast down. Because of its sheltered harbour and its distance from Gondor's strength, Umbar changed hands more than once between Gondor and the peoples of Harad. It also gave a base to exiles and rebels who had fled the South-kingdom, and its fleets could reach the Anduin's mouths and sail up the river towards Pelargir.3

The Tale of Years records Umbar as a Númenórean holding well before the end of the Second Age. Around the year 2280, in the centuries when the kings of Númenor were turning from the counsel of the Elves and pressing their power along the coasts of Middle-earth, the haven was made into a great fortress. It then served as the southern anchor of Númenórean dominion for roughly a thousand years. Its most famous hour came in 3261, when Ar-Pharazôn put in there with his armament and marched inland to challenge Sauron. In the following year Sauron was carried back to Númenor as a captive, an outcome whose consequences would eventually undo the island itself.1

The Downfall of Númenor did not end Númenórean rule at Umbar, but it changed who held it. The haven stayed with the descendants of the King's Men, who had no part in the realms that Elendil and his sons founded, and for the first centuries of the Third Age it lay outside Gondor's reach. That changed under the ship-kings. Eärnil I, having rebuilt Gondor's navy, besieged Umbar by land and sea and captured it in 933, making it a harbour and fortress of the South-kingdom. Three years later he was lost with many ships in a storm off its coast. The Haradrim then contested the prize, and King Ciryandil fell in battle against them in 1015 while the haven was under siege. His son Ciryaher avenged him, defeated the southern kings in 1050, and took the name Hyarmendacil, after which Umbar stayed in Gondor's hands for about four centuries.2

The Kin-strife of Gondor turned Umbar against the realm that had won it. The usurper Castamir, whose strength lay in the fleets and the coastlands, was slain in 1447 when the rightful king Eldacar returned. His sons and many of his followers escaped with a large part of the navy, and in 1448 they seized Umbar and made it an independent lordship. From then on the haven took in Gondor's enemies and gave refuge to all who opposed its kings. Its ships harried the southern coasts, and in 1540 King Aldamir was killed in a war against Harad and the rebels of Umbar. In 1634 a raid led by two of Castamir's great-grandsons fell upon Pelargir and killed King Minardil, the rebels' long feud reaching into the heart of the South-kingdom.3

Gondor retook the haven once more before losing it for good. In 1810 King Telumehtar captured Umbar and drove out the Corsairs, and the last of Castamir's line died there; the victory earned him the title Umbardacil. The recovery did not last. Amid the plague, invasions, and other disasters that struck Gondor in the following generations, Umbar was lost again and passed into the hands of the Men of Harad. The appendices give no year for this final loss. From that point on the haven stayed in hostile hands, and the Corsairs sailing from it became a lasting threat on Gondor's southern flank, drawn in time into Sauron's service.4

Late in the Third Age, while Ecthelion II was Steward, a captain serving Gondor under the name Thorongil led a small fleet against Umbar in secret. By a night attack he burned a large part of the Corsair ships and overthrew the Captain of the Haven on the quays, a blow that bought Gondor some respite. The Corsairs recovered, however, and in the War of the Ring their fleet sailed north in support of Mordor. At Pelargir in 3019 that fleet was taken by the same man, now openly Aragorn, and turned against the besiegers of Minas Tirith, which broke Umbar's sea-power at the decisive moment. After his crowning, the restored king made peace with the peoples of Harad. The published texts say nothing more specific about Umbar's later condition, so its history in the Fourth Age remains unrecorded.5

The Akallabêth ties the first rulers of Umbar to a change in how Númenor dealt with Middle-earth. In the early centuries the seafarers came as teachers and helpers of lesser Men. Once the King's Men gained the upper hand, their settlements on the southern coasts became seats of lordship, and the people of the hinterland were made to pay tribute and to serve. The texts give no individual name for a lord of Umbar in the Second Age. They describe the ruling class only as a group: Númenóreans loyal to the crown and its ambitions, who set themselves above the native population and were feared by it rather than welcomed.1

After the Downfall these southern lords did not pass to Elendil and his sons. The account of the Rings of Power says that many of the Númenóreans who remained in the south fell under Sauron's sway, and it names Herumor and Fuinur as renegades of that kind who rose to great power among the Haradrim. The passage places them in the wide lands south of Mordor and does not seat them at Umbar itself. Even so, it shows the setting in which the haven's masters lived: a Númenórean ruling line, separated from the Faithful by old enmity, close to and sometimes above the peoples of Harad.2

The Downfall of Númenor did not end Númenórean rule at Umbar, but it changed who held it.

The Gondor annals in the appendices show how often the haven changed masters. Under Hyarmendacil I the kings of Harad had to acknowledge Gondor's overlordship and send their sons as hostages to the royal court. That settlement put Umbar at the edge of a southern order ruled from the north. After the Kin-strife the haven was held by the house of Castamir as a lordship of its own. Among the later heirs of that house were the brothers Angamaitë and Sangahyando, and the rule of his descendants ended only when the last of them died there under Telumehtar. After that the haven passed to the Men of Harad. Its later government appears only through the Corsairs and the officer called the Captain of the Haven, whose people and descent the texts do not describe further.3

In the Akallabêth, Umbar is less a setting than a turning point. The tale brings the King's armament to this shore to display Númenor's power at its height, and the landing is presented as a show of majesty. The ships, the empty coast and the unopposed march inland all serve that purpose. What looks like a victory is the moment the story turns against the victors. The submission won from the inland height is the one that carries the enemy back across the sea, so the harbour marks where Númenórean pride reaches Middle-earth and where its undoing begins. The account treats Umbar as the entry point of that pride, and later ages inherit the place in that role.1

The Lord of the Rings never takes a character to Umbar. The haven exists in the story only as something heard of, a danger at the southern edge of Gondor's awareness. When the defenders of Minas Tirith count the companies arriving from the outlying fiefs, the coastal lands have sent fewer men than hoped, because the threat from the sea keeps them at home. The ships themselves appear only late, coming up the Anduin during the battle before the city. Watchers on the walls take them for reinforcements of the besiegers until the banner they carry shows who now commands them. How the fleet changed hands is told afterwards, in the account that Legolas and Gimli give of the ride to Pelargir.2

Read together with the appendices, Umbar stands for an old division that was never healed. It began in the split between the King's Men and the Faithful and was renewed in the Kin-strife, and in both cases the haven sheltered the party that had broken with the line of Elendil. The book settles this conflict without ever reaching the place. The southern threat is ended by turning Umbar's own ships against Mordor, not by a campaign against the harbour. For Aragorn the haven also links his earlier service under another name with his open return, a connection the appendices bring out and the main narrative leaves unspoken.3

Among the screen versions, Umbar has a real presence only in Peter Jackson's film trilogy, and only in the third film, The Return of the King. As in the novel, the haven itself is never shown and no scene takes place there. The place enters the story entirely through its fleet, whose crews the film calls the Corsairs of Umbar. Most of this material is in the extended edition, which adds an encounter at Pelargir that the theatrical cut leaves out. In that added sequence Jackson has a brief cameo as one of the Corsairs aboard the ships. None of the Corsair crew are given names or dialogue roles of any weight, so there is no speaking part tied to Umbar in the way there is for the named characters of the story.1

The most discussed departure concerns what happens once the ships are taken. In the book the Dead are released after the victory at Pelargir, and the captured fleet sails up the Anduin carrying living men: the Grey Company and fighters gathered from the southern fiefs. The film leaves out the Rangers of the North who ride with Aragorn in the novel. Instead, the army of the Dead travels on the Corsair ships and fights in the battle before Minas Tirith, and it is released only after the siege is broken. This change also affects how Umbar's fleet serves the story. In the novel the fleet's capture is a turning point achieved mainly by men. In the film it becomes the way a supernatural host is carried into the main battle.2