#ondonórë blogging

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.

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.

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.