#legendarium blogging

The NOME passage on Elf/part-Elf beardlessness is interesting in a lot of ways, honestly.

The thing is, you can quibble with Tolkien’s sweeping generalizations about how beardlessness works. He saysthatallElves are beardless, which is canonically not true; Círdan is bearded in LOTR. He says that the mortal descendants of Elves are beardless, such as Aragorn, Imrahil, Boromir, and Faramir, contrasting them with the bearded Théoden and Éomer … who are also descendants of an Elf (the same Elf as Imrahil’s ancestress, at that). So it’s easy to go, eh, not compatible with canon, whatever.

Of course, Tolkien elsewhere has a less sweeping explanation of Elvish beardlessness. Typically, only very old Elves can grow beards (with the occasional rare exception). Círdan’s beard is a mark of his age, not something characteristic of male Elves in general.

What’s less clear is how this more limited beardlessness manifests among the mortal descendants of Elves. Maybe they never live long enough to reach the beard-growing stage. Maybe the Númenóreans’ strange lifespans and aging are essentially a hybrid of Elvish cycles of life+mortality, so they can grow beards at their own equivalent of the late Elvish life-cycle. Tolkien isn’t really clear on how the clarification of Elvish beardlessness affects the beardlessness of Elvish descendants.

But it is very clear, IMO, that the statement that alldescendants of Elves are beardless is an over-generalization. For Tolkien, it seems that only some descendants of Elves “count” for these purposes. Théoden is the son of a Númenórean woman of the line of the Princes of Dol Amroth, but he’s so powerfully identified with his father’s culture and ethnicity that he’s basically never treated as Númenórean or part-Elvish in any way. UT attributes Éomer’s height to his Númenórean ancestry but nothing else.

However, Tolkien also suggests that Boromir’s and Faramir’s beardlessness is partly attributable to their descent from the Princes of Dol Amroth through their mother (as well as Denethor’s descent from Elros). So it’s not just some patrilineal take on genetics at work. And the beardlessness of the royal families of Gondor and Arnor goes back to a woman, anyway—Princess Silmariën, who herself inherited the Elvish blood of Idril, Nimloth, and Lúthien, all women. This can definitely be transmitted through the female line.

It’s maybe a bit uncharitable, but my suspicion is that Faramir and Boromir’s Dol Amroth heritage “counts” for Tolkien in a way that Théoden and Éomer’s doesn’t because it doesn’t reallychange anything. Faramir and Boromir are already part-Elvish Númenóreans on Denethor’s side, so Tolkien can tack on “and Finduilas was part-Elvish, too” to reinforce it, whereas Théoden and Éomer are so thoroughly identified with the Rohirrim that their function would be undermined by any signs of Elvishness.

In any case, it’s not that Tolkien is perfectly consistent here by any means, or that his preference for patrilineality doesn’t color a lot of how this works. But I do think it’s more complicated and intriguing than the “Círdan and Théoden have beards tho, checkmate” crowd allows.

Thinking about Gondor’s dynastic disputes has me thinking about how interesting it is that the royal House of Anárion was ever a thing at all. IIRC, Anárion was the older son in an earlier draft, and in that case the kingship falling to his son Meneldil would simply be business as usual. But in the final version, Isildur is the elder son, and he had four sons of his own. He could have turned Gondor over to one of them instead of to Meneldil. Or, if he was set on establishing all of his children in Arnor, he could have made Meneldil a viceroy of some kind rather than placing him on the throne as king in his own right. It’s just a really different and intriguing way of going about things.

I just remembered the other thing I was going to say on my Arvedui and Pelendur post earlier today.

It’s sometimes presumed that Aragorn’s claim to the throne of Gondor is interchangeable with Arvedui’s, but this isn’t true. Arvedui pretended or believed that Númenor allowing women and their children to inherit somehow gave him a claim to the throne of Gondor as Princess Fíriel’s husband. He was wrong. Under Númenórean law, he would be a usurper had he succeeded, either of Fíriel or of their son Aranarth. But Aragorn is Aranarth’s heir, so had he chosen to claim the throne through Fíriel, the claim on that side would not be nearly so groundless.

However, Aragorn doesn’t actually try to make that claim. He firmly identifies himself as the heir of Isildur and claims the throne of Gondor as heir of Valandil -> Isildur -> Elendil, evading the entire prickly issue of royal inheritance through the female line (something that neither Arnor/Arthedain nor Gondor ever permitted, though the Stewards managed it by not claiming royalty).

On top of that, though, the rejection by Pelendur and the Council of Gondor is so sweeping that I suspect they would have rejected any argument that Arvedui made. This is veering into headcanon, but I think their overriding concern—above misogyny, above whatever Isildur may or may not have intended—was the subordination of Gondor’s interests to Arthedain’s. And Pelendur was a descendant of Anárion (according to POME and NOME) through some line that couldn’t claim the throne—likely through a female line. He excluded himself and his own descendants from the succession forever to keep the house of Isildur out of Gondor.

Something that’s interesting about Aragorn in the book, though, is that he’s … pretty damn enthusiastic about becoming King of Gondor for its own sake. Like, yes, he restores Arnor and reunites the kingdoms and all, but I think it’s clear that Gondor is not subordinated to Arnor in his rule or mind. If anything, the end of “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” indicates that Aragorn’s rule was centered on Minas Anor to the end of his very long life.

So while the heirs of Isildur were eventually able to take power in Gondor, it makes sense that Aragorn—the victorious captain who was willing to jeopardize himself for Gondor and who clearly loves and values it for its own sake, and who is much more straightforward and honest about his claim—was a lot more palatable to Gondorians than Arvedui would have ever been. And it certainly didn’t turn out in the way that I think Pelendur and the Council might have feared.

Arvedui’s claim to the throne through his marriage to Princess Fíriel is interesting for a couple of reasons.

He makes a separate claim as heir of Isildur (though his father was alive at the time…), which is its own matter. But his additional argument that, under the laws of Númenor, his marriage to Fíriel gives him some claim to the throne of Gondor is frankly either duplicitous or ignorant. The laws of Númenor, after Tar-Aldarion, allowed women to rule in their own right. The only men to rule Númenor via the birth/lineage of their wives were usurpers.

Under Númenórean law, Fíriel’s status as daughter and only living child of the King of Gondor would make herthe rightful ruler, not Arvedui. If she’s dead by then, her claim would pass to her eldest child (regardless of gender), not Arvedui.

I think his attempt to bullshit his way into the kingship is somewhat obscured by the fact that, while the Council of Gondor rejects this claim, they do not reject it for being wrong (though it is). Rather, the Council’s argument is that Númenórean law has not been applied in either Gondor or Arnor/Arthedain at any point (this seems to be true) and that they do not consider women to have any place in the succession (i.e., not only can women not claim the throne, but men cannot claim the throne throughwomen because something something war). So they don’t cover themselves in glory, either.

I suspect the real issue is that the Council (and, it’s implied, the Dúnedain of Gondor in general) didn’t want Gondor to be ruled by Arthedain. Arthedain was an ally, yes, and one with which they had kinship, but also by that point had been a separate country with its own interests and priorities for a long time, and was also considerably weaker than Gondor. The Council could have made a narrower and fairer ruling dismissing Arvedui’s particular claim because of its misrepresentations, but that would open the door for Aranarth to claim the throne, which as far as they were likely concerned, would lead to exactly the same thing.

Tolkien suggests that one figure had an outsized role in all this: Pelendur, Steward of Gondor. As Steward, he would have been the chief of the Council, and acting ruler of Gondor between Ondoher’s death and the succession of the new king. But an interesting twist is that both Peoples of Middle-earth andNature of Middle-earth suggest/state that Húrin of Emyn Arnen, the direct forefather of the Stewards, was a descendant of Anárion without being of the “line” of Anárion—which, in all likelihood, means that Pelendurhimselfwas also descended from Anárion through a woman, and that the call he made wrt Fíriel applied to his own family as well and ensured that they could never claim the throne of Gondor.

I’m unsure what my takeaway from this is—just that I think it’s really interesting and more complicated than it’s sometimes treated.

Now that I’m thinking about the Ruling Stewardship being inherited through female lines a couple of times, by contrast to Gondor’s (and apparently Arnor’s/Arthedain’s) firm position that only male-line male heirs could inherit the crown, I’m wondering a lot about Denethor I.

This Denethor was the son of Steward Dior’s sister Rían, and the first person to inherit the rule of Gondor through a woman. We don’t really have any details of how he inherited the Stewardship—was there any controversy? was it Dior’s decision? the Council’s? was it a perfectly smooth transition? what was Rían’s place in all this?

If there wereany shenanigans to enable the continuance of the Ruling Stewardship, it’s interesting that the consequences of Rían’s descendants succeeding to the Stewardship were so directly spectacular. Denethor I’s son was the asskicking Steward Boromir whom even the Witch-king feared, and Boromir’s son was Cirion himself, “a man of little pride and of great courage and generosity of heart, the noblest of the Stewards of Gondor.”

I was thinking some more about Tolkien’s choices with the Stewards, and the inevitable difficulties we run into with them because of the basic dynamics at play.

The thing is that, in LOTR, the Stewards come from and rule over Gondor’s Númenórean elite. I suspect it was pretty difficult for Tolkien to see the Dúnedain of Gondor accepting the rule of a family with zero royal ancestry—and, indeed, he emphasizes in NOME that Húrin of Emyn Arnen’s royal ancestry was part of why he was chosen for such an important position at all, even before the Stewards became de facto monarchs.

But they also can’t have strong enough ties to the royal house to actuallybe kings, or even serious claimants, because otherwise it screws up the return of the king plot. You can see Tolkien trying to work this out in drafts of the Appendices in POME, where he mentions the Stewards’ royal origins multiple times in different drafts—it’s not just a NOME thing.

Also, in some ways, the Stewards actually benefited from their non-royal status. e.g., The Council led by their ancestor, Steward Pelendur, decided that Gondor’s crown couldn’t be inherited through women and were apparently supported in that decision by all the Dúnedain of Gondor. But later on, Ruling Stewards did inherit their position through women and got away with it because technicallythey weren’t kings, even though they had the authority of the kings. Okay, lol.

But it does leave us at a kind of odd place in terms of the stakes of restoring the House of Elendil to power in Gondor.

Kind of interesting how the Ruling Stewards were, collectively, so competent and upstanding right up to the last hours of their 969-year rule while the kings were kind of all over the place. Tolkien couldhave laid the groundwork for Aragorn’s rise in some inadequacy on their part, but … doesn’t, really? He’s very insistent that they’re awesome. They’ve still got to go, though.

fairy-anon-godmother replied to this post:

Inquiring minds would love to see? (We’re watching the appendices right now and it’s very topical lol)

I read a lot of Denethor threads, but found this one especially soothing!

I was feeling down and apathetic today. I could have exercised or cleaned something or done something productive, but instead I ended up digging up old (c. 2013-2018) threads about how badly PJ et al fucked up Denethor in the LOTR movies. I actually do feel better now!

(Strong agreement with the threads, obviously.)

incognitajones replied to this post:

hmmm, and yet I don’t recall him having anything to say about Aragorn’s attractiveness… does that mean Aragorn is an uggo?!?

Sort of, lol! Aragorn cleans up nice on multiple occasions (and Denethor is noted as attractive and strongly resembles him), but in his ragged graying wilderness man persona, he’s … well, there’s a reason that the hobbits decide that he would probably “look fairer” if he were actually trying to deceive them. :P

echoofthemusicsaid:

Sorry that was annoying, I’ve not considered this detail before & it’s very funny

No problem, and thanks!

I’m not sure why it is that 90% of jokes are either a) incomprehensible or b) painfully unfunny to me, but Legolas soberly eulogizing Boromir as “Boromir the Fair” is hilariousto me.

Legolas is an Elf who is startlingly “fair” to pretty much everyone, including Boromir’s own people, but when they’re laying Boromir to rest, Legolas’s contribution to the sad musical number is “he was so pretty, too :( rip”

Bonus: later, he meets Boromir’s uncle, and his takeaway is this: “That is a fair lord and a great captain of men.” Okay, Legolas.

(Yes, Imrahil is known as “Imrahil the Fair,” the grandson who resembles him is “Elfwinë the Fair,” Boromir is repeatedly described as fair, Faramir closely resembles him and also has a “fair face,” so this isn’t just Legolas’s perception of them. But he certainly has his priorities in order!)

Oh, one of the other things about NOME and part-Elvish beardlessness: Tolkien says something to the effect that the beardlessness is one of the most enduring part-Elvish traits. You’ll get people who aren’t really very Elvish, but if there’s any amount of Elvish blood left, they’ll still be naturally beardless. And he particularly associates this with the House of Elendil’s descent from Elros, with a whole explanation of why that applies to the House of the Stewards also.

The short version is that Húrin of Emyn Arnen, while not a direct-line member of the royal house, wasdescended from Anárion and a recognized kinsman of King Minardil, which was part of the reason he was appointed to the Stewardship. We’ve known this was rattling around Tolkien’s head since POME, but it’s very clearly laid out in NOME in order to explain that Boromir and Faramir are Elrosians through Denethor and therefore beardless (+part-Elvish through Finduilas as well).

The thing I’m thinking is … it’d be interesting if there was some kind of, hmm, cultural cachet around beardlessness? I know a lot of people are really into bearded Dúnedain, but if natural beardlessness is one of the most lingering marks of royal ancestry, it seems like it’d be kind of loaded, esp in Gondor. Has it affected the Gondorian aesthetic? Is it some Gondorian value of punk for a young man to grow a beard, or pretend to? Are there ever any misunderstandings with, say, the Rohirrim re: age/status/etc?

I do suspect that, although beardlessness ultimately derives from Elvish ancestry, the fact that in most cases it comes through the royal line would lead to it being more associated with Númenórean royalty than Elves per se. Gondorians care a lot more about Elendil than Turgon.

I spent seven hours helping my mother shop and while she’s still energetic, I just feel sort of … flattened at this point.