Nolondil: Friend of Lore

After the Downfall of Númenor, Elendil led the survivors of the Elf-friends back to the North-western shores of Middle-earth. There many already dwelt who were in whole or part of Númenórean blood; but few of them remembered the Elvish speech. All told the Dúnedain were thus from the beginning far fewer in number than the lesser men among whom they dwelt and whom they ruled, being lords of long life and great power and wisdom. They used therefore the Common Speech in their dealing with other folk and in the government of their wide realms; but they enlarged the language and enriched it with many words drawn from elven-tongues.

The Númenóreans were a minority group within the realms they controlled, especially in Gondor, which was more populous than Arnor and expanded significantly throughout the first millennium of the Third Age as it established a very large empire in the northwest of Middle-earth. Gondorian monarchs also at times had influence over neighboring peoples such as the Northmen and the Haradrim, but even within “Gondor proper” not all inhabitants were considered Númenóreans, especially in the early period of Gondor’s history. However, the Númenórean worldview was not a static one. Faramir described the state of it at the time of the War of the Ring as such:

For so we reckon Men in our lore, calling them the High, or Men of the West, which were Númenóreans; and the Middle Peoples, Men of the Twilight, such as are the Rohirrim and their kin that dwell still far in the North; and the Wild, the Men of Darkness. (TTT, IV 5)

Tolkien substantially elaborated on this in the essay “Of Dwarves and Men” (found in HoMe XII) which is full of interesting points, but since that discussion is focused mainly on the labels of Middle Men and Men of Darkness I will quote only a few parts:

With regard to Middle Men Faramir spoke mainly of the Rohirrim, the only people of this sort well-known in Gondor in his time, and attributed to them actual direct descent from the Folk of Hador in the First Age. This was a general belief in Gondor at that time, and was held to explain (to the comfort of Númenórean pride) the surrender of so large a part of the Kingdom to the people of Eorl.

…

Thus it came about that the Númenórean term Middle Men was confused in its application. Its chief test was friendliness towards the West (to Elves and to Númenóreans), but it was actually applied usually only to Men whose stature and looks were similar to those of the Númenóreans, although this most important distinction of ‘friendliness’ was not historically confined to peoples of one racial kind.… Also it must be said that ‘unfriendliness’ to Númenóreans and their allies was not always due to the Shadow, but in later days to the actions of the Númenóreans themselves.

The passage goes on to mention the coastal peoples of the Minhiriath (cf. UT, The History of Galadriel and Celeborn, Appendix D) and their Third Age descendants, the Dunlendings, as examples of peoples who by descent should have been considered Middle Men, but became enemies of the Númenóreans due to the abuses perpetrated by the latter. We see this in action in the expulsion of the Dunlendings from Calenardhon when it was gifted to the Rohirrim. Both the Dunlendings and the Rohirrim (then known as the Éothéod) were descended from First Age Edainic peoples, but the Rohirrim were (a) phenotypically more similar to Númenóreans and (b) important military allies, so they were given the more privileged label and the Dunlendings were not.

My hypothesis here is that the label of Númenórean itself was just as confused and politicized as the labels of Middle Men and Men of Darkness. This was not to my knowledge explicitly stated by Tolkien as in the case of “Middle Men”, but I think there is enough evidence that can be gleaned from the Third Age histories, primarily found in LOTR Appendix A, to make a case, though it must remain speculative. The nature of the Appendices’ presentation in LOTR invites critical analysis of this sort because they are explicitly stated (in the Prologue) to be the product of in-universe historians, specifically drawing on sources from Rohan and Gondor. Furthermore, much of Appendix A is printed within quotation marks, indicating ostensible direct quotes from Secondary World historical texts, and Appendix B is an abridgment of The Tale of Years, which is also established as an in-universe text. These works should therefore be understood not as objective accounts but as sources influenced by the cultures and biases of their ostensible in-universe authors.

The significance of the label “Númenórean” was most famously addressed in the case of the Kin-strife, the 15th century Third Age Gondorian civil war. Valacar, the son of King Rómendacil II of Gondor, married a princess of the Northmen, an Edainic people of Rhovanion (Wilderland) who were an important part of Gondor’s defense policy both because of their status as a buffer state between Gondor and the Easterlings and because many Northmen were recruited directly into Gondor’s armies, some of them holding high rank. The civil war began when a significant number of Gondorian nobles and lesser royalty (“the high men of Gondor” and “descendants of the kings”) refused to accept Valacar’s son Eldacar (birth name Vinitharya) as king. Eldacar was deposed for 10 years by Castamir the Usurper who ruled with the support of the coastal provinces, but Eldacar regained his throne with the help of his mother’s people and the inland provinces of Gondor. Eldacar and his descendants were restored to the throne but Castamir and his followers held out in Umbar, which ceased to be part of the Kingdom of Gondor (LOTR, Appendix A).

After the return of Eldacar the blood of the kingly house and other houses of the Dúnedain became more mingled with that of lesser Men. For many of the great had been slain in the Kin-strife; while Eldacar showed favour to the Northmen, by whose help he had regained the crown, and the people of Gondor were replenished by great numbers that came from Rhovanion. (Ibid.)

There is a lot to unpack here. First, it must be noted that the war did not result in Gondor becoming a more racially egalitarian place. The Secondary World historians whose works were the ostensible basis for Appendix A continued to bemoan the loss of pure Númenórean descent in Gondor. The line of kings came to an end after the death of Eärnur some 600 years later because “no claimant to the crown could be found who was of pure blood, or whose claim all would allow; and all feared the memory of the Kin-strife, knowing that if any such dissension arose again, then Gondor would perish.” Because the Kin-strife had already established that partial Northmen descent was not a disqualifying factor, I think the conclusion here is that the lesser royalty of Gondor had been consistently intermarrying with other ethnic groups within the empire, probably including the indigenous and/or mixed descent inhabitants of Gondor proper, but possibly also more far-flung subjects and tributary allies.

It was not until the time of the Stewards that Gondor “recruited the strength of [its] people from the sturdy folk of the sea-coast, and from the hardy mountaineers of Ered Nimrais” (TTT, IV 5). At the time of the War of the Ring the people of Lossarnach and Lebennin “were reckoned men of Gondor, yet their blood was mingled, and there were short and swarthy folk among them whose sires came more from the forgotten men who housed in the shadow of the hills in the Dark Years ere the coming of the kings” (ROTK, V 1). This is contrasted unfavorably with the “high blood” of the men of Dol Amroth but it indicates a significant change in Gondorian policy and self-image since the days of the kings; a change based primarily on the political and military reality that Gondor no longer had enough “pure” Númenóreans under the original definition to remain a viable state. Faramir also noted this as the reason for the Rohirrim being gifted Calenardhon (TTT, IV 5) which, as noted above, also entailed a tweaking of the Númenórean worldview.

Returning to the Kin-strife, it is fairly clear that pure Númenórean descent was not the only or even necessarily the primary factor motivating Castamir’s faction. Appendix A states that “the high men of Gondor already looked askance at the Northmen among them; and it was a thing unheard of before that the heir of the crown, or any son of the King, should wed one of lesser and alien race.” I think that both halves of this statement are of crucial importance: it was unheard for a prince of Gondor to marry a non-Númenórean, but the nobility of Gondor was already displeased with the pro-Northmen policies of Valacar’s father. The rebellion originated in “the southern provinces”, which were all coastal. Castamir “was supported by the people of the coasts and of the great havens of Pelargir and Umbar” and “cared little for the land, and thought only of the fleets, and purposed to remove the king’s seat to Pelargir.” It’s not hard to imagine why the people of these regions, which had been the focal point of Gondor’s power during its zenith under the Ship-kings, would resent a realignment of Gondorian policy towards northern, continental matters; a realignment which gave the Northmen significant power.

(It behooves me to mention that some of these points first caught my interest when reading Chris Seeman’s essay “Rethinking Umbar” and to a lesser extent Codex Regius’ Middle-earth seen by the barbarians, although Codex Regius goes much further into the realm of revisionism than I am comfortable doing and I draw a different conclusion than Mr Seeman regarding whether the Black Númenóreans were fully subsumed into the Haradrim, as I will attempt to explain later in this essay.)

Rómendacil II, by birth Minalcar, was preoccupied with the threat of the Easterlings (his regnal name means “East-victor”) and desired to make the Northmen more reliable allies than they had been in the past. Valacar only met his bride-to-be because his father sent him to live among the Northmen, but he “far exceeded his father’s designs” (LOTR, Appendix A). Looking at Tolkien’s drafts of the Appendices is instructive here, though to be clear as unpublished texts they must be taken with a grain of salt. In a lengthy footnote to one draft Tolkien wrote that Rómendacil approved the marriage because “[h]e could not forbid or refuse to recognize it without earning the enmity of Vidugavia [self-styled King of Rhovanion and father of the princess Valacar wished to marry]. Indeed all the Northmen would have been angered, and those in his service would have been no longer to be trusted” (HoMe XII, The Making of Appendix A). Intriguingly, one version of another text states that after fleeing to Umbar Castamir’s descendants and other minor Gondorian royals who rebelled “married women of the Harad and had in three generations lost most of their Númenórean blood” (HoMe XII, The Heirs of Elendil). This is probably of more dubious reliability but there are a lot of interesting implications to think through here.

At the time of the War of the Ring the Haradrim were an enemy of Gondor and they had been so during the War of the Last Alliance as well. However, after their defeat by Hyarmendacil I of Gondor, Harad became a tributary region of Gondor for 400 years—until after the Kin-strife, when Gondor also lost the province of Umbar directly west of Near Harad. During the tributary period “the kings of the Harad did homage to Gondor, and their sons lived as hostages in the court of its King” (LOTR, Appendix A). Here we are very much entering the realm of speculation, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that the Haradrim played a role not unlike that of the later Northmen. Probably not to the same extent, as the Haradrim were not a buffer between Gondor and other enemies, but there must have been considerable movement of people between Gondor and its tributaries; not only princes but also soldiers, merchants, laborers, and others. We know that there was significant interaction between Near Harad and Umbar throughout much of their shared history, to the point that Damrod (one of the Rangers of Ithilien, who had personal experience fighting the Haradrim in the late Third Age) described Umbar as a “realm” of the Haradrim (TTT, IV 5). I think it is more likely than not that this exchange continued while both were under the sway of Gondor, and from Umbar some Haradrim undoubtedly made their way to the rest of Gondor as well. While it is almost certain that no non-Black Númenórean Haradrim married into the direct line of kings, they could very well have been part of the reason for the overall decline in “pureblood” Númenóreans in Gondor, as mentioned above.

Nor were the nobility of Gondor the first Númenóreans whom the Haradrim had close experience with. For more than a thousand years before it became part of Gondor, Umbar was ruled by the Black Númenóreans: the descendants of the King’s Men faction of Númenor that opposed the Faithful (Elf-friends). The earliest Black Númenórean leaders that we know anything about are Herumor and Fuinur, “who rose to power among the Haradrim” around the time of the War of the Last Alliance. It is often speculated that they were rulers of Umbar because they are contrasted with other Black Númenórean “renegades, lords both mighty and evil, [who] for the most part took up their abodes in the southlands far away” because they were avoiding the power of Gil-galad (TS, Akallabêth; Umbar was as far north as the Black Númenóreans reached). A footnote to Appendix A states that “[a]fter the fall of Sauron [in the War of the Last Alliance] their race swiftly dwindled or became merged with the Men of Middle-earth, but they inherited without lessening their hatred of Gondor.” However, this is contradicted by other pieces of evidence. For one, the Mouth of Sauron is described as Black Númenórean, and he was born almost 3000 years into the Third Age (the evidence does not support the notion that he was born in the Second Age and somehow survived until the War of the Ring).[1] Keeping in mind the ostensible Secondary World origins of The Lord of the Rings in The Red Book of Westmarch, this description indicates the opinion of either Gondorians or Hobbits working from largely Gondorian sources. In either event, it means Elf-friends recognizing the continued existence of a separate Númenórean people outside the Realms in Exile thousands of years after the Downfall.

We could write this off as a case of Tolkien changing his mind and an error slipping through the cracks but I think it is more likely that the two conflicting statement reflect opposing viewpoints held by Gondorians (possibly in different eras) about the status of the Black Númenóreans and/or their descendants. The most interesting piece of circumstantial evidence for this is the case of Queen Berúthiel. The story of her cats is fleetingly mentioned in The Lord of the Rings and elaborated on in Unfinished Tales but it was in a 1966 interview with New Worlds magazine that Tolkien expounded on Berúthiel herself (quoted here):

There’s one exception that puzzles me—Berúthiel. I really don’t know anything of her—you remember Aragorn’s allusion in Book I (page 325) to the cats of Queen Berúthiel, that could find their way home on a blind night? She just popped up, and obviously called for attention, but I don’t really know anything certain about her; though, oddly enough, I have a notion that she was the wife of one of the ship-kings of Pelargir. She loathed the smell of the sea, and fish, and the gulls. Rather like Skadi, the giantess, who came to the gods in Valhalla, demanding a recompense for the accidental death of her father. She wanted a husband. The gods all lined up behind a curtain, and she selected the pair of feet that appealed to her most. She thought she’d got Baldur, the beautiful god, but it turned out to be Njord, the sea-god, and after she’d married him, she got absolutely fed up with the seaside life, and the gulls kept her awake, and finally she went back to live in Jotunheim.

Well, Berúthiel went back to live in the inland city, and went to the bad (or returned to it—she was a black Númenorean in origin, I guess). She was one of these people who loathe cats, but cats will jump on them and follow them about—you know how sometimes they pursue people who hate them? I have a friend like that. I’m afraid she took to torturing them for amusement, but she kept some and used them—trained them to go on evil errands by night, to spy on her enemies or terrify them.

Unfinished Tales specifies that the Ship-king in question was Tarannon Falastur (UT, The Istari, note 7). It has been argued by both Chris Seeman (not in the piece I linked above) and Codex Regius that his quote suggests Berúthiel was from Umbar, which I think is an odd reading of it since Umbar was a seaport and following Tolkien’s analogy with Norse mythology Berúthiel is implied to not have been from a coastal city. On the other hand, if we want to interpret the analogy with a giantess seeking marriage as restitution to mean that Berúthiel and Falastur’s marriage was a political one arranged in an attempt to forestall further conflict (though it clearly failed), then Umbar shoots back up the list of possible origins for Berúthiel since all of Falastur’s wars were “along the coasts west and south of the Mouths of Anduin” (LOTR, Appendix A; his epithet means “Lord of the Coasts”). On the other hand, because we know Harad consisted of multiple allied but presumably independent realms (cf. Damrod’s quote and the mention of multiple kings of Harad sending their sons to the court of a singular Gondorian king), we could suppose that Berúthiel was born in a Black Númenórean realm or city-state in the interior of Harad that nonetheless sent forces to participate in one of the wars with Gondor. At this point we are fully into the realm of speculation, but I find it an interesting prospect to consider.

Another indication that the Black Númenóreans persisted in Umbar can be found in Tolkien’s own out-of-universe notes to himself. Temporarily setting aside the question of Secondary World historiography, the discussion of Gandalf’s travels found in Unfinished Tales tells us that “Harad ‘South’ is thus a vague term, and although before its downfall Men of Númenor had explored the coasts of Middle-earth far southward, their settlements beyond Umbar had been absorbed, or being made by men already in Númenor corrupted by Sauron had become hostile and parts of Sauron’s dominions” (UT, The Istari). The implication here that Umbar, in contrast to other Númenórean colonies further south, had not been “absorbed” by their surrounding peoples is another piece of evidence for a continued Númenórean identity (presumably only among the elite) well into the Third Age, late enough for Gandalf to observe it during his travels.[2]

To attempt to draw these disparate points together, it must also be considered that the exodus of Gondorian nobility and royalty leaving for Umbar may have impacted the remaining Gondorians’ perception of the Númenórean status of their southern neighbors. Appendix A relates that by the time of Eärnur’s death in the 21st century of the Third Age:

Now the descendants of the kings had become few. Their numbers had been greatly diminished in the Kin-strife; whereas since that time the kings had become jealous and watchful of those near akin. Often those on whom suspicion fell had fled to Umbar and there joined the rebels; while others had renounced their lineage and taken wives not of Númenórean blood.

I find this statement interesting: minor Gondorian royalty joined their distant relatives in Umbar or they married non-Númenóreans and thereby removed themselves and their descendants from consideration for the throne (though as noted above I think they must also have married non-Northmen). The implication is that those who fled to Umbar did not “renounce their lineage”. Near the end of his life Tolkien responded to a letter asking if the named descendants of Castamir (Angamaitë and Sangahyando) had taken Quenya names as a way of asserting that their heritage was purer than Eldacar’s or his descendants’. Tolkien replied that “there was no need to assert their royal descent, as that was clear” (Letters, no. 347). As with so many of these quotes there is room for many interpretations. Taken in a vacuum Tolkien’s comment could suggest only that Angamaitë and Sangahyando had no need to impress their followers in Umbar, but taken in conjunction with the Appendix A quote I think it creates an intriguing possibility: namely, that Gondor recognized (at least at some points in history) that there was a distinct Númenórean realm beyond the two established by Elendil.

Also worth taking into consideration is that both the Gondorians and the rulers of Umbar later in the Third Age left the monument to Ar-Pharazôn’s victory over Sauron intact until after Sauron openly declared his return near the end of the Third Age (LOTR, Appendix A). I think this is a strong indication that the rulers of Umbar after its time as a Gondorian province identified with the Númenórean legacy represented by the monument and I think it is unlikely that a fully “Haradrified” population would have done so. Chris Seeman argues in “Rethinking Umbar” that the descendants of the Black Númenóreans had thoroughly merged with the Haradrim but let the monument stand because they identified with Ar-Pharazôn’s adoption of Melkorism. However, I find this argument unconvincing since the monument specifically represented Ar-Pharazôn’s victory over Sauron, whereas dedicated Melkorists considered Sauron a key figure in their religion and I think would have seen the conflict with him as a misguided decision made before the Númenóreans fully realized who the true enemy was, much in the same way that political extremists in the Primary World recast wars in their own historiographies.[3]

In any event, the Black Númenóreans undoubtedly intermarried with their neighbors just as the Gondorians had done. I suspect the same arguments that Faramir gave for an expansive definition of the term “Númenórean” (that the “pureblood” population had become too small to be viable on its own, even as a political elite) would have been made within the Black Númenórean community. What we can consider with slightly more grounding in the text is why the Gondorians appear to have waffled on whether or not they recognized said Númenórean status. We are told that records of Queen Berúthiel were destroyed at the time she was expelled by Falastur (UT, The Istari, note 7) but later scribes who recorded what was remembered of her would have been left to assume that she was of Númenórean descent since, according to Gondorian historiography, no king before Valacar had married a non-Númenórean. Presumably a similar justification would have had to be made at the time the marriage occurred. If it was in fact a diplomatic marriage then mutual recognition of each other’s Númenórean heritage might have been part of the bargain. Likewise, whichever author of the Red Book described the Mouth of Sauron as a Black Númenórean (perhaps Frodo but possibly Findegil or someone at Great Smials where Pippin curated a collection of material focused especially on Gondor) would have been writing in the very late Third Age or the early Fourth Age, shortly after Aragorn “made peace with the peoples of Harad” (ROTK, VI 5); a time in which Gondorians and their allies would presumably be more inclined to be diplomatic toward their southern neighbors.

For practical purposes, we can define death as the severance of the connection between body and soul. All individual members of Tolkien’s sentient races, had a soul, called a fëa in Quenya (plural fëar) housed within a body, or hröa (plural hröar). This was the metaphysical nature of the Children of Ilúvatar: Elves and Men, and eventually Dwarves as well (HoMe X, Laws and Customs among the Eldar). The fëa came directly from Ilúvatar (HoMe X, Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, Commentary) and was what distinguished sentient beings from animals. When Aulë created the Dwarves, they were not truly sentient or self-aware until Ilúvatar granted them fëar: “‘Thy offer I accepted even as it was made. Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices?’” (TS, Of Aulë and Yavanna). This is also why Morgoth was unable to create beings of his own, but only corrupt and mock the Children (ROTK, VI 1). However, the idea that evil could not create was not yet present in earlier versions of the mythology and Tolkien never completely ironed out all the resulting inconsistencies. Having to make sense of inconsistent texts is something of an occupational hazard when it comes to studying The History of Middle-earth, though. For now, let’s consider each race in turn.

The Elves had greater control over their bodies than humans did and their fëar were “immortal” in the sense that they endure for the whole life of Arda (the world), but not necessarily longer than that. The Elven hröa was also intended to last this long and so was physically tough and not subject to disease. However, Elves could suffer bodily death through violence, as in fact happened quite frequently in “The Silmarillion”. When this occurred, the fëa of the deceased Elf was summoned to the Halls of Mandos in Aman (HoMe X, Laws and Customs). Tolkien’s earlier idea, described in Laws and Customs, was that Elves could then be reborn among their people and as they matured would regain the memories of their previous life. However, Tolkien later rejected this on the grounds that each individual’s fëa and hröa were specially fitted for each other. In The Converse of Manwë and Eru (an appendix to the Athrabeth in HoMe X), Tolkien suggested that the Elvish fëa could be given a new, identical copy of its hröa based on memories of the body that were “imprinted” on the soul. Whether the creation of the new hröa was done by the Valar or by the incorporeal fëa itself is unclear. There are contradictory notes on this matter, though when Tolkien returned to the question of Elvish reincarnation very late in his life he seemed to imply that the new hröa was provided by the Valar (HoMe XII, Last Writings, Glorfindel). In any event, it does not appear that Tolkien intended to alter the idea that the Valar could refuse to allow a specific fëa to re-embody (cf. HoMe X, Later versions of the Story of Finwë and Míriel; TS, Of the Return of the Noldor).

A recently disembodied Elvish fëa could refuse the summons to Mandos, however, and remain in the area where they died. Usually this occurred among the Elves of Middle-earth, either those who still could not bear to leave it behind or those already in some way corrupted by the Shadow. However, the act of refusing the summons was itself a sign of corruption and rebellion. A houseless fëa could be communed with, though this was not recommended by Elvish loremasters because the fëa could try to seize control of another’s body. On the other hand, houseless fëar could be captured and enslaved through necromancy, which was a particular specialty of Sauron (HoMe X, Laws and Customs). Sauron’s connection with necromancy is displayed in The Silmarillion (TS, Of the Ruin of Beleriand), and is alluded to in The Hobbit where he is known as “the Necromancer”. The Silmarillion describes werewolves as “fell beasts inhabited by dreadful spirits that he [Sauron] had imprisoned in their bodies” (TS, Of Beren and Lúthien), and it may be that some of those spirits were captured disembodied Elves, though there are other possibilities discussed later in this essay.

While the Elvish fëa was irrevocably tied to the fate of Arda, the human soul only briefly inhabited Arda. (For the purposes of this essay, humans and hobbits are considered as one since Hobbits are more closely akin to humans than any of the other Children of Ilúvatar [LOTR, Prologue].) The Elvish loremasters believed that human fëar were also summoned to Mandos and were unable to refuse these summons. They then spent a brief period in the Halls of Mandos before being “surrendered to Eru” and leaving Arda entirely (HoMe X, Athrabeth, Commentary). This waiting period in Mandos is why Lúthien was able to win Beren a temporary return to life, since his fëa had not yet departed Arda. However, the story of Beren and Lúthien in The Silmarillion also depicts the wraith of a recently deceased man (Gorlim the Unhappy, who warns Beren of his treachery in a dream), which casts some doubt on the accuracy of the Elvish loremasters’ statements. Tolkien was careful to specify that these ideas about the fate of human souls were only what was speculated by the Elves within the story working with imperfect knowledge. It is possible that Gorlim simply resisted the call to Mandos for a short time so that he could warn Beren, much as Beren himself was said to have “tarried in the Halls of Mandos, unwilling to leave the world” but was only able to delay his fate, not escape it (TS, Of Beren and Lúthien). This must remain speculation, though.

Tolkien elaborated at length on both Elvish and human views of mortality in the philosophical dialogue Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (The Debate of Finrod and Andreth). Andreth, a wise-woman of the Edain, rejected the Elvish idea that death was the gift of Ilúvatar to men (the same point of view that the messengers of the Valar communicated to the rebellious Númenóreans in the Akallabêth), and claimed that humans were originally intended to be immortal like Elves but had been punished by Eru for the original sin of worshipping Melkor when he came among them and deceived them. This was normally something that human loremasters kept secret and Finrod was surprised to learn of it. Some Elves believed that since they were tied to the world they were destined for utter destruction, body and soul, when Arda ended, but that humans would live forever with Ilúvatar beyond the limits of the physical world. Other Elves believed that because humans were not bound to Arda they would ultimately deliver the Elves from their fate, and thus viewed human mortality as a blessing (TS, Of the Beginning of Days). The lack of understanding of either group for the other is one of the major themes of the Athrabeth and is reflected in chronologically later tales as well. The parallels with Christianity get especially prominent when Andreth describes the belief among some humans that Eru himself will enter Arda to heal its Marring, an idea which astounds Finrod but also gives him hope. Tolkien was concerned that the dialogue read like “a parody of Christianity” and felt that including a legend of the Fall of Man “would make it completely so” (HoMe X, Athrabeth). While Tolkien wished to include the Athrabeth as an appendix to a published “Silmarillion”, it remains an open question what he may have changed in the course of finalizing the text.

The Silmarillion offers two potential explanations of the ultimate fate of Dwarves. First it is stated that “[a]foretime it was held among the Elves in Middle-earth that dying the Dwarves returned to the earth and the stone of which they were made”, which does not seem consistent with the idea of Dwarves being sentient and having fëar. It is significant that this belief is stated to have been held “aforetime”, implying that the Elves had since changed their beliefs, although the only other belief stated is the Dwarves’ own: “that Aulë the Maker, whom they call Mahal, cares for them, and gathers them to Mandos in halls set apart” (TS, Of Aulë and Yavanna). The implication seems to be that the Elves accepted this Dwarvish idea at some point. This would be consistent with a late essay in which Tolkien stated that the Sindar encountered the Petty-dwarves before any others of that race and “thought that they were a kind of cunning two-legged animals living in caves” and hunted them (HoMe XI, Quendi and Eldar). The Sindar eventually met the “great Dwarves”, realized the truth, and ceased attacking the Petty-dwarves, but this is stated to be one of the grievances of the Dwarves against the Elves. Interestingly, the Dwarvish belief that “their part shall be to serve Aulë and to aid him in the remaking of Arda after the Last Battle” (TS, Of Aulë and Yavanna) is reminiscent of Finrod’s hope that Men would be responsible for the remaking of Arda and the deliverance of the Elves from death after the end of the world (HoMe X, Athrabeth).

Once the related ideas that evil could not create and that fëar came from Eru became entrenched in the mythology, the existence of orcs became a puzzle that Tolkien never totally solved. The earlier idea that Morgoth had created the orcs had to be abandoned and Tolkien concluded that Morgoth must have corrupted them from existing beings. He played around with many different possible origins but the question remained unresolved at his death. Christopher Tolkien used the idea that orcs originated from captured Elves in The Silmarillion (TS, Of the Coming of the Elves), in part because other explanations would have required substantial rewriting. Tolkien wrote that captured humans were a “likely” source (HoMe X, Myths Transformed, Text X), though this was only possible in the radically altered timeline and cosmology he considered during the Myths Transformed period. He also speculated that orcs might have been bred from animals and could only mimic speech, but this does not really gel with the depictions of orcs elsewhere, including in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien also considered the possibility that the original orcs were corrupted Maiar, though Tolkien did not think Eru would grant fëar to later generations of orcs (HoMe X, Myths Transformed, Text VIII). There is ultimately no clear answer on the question of whether orcs had souls, whether they were redeemable, and what (if anything) happened to them after death.

Whether or not Tolkien would have retained the idea that orcs were descended from corrupted Maiar, this was not the only example of Ainur reproducing. The Silmarillion of course prominently features Melian the Maia, wife of Elu Thingol and mother of Lúthien Tinúviel. However, in The Book of Lost Tales (one of the earliest phases of the mythology), the Valar themselves had children, most notably Fiönwë, son of Manwë (HoMe I, The Music of the Ainur). Tolkien later rejected this idea and Fiönwë became Eönwë, herald of Manwë and one of the Maiar (TS, Valaquenta). The concept of the Maiar did not enter the mythology until after the completion of The Lord of the Rings during the reworking of the Annals of Valinor into the Annals of Aman and was something of a catch-all for many previous classes of spirits (HoMe X, Annals of Aman, notes on section 1). However, Tolkien did not reject the idea that the Valar could have children, merely that they did. The Ainur pre-dated the physical universe and were created as incorporeal spirits. They could take physical form, even the same forms as Elves or Men, but they were not by nature bound to these forms (TS, Valaquenta). This was one of the differences between the Ainur and the Incarnates. However, the longer an Ainu spent in the same form the harder it was to change form (and the less they were inclined to do so), until in some cases they became unable to change their physical form at all, as happened to Morgoth (TS, Of the Darkening of Valinor). Morgoth was trapped in his “Dark Lord” form because he had expended so much of his initial being, allowing his spiritual power to pass from himself to the physical matter of Arda and his corrupted servants. After the War of Wrath, his physical body was brought before Mandos to be judged and subsequently executed, leaving his newly disembodied spirit impotent as it was thrust into the Void. However, due to his vast initial strength, Morgoth was in the probably unique position of being able to regrow his power even after being so utterly reduced (HoMe X, Myths Transformed, Text VII).

We see the form-changing ability of an undiminished Ainu in action during Sauron’s battle with Huan, when he takes the forms of a great wolf, a serpent, his standard humanoid form, and a vampire in rapid succession. He shifts between these forms with ease, but remains held in place by Huan. He could have escaped Huan’s grasp by abandoning physical form entirely but he feared the humiliation of being forced to do so (TS, Of Beren and Lúthien). Much later, after investing so much of his spiritual power in the One Ring, Sauron became diminished in the same way as his former master. He was able to create new bodies after the destruction of his physical forms in the Downfall of Númenor and the War of the Last Alliance because the Ring still existed, but he was no longer able to change form at will. Like the Incarnates he could only become incorporeal again through the death of his body, though his disembodied spirit possessed much greater potency than a houseless Elvish fëa. Once the Ring (and the spiritual power he’d placed within it) was destroyed, Sauron could not regain physical form and his spirit was powerless (TS, Akallabêth; ROTK, V 9). Procreation using one’s physical form also involved an outlay of energy for the Ainur and Melian became similarly bound to her form as Queen of Doriath, both from the length of time she inhabited it and especially from bearing Lúthien (HoMe X, Myths Transformed, Text VIII). The later conceptions of the Valar could have had children as well, but chose not to, although they increasingly remained in forms similar to those of the Chidlren of Ilúvatar as time went on (Ibid.). That said, the Valar did expend great amounts of energy in the shaping of Arda: note Yavanna’s inability to make something like the Two Trees more than once (TS, Of the Flight of the Noldor).

In light of this, the Maiar are a possible source for many beings and creatures within Middle-earth. Werewolves, as mentioned above, were spirits imprisoned within lupine bodies. Maiar in the service of Sauron (voluntarily or otherwise) are another possible explanation here. Werewolves were able to procreate, as Carcharoth was a descendant of Draugluin, though Carcharoth is also said to have become “filled with a devouring spirit, tormented, terrible, and strong” only after being raised by Morgoth (TS, Of Beren and Lúthien). On the other hand, dragons in later Ages reproduced in the wild and their descendants, most notably Smaug, were sentient without (as far as we know) any binding of spirits within them by a Dark Lord. However, we run into the same question of whether Eru would grant fëar in this case as we did with orcs. On a more pleasant note, Ents and Eagles were said to originate from “spirits [summoned] from afar, and they will go among the kelvar and the olvar [animals and plants], and some will dwell therein” (TS, Of Aulë and Yavanna). This sort of vague reference to spirit is the kind of thing that mostly fell under the umbrella label of Maiar in the later “Silmarillion”, though there remained unexplained categories of beings as well. Of course, the Ents and Entwives are known to reproduce (TTT, III 4) and Thorondor, the chief Eagle of the First Age, had descendants as well (ROTK, VI 4), but this is not incompatible with the idea that the first generation of each were Maiar taking permanent physical forms. Their descendants were probably not Maiar, however, especially if (as seems likely in the case of the Eagles) they mated with normal creatures. Just as Lúthien, daughter of a Maia and an Elf, possessed a fëa and was metaphysically the same as other Elves (albeit an unusually powerful one), the Eagles of the Third Age probably possessed fëar and were Incarnates like other sentient beings (HoMe X, Myths Transformed, Text VIII). Their fate after death remains a mystery, but they may have been summoned to Mandos as that seems to be the common thread in the fates of Elves, Men, and Dwarves.

While there are certain points that are too vague or contradictory to make clear statements, we seem to be left with three broad classes of beings. Animals (kelvar) without sentience are not survived by any soul or spirit after their physical death. This category possibly includes orcs and trolls as well. Naturally disembodied spirits, principally the Ainur, are essentially eternal. Even when they became bound to a specific form they still survived the destruction of their body and lingered on, though their spirit would be diminished. Incarnate beings (Elves, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and probably the Ents and Eagles) have souls that are tied to their bodies but outlast physical death, though they go to different pre-determined destinations. Elves are permanently bound to the world and may be reincarnated but their souls might be destroyed at the end of the world. Human souls depart the physical universe entirely and go to Eru. Dwarven souls might be held in Mandos awaiting the end times. The eschatology of Middle-earth is very vague, so we can only speak to the beliefs of different groups. The Silmarillion ends with a statement that no one except maybe Manwë and Varda know if the Marring of Arda will be undone but earlier alludes to a Second Music of the Ainur involving Men (TS, Of the Beginning of Days). Hope for this Healing is expressed in The Lord of the Rings by Galadriel when she tells Treebeard that they will meet again “[n]ot in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring” (ROTK, VI 6). Tolkien wrote a description of the end times as the Second Prophecy of Mandos in the 1930s, before The Lord of the Rings or the idea that the mythology would extended past the First Age, but in the 1950s he wrote a version of the Valaquenta specifying that the future had not been prophesied which Christopher Tolkien used in the published Silmarillion (HoMe X, The Valaquenta). Tolkien made a few references to eschatological prophecy in the later “Silmarillion” works as well, but in one of the last instances he changed it to be a prophecy by Andreth of the end of the First Age, rather than a prophecy by Mandos of the end of the world (HoMe XII, The Problem of Ros).

Tolkien famously began The Hobbit by spontaneously writing the phrase “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit”. He told the story of Bilbo Baggins to his sons in parts over a period of some years, probably in the late 1920s or early 1930s. In the mid-1930s Tolkien’s typescript of The Hobbit was read by various friends and acquaintances, eventually coming to the attention of the publishing house George Allen & Unwin. Sir Stanley Unwin gave the typescript to his then-ten-year-old son Rayner, who recommended publishing the book. This came to happen in September 1937 and the book was an immediate success; by the end of the year Tolkien had already begun work on a sequel at his publisher’s request. In 1947, with The Lord of the Rings close to completion, Tolkien sent his publishers a number of corrections to the published text of The Hobbit as well as a rewritten version of “Riddles in the Dark” reflecting the new, much darker nature of the Ring. Tolkien did not realize that Allen & Unwin intended to publish the new chapter until three years later when he received galley proofs for the forthcoming second edition. He then wrote a note, included in the published book, explaining the difference in the new edition as reflecting two different stories that Bilbo told about how he found the Ring (Guide, The Hobbit).

The Lord of the Rings was finally published in 1954-5, though the final volume was delayed by Tolkien’s need to finish the Appendices (the main story had been finished in 1949). Tolkien initially intended for the Appendices to include “The Quest of Erebor”, a short story in which Gandalf recounts some of the events of The Hobbit from his point of view, but only a few fragments made it into Appendix A. Two draft versions of “The Quest of Erebor” were eventually published posthumously in Unfinished Tales and The Annotated Hobbit. After the publication of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien grew increasingly dissatisfied with the earlier book. In a 1959 letter he stated that he had written it as a children’s book because “I had at that time children of my own and ... I had been brought up to believe that there was a real and special connexion between children and fairy-stories”, though he had become skeptical of that notion (Letters, no. 215). Tolkien’s thoughts about fairy-stories (his use of the term was closer to what modern audiences know as “fantasy fiction”) had since crystallized in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” and through writing The Lord of the Rings. In 1960 he attempted to rewrite The Hobbit in a less juvenile style, though he didn’t remove the infamous talking purse or the Cockney trolls. Tolkien abandoned this project less than three chapters in after receiving feedback on it. As John D. Rateliff describes:

According to Christopher Tolkien, when his father had reached this point in the recasting he loaned the material to a friend to get an outside opinion on it. We do not know this person's identity, but apparently her response was something along the lines of 'this is wonderful, but it's not The Hobbit'. She must have been someone whose judgment Tolkien respected, for he abandoned the work and decided to let The Hobbit retain its own autonomy and voice rather than completely incorporate it into The Lord of the Rings as a lesser 'prelude' to the greater work. When he briefly returned to it in 1965 for the third edition revisions, he restricted himself in the main to the correction of errors and egregious departures from Middle-earth as it had developed (e.g., the policement of Chapter II; DAA.69) and left matters of style and tone alone.... (HoTH, p. 812)

It is worth noting here that Tolkien was not, generally speaking, the kind of writer to let negative feedback stop him from pursuing a certain idea. The repeated rejections of the “Silmarillion” material never put him off continuing to work on those stories and he risked not being able to publish The Lord of the Rings either by refusing edits or cuts to it (Guide, The Lord of the Rings). For him to have ceased work on the 1960 rewrite suggests that his heart wasn’t really in it or that he thought better of the idea. However, he continued to express regret over the children’s book style of The Hobbit even while refraining from rewriting the whole book or making major edits for the third edition (unpublished letter to Rayner Unwin; qtd. in Guide, The Hobbit). With this in mind, we can then consider some of the claims that have been made about The Hobbit movies, particularly the idea that Peter Jackson was following in Tolkien’s footsteps or doing what Tolkien himself had wished but failed to do. Jackson himself was an early proponent of this argument. As he stated to Deadline the summer before the first film in the trilogy was released:

What people have to realize is we’ve adapted The Hobbit, plus taken this additional 125 pages of notes, that’s what you’d call them. Because Tolkien himself was planning the rewrite The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings, to make it speak to the story of The Lord of the Rings much more. In the novel, Gandalf disappears for various patches of time. In 1936, when Tolkien was writing that book, he didn’t have a clue what Gandalf was doing. But later on, when he did The Lord of the Rings and he’d hit on this whole epic story, he was going to go back and revise The Hobbit and he wrote all these notes about how Gandalf disappears and was really investigating the possible return of Sauron, the villain from The Lord of the Rings. Sauron doesn’t appear at all in The Hobbit. Tolkien was retrospectively fitting The Hobbit to embrace that mythology. He never wrote that book, but there are 125 pages of notes published at the back of Return of the King in one of the later editions. It was called The Appendices, and they are essentially his expanded Hobbit notes. So we had the rights to those as well and were allowed to use them. ... We haven’t just adapted The Hobbit; we’ve adapted that book plus great chunks of his appendices and woven it all together. The movie explains where Gandalf goes; the book never does. We’ve explained it using Tolkien’s own notes. (my emphasis)

There are a number of factual errors in Jackson’s account. Tolkien was not “planning” to rewrite The Hobbit, he actually began to, but then apparently thought better of it and left the book mostly as-is even after preparing a third edition of it some years later. The Appendices were not added “in one of the later editions” but were part of The Lord of the Rings from its first publication, and thus predated Tolkien’s abortive Hobbit rewrite. “The Quest of Erebor”, which is a very short piece, does touch on Gandalf’s concerns about the rise of Sauron but it does not discuss Gandalf’s activities during the period when he is separated from Thorin and Company. In any event, Jackson and his co-writers did not have the rights to “The Quest of Erebor” (or anything else in Tolkien’s posthumous works; only the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were ever sold), so the Appendices were the only additional source he could draw on. Because not everyone reads the Appendices after finishing LOTR, it’s worth recounting what is actually in them to see if there are any “great chunks” relevant to The Hobbit or the White Council and Dol Guldur. I’ve used the page numbering in the 50th Anniversary One Volume Edition as my guide:

Appendix A (49 pages): condensed histories of Númenor, Arnor, Gondor (including the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen), Rohan, and Durin’s Folk. Relevance to The Hobbit: about 10 pages on Dwarves, including a family tree, most of which deals with Erebor. Includes fragments of “The Quest of Erebor”. Devotes a single paragraph to the events at Dol Guldur.

Appendix B (17 pages): aka The Tale of Years, including timelines for the entire Second and Third Ages, as well as a day-by-day chronology for the main period of The Lord of the Rings itself and a partial timeline of the early Fourth Age. Relevance to The Hobbit: a handful of entries in the Third Age timeline mostly repeating information from Appendix A.

Appendix C (7 pages): family trees of several prominent Hobbit families. Relevance to The Hobbit: it shows Belladonna Took, but she (and the whole Baggins/Took dichotomy) was mainly mentioned by the narrator, who was understandably absent from the film.

Appendix D (7 pages): notes on calendrical systems used by Hobbits, Elves, and humans. Relevance to The Hobbit: essentially none.

Appendix E (14 pages): information on writing systems, spelling, and pronunciation of Tolkien’s invented languages. Relevance to The Hobbit: limited to translators, dialogue coaches, and set and prop design.

Appendix F (11 pages): additional linguistic and cultural information and “On Translation”. Relevance to The Hobbit: four paragraphs about Dwarves that include some information not otherwise found outside of HoMe.

The vast majority of the Appendices are backstory and ancillary information about The Lord of the Rings (which makes sense considering which book they’re bundled with) and they are certainly not notes from a planned Hobbit rewrite, but there is some relevant information that gives greater context to the events of The Hobbit. However, Jackson made very little use of it beyond the general concepts. The backstory of Erebor presented in An Unexpected Journey compresses much of Tolkien’s backstory but adds Thrór’s “dragon sickness” and portrays the Dwarves as politically dominant over nearby peoples such as the Elves of Mirkwood, neither of which are present in the Appendices. Neither is the Elf-army that watches Smaug sack Erebor in the film. A big chunk of the Dwarf material from Appendix A discusses the War of the Dwarves and Orcs, culminating in the Battle of Azanulbizar, which is shown in flashback later in the first film. The film’s version of the war is very different though as Thrór’s death occurs in the final battle, rather than being the cause of the conflict, and Thorin is given Dáin’s role by defeating Azog. The survival of Azog and the involvement of the Ringwraiths are also inventions of the filmmakers. Film!Elrond states that Middle-earth is enjoying a “Watchful Peace”, which is a phrase from Appendix A, but in the book refers to a period that ended 500 years before The Hobbit. (The film does not try to square this with the relatively recent occurrences of the sack of Erebor and the War of the Dwarves and Orcs.)

Setting aside the Appendices, however, there’s still the fact that Tolkien was unsatisfied with the tone of The Hobbit. Corey “Tolkien Professor” Olsen is another significant proponent of the idea that Jackson was following in Tolkien’s own footsteps since Tolkien “spent a good deal of time working to retrofit ‘The Hobbit’ for the world of ‘The Lord of the Rings’”. However, this idea rests on a conflation of the broader backstory to The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien developed and The Hobbit itself. Tolkien’s “retrofitting” of The Hobbit was primarily limited to the chapter “Riddles in the Dark” and in removing a few other particularly egregious (but less intrusive) inconsistencies. As noted above, he stopped himself from going through with many of the ideas he briefly considered. Furthermore, none of the things we know Tolkien considered approached the kind of expansion Jackson engaged in. It’s understandable that Jackson wanted to make prequels to his earlier films more than he wanted to adapt the book (“to treat these as three movies that are basically going to lead into the three Lord of the Rings films ... that was really the point, that's what I am doing and that's the reason why I'm doing it”). But to consider Dol Guldur an integral part of The Hobbit is to essentially deny its independent existence as a story and reduce it to mere fodder for background material to The Lord of the Rings. This is the inevitable result of adding a subplot for the White Council (which is, in the grand sweep of Third Age history, far more important than Smaug), a subplot for Legolas, a subplot involving the Ringwraiths, and endless references to the earlier films, including dialogue repeated verbatim. It prevents The Hobbit films from standing on their own and renders them wholly dependent on The Lord of the Rings for any sense of identity or purpose.

With the posthumous publication of Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, the scholarly journals of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, and many other works, modern readers can explore a wealth of Middle-earth lore previous generations could only dream of. Much of this material remains fragmentary, however, and attempting to piece together the details has long been a hobby of the “lore-clamorers”. Dr. Timothy R. Furnish is undoubtedly one such fan and his new book High Towers and Strong Places: A Political History of Middle-earth is the product of a great deal of research and an admirable application of Primary World-style historical analysis to the Secondary World with the aim of enhancing our understanding of the political and military aspects of Tolkien’s subcreation. Furnish has predecessors in this endeavor, many of whom he cites in the book’s hundreds of endnotes, but as Furnish correctly notes in his introduction, the vast majority of published Tolkien scholarship has studied the legendarium for its literary qualities rather than its vast invented history. While research into Tolkien’s invented languages has a prominent and respected place in Tolkien studies, investigations into the history of Arda are often frowned upon. As the journal Mythlore warns prospective authors, they do not accept “pure ‘Middle-earth studies’ ... which take as a premise that the mythopoeic creation of any author is real, or that fail to relate their work to the ‘mundane world’”. Unlike the situation with Tolkien’s languages, there are no alternative journals for such studies to call their own.

Dr. Furnish, who is a former college professor and author of three previously published books on Islamic history, makes plenty of references to the “mundane world” through his application of concepts from political and military science to Tolkien’s cultures and armies. However, this is very much a book about the invented history of Middle-earth rather than one comparing Tolkien’s work with various potential inspirations. Much of High Towers and Strong Places is devoted to recounting the basic histories of the First through Third Ages and providing a brief outline of the major polities of each era. This is necessary for the analysis that follows and the amount of legwork Furnish put in will undoubtedly be appreciated by casual readers, though anyone who has previously spent hours poring over The Lord of the Rings’ Appendix A or Karen Wynn Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-earth (both frequently cited by Furnish) will find the first half of this volume fairly predictable. The book shines brighter when Furnish is in analytical mode as he is for much of the second half; the forthcoming companion volume (expected in 2017) will apparently be more like this throughout. His enthusiasm for Middle-earth is palpable and his application of Primary World concepts from the social sciences is thought-provoking, but unfortunately this analysis is undercut by a number of flaws in Furnish’s recounting of the histories. The observant reader will also spot a number of Lore errors of varying degrees of severity which undercut Furnish’s ambitions to provide a “complete examination of the part played by warriors ... from the First to the early Fourth Age” (p. 20).

(A quick note regarding citations: I purchased and read the e-book version of High Towers and Strong Places, available on the Oloris Bookshop website, which is in the ePub file format. EPub files do not have the same page numbering as their corresponding print editions. Some e-readers will alter the number of nominal pages in a book depending on the screen and font size settings, which makes giving citations difficult. As a partial workaround to this problem I have referred to the page numbers as displayed in Adobe Digital Editions, a free e-reader program which is more consistent with its page numbering. However, these are still not the same numbers as in the softcover edition.)

The most serious misstep is a methodological one: namely, that Furnish has no consistent historiography or analytical framework for assessing the source texts. This is most evident in the sections regarding the First and Second Ages where one not only has to tease out information from often scant accounts but also attempt to determine Tolkien’s own intentions from a mass of often inconsistent writings. Furnish runs into this problem early in the second section of the book when discussing the histories of Eregion, Lórien, and Galadriel and Celeborn (p. 37-38). The main source here is “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn”, published in Unfinished Tales, which is infamous for its many conflicting versions and lack of definitive answers on almost anything. Furnish acknowledges this in the section’s endnotes, but his main narrative makes no mention of the major questions surrounding the “facts” he presents. Furnish’s endnotes are extremely thorough and well worth referring to, but by piecing together a single narrative from various passages within “Galadriel and Celeborn”, Furnish gives an impression of consistency or solidity, particularly to the casual reader, while the actual situation is the exact opposite. This is not only a bad way to read Tolkien, but it would be a poor treatment of any controversial point in real history. The Second Age activities of Galadriel and Celeborn are as controversial as they come in the historiography of Middle-earth and this merits discussion in the main body of the book.

This same problem plagues Furnish’s descriptions of orcish society, which span several sections. Furnish acknowledges that the question of how orcs were first made is left unresolved in “the canon” (the term he uses for Tolkien’s writing, especially vis-a-vis the Peter Jackson movies), but he notes that humans are the most likely source, as Tolkien commented in “Myths Transformed” (Furnish, p. 70-71). However, “Myths Transformed” (published in HoMe X: Morgoth’s Ring) is a collection of notes and fragments that Tolkien wrote largely as musings addressed to himself, playing around with many different concepts and rejecting many of them. He returned to the question of orcs numerous times in these notes, with multiple different answers. He also proposed sweeping revisions to the legendarium that he never followed through on, leaving it an open question which of these ideas he might have used had he ever finished “The Silmarillion”. In short, “Myths Transformed” is not something to be referenced lightly or without carefully establishing the context in which a comment was made. To his credit, Furnish does acknowledge these limitations the first time he discusses orcs. However, he later cites different parts of “Myths Transformed” as evidence for various statements about orcs, despite these texts not being compatible with each other. For example, Furnish describes Orcs as only able to speak by imitation, like parrots (p. 144), referring to an idea Tolkien expressed in Text VIII of “Myths Transformed”, while making the point that orcs lack autonomy. However, later in the same section he refers to Text X while describing orcs as possessing autonomy and quotes Tolkien as mentioning the orcs’ ability to speak as evidence of this. Instead of presenting these as snapshots of Tolkien’s evolving conceptions about orcs, both statements are simply given at face-value, leaving readers unfamiliar with HoMe to question which is meant to be true. For a more detailed consideration of the complex treatment of orcs in “Myths Transformed” and how Furnish describes them, please see the addendum to this post.

I do not claim that there are easy answers to questions regarding the Second Age activities of Galadriel or the origins of orcs; in fact, with Tolkien apparently undecided on these issues, there are no definitive answers at all. This is frustrating to many readers, but it mirrors a similar problem in Primary World historiography. In real history, the events of the past are of course not subject to change, but our understanding of those events has to be reconstructed from various pieces of evidence (written accounts, material culture, etc.). Some events are for all practical purposes universally agreed to have occurred, but the meaning we take from events is always subject to interpretation and can be taken in wildly different directions depending on our approach and assumptions. The different ways people interpret the past is the central focus of historiography. In the study of Tolkien’s invented histories, particularly for the First and Second Ages, we face the additional problem of the “true” events never having achieved a finished form in Tolkien’s mind, much less in publication. However, Tolkien presented both his stories and the vast histories underlying them as translations of texts that were ostensibly written in-universe by characters inhabiting specific places and eras within Arda and therefore working from incomplete knowledge, exhibiting biases, and otherwise not being completely reliable narrators, just like in real history. Tolkien’s stories are therefore not to be understood as gospel truth but as subject to interpretation based on our broader knowledge of Middle-earth. This framing device is made explicit in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but was left out of the published Silmarillion. However, the internal source tradition is made very clear in The History of Middle-earth and although the specifics of that tradition changed throughout Tolkien’s life it is clear that Tolkien intended for “The Silmarillion” to be understood as the product of in-universe hands (HoMe I, Foreword).

The Third Age material, most of it having been published during Tolkien’s lifetime, is the easiest part of the legendarium to examine in this manner. The LOTR Appendices are explicitly stated to be based on in-universe histories that were preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch, given by Frodo to Sam at the end of The Return of the King (cf. LOTR, Prologue, Note on the Shire records), and much of the Appendices is printed within quotation marks indicating that, unlike the main story, they had not been ostensibly rewritten or dramatized for modern audiences. Curiously, Furnish does not examine the Appendices through this light at all. He makes a single mention of the Red Book in the introduction (p. 14) but only once does he question the reliability of a statement in the text, and this is a spoken line of dialogue -- Erendis’ description of Númenórean men as warlike (UT, Aldarion and Erendis; qtd. in Furnish, p. 156) -- not a statement from an in-universe chronicler. This leaves serious holes in Furnish’s analysis, such as in his description of the mid-Second Age Númenórean empire as “benevolent” (p. 46). Furnish bases this statement on the Akallabêth, which is ostensibly a historical document written and preserved by Númenóreans, reflecting their worldview and intended to make the party of the Faithful look good. Tolkien wrote much more negative accounts of Númenórean imperialism in an appendix to “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn” and in the fragmentary story “Tal-Elmar” (HoMe XII). Furnish actually does refer to “Tal-Elmar”, but he places it too late in the timeline and ascribes blame for the abuses described therein to the wrong faction. (See the addendum for more detail.) Later, in a brief discussion of the Drúedain, Furnish ignores Tolkien’s explicit statement that the history as presented is only what was known to the historians of Gondor (and his brief suggestion that the Gondorians were mistaken) but repeats it uncritically as if it were undisputed fact (Furnish, p. 59-60; contrast UT, The Drúedain, especially note 13).

Historiography aside, Furnish does apply concepts from the social sciences to his analysis of Middle-earth’s political structure and military history, primarily in the second half of the book. This comes across as the area where Furnish’s interest truly lies, though to some extent it feels like a teaser for the second volume, Bright Swords and Glorious Warriors, which Furnish indicates will be a more technical look at the military side of things. The third section of the current volume is nominally about classifying the polities of Middle-earth by political system but also serves to bring readers up to speed on the terminology and theoretical framework being used. The fourth and final section is almost entirely analysis of the cultures and armies of Middle-earth through this lens. These sections include genuinely insightful observations such as Furnish’s ideas about how Elvish immortality influences their military activities. (He offers a thoughtful critique of the Peter Jackson movies’ depiction of Elves as well.) Furnish also observes that the Elves rarely if ever seem to have had conflicts with humans and suggests that the Second Age Eldar may have limited their settlements to the north of Middle-earth because they had “begun consciously trying to avoid conflicts with their successors [Men, including evil men], who were destined to rule all of Middle-earth” (p. 150-1), which is a genuinely thought-provoking idea that merits further consideration. The book concludes with perhaps its most intriguing synthesis of Primary World thought and Middle-earth history, suggesting that “Gondor (and its enemies in Middle-earth) were locked into a half-millennium cycle of socio-political/economic stress which was exacerbated, or more likely, exploited by Gondor’s chief enemy, Sauron—who as an immortal Maia, would have had a long enough lifespan to recognize such turns of the pendulum” (p. 166-7). Frustratingly, the book ends only a paragraph after this idea is introduced.

One hopes that the companion volume will not only introduce such ideas but explore them more thoroughly, yet it is hard to shake the feeling that the lack of deeper analysis is to some extent due to Furnish’s approach to the source material. He refers repeatedly to “the canon” of Tolkien’s writing (p. 21, 59, 71, 107, et passim), especially in comparison to the Peter Jackson film adaptations, but has little recourse when a concept is not explicitly stated “in the canon”. Furnish declines to even attempt an analysis of Elvish economies on the grounds that there is too little evidence to work from (p. 161). Caution is understandable here, but certain things can be inferred, especially when one accepts the stories as the products of certain characters’ hands rather than an objective and omniscient picture of Middle-earth. Such an approach yields only probabilities at best, which is unsatisfying to some, but in truth so much of the legendarium was left unfinished by Tolkien that there are many points where we can only make educated guesses at best, regardless of what type of analysis we carry out. Even restricting oneself to just The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion does not give one a completely consistent picture, as I have discussed before, but Furnish reaches frequently for The History of Middle-earth as well, though he doesn’t fully acknowledge the difficulties this poses. Knowing which characters and cultures recorded the histories gives us more room for inference by allowing us to assess the reliability of different accounts, but Furnish never attempts this. Even so, his book is clearly the product of a great labor to gather so many references to the histories from across Tolkien’s corpus. However, its usefulness as a reference work in the model of, say, The Atlas of Middle-earth is limited by an unfortunately large amount of inaccurate information quite separate from the question of historiography.

Furnish has a disconcerting habit of reading the text in an extremely literal way, which leads him to unusual and sometimes baffling conclusions. At one point Furnish refers to the two founders of the Shire as “Marcho and Blanco Fallohide” (p. 62-3). This appears to be based on a line in the Prologue referring to them as “the Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco”, but Fallohide is the name of a subgroup of Hobbits, not a surname. Later, Furnish quotes Tolkien’s discussion of how Sauron was “greater” in the Third Age than Morgoth was at the end of the first. Tolkien stated that “though [Sauron] was far smaller by natural stature, he had not yet fallen so low. Eventually he also squandered his power (of being) in the endeavour to gain control of others. But he was not obliged to expend so much of himself. To gain dominion over Arda, Morgoth had let most of his being pass into the physical constituents of the Earth” (HoMe X, Myths Transformed, Text VII). This is the source of the title “Morgoth’s Ring”, which refers to Morgoth having expended so much of his innate spiritual power (his “natural stature”) in the corruption of Arda that he himself was reduced. Furnish quotes much of this passage but in the portion he paraphrases he removes the word “natural” and instead states that Sauron “was far smaller in physical stature than his master Morgoth” (p. 66, my emphasis). He also claims that “Sauron seems to have gone into a state of suspended animation” (p. 69) in the early Second Age, providing no further elaboration. This seems to be based on a line from The Tale of Years which states that “Sauron began to stir again” in c. S.A. 500 when he began to build a new power base.

In addition to matters of idiosyncratic interpretation, there are many straight-up factual errors. This review is not the place to try to recount all of them, but a few merit mention. Furnish asserts that Sauron never had a naval force, even noting that it would have been useful during his wars with Gondor (p. 160), apparently having forgotten that Sauron used the Corsairs of Umbar and the Haradrim to launch naval attacks on Gondor numerous times including, of course, during the War of the Ring (ROTK, V 9 and Appendix A). When discussing the Elven realms, he claims that the haven of Edhellond was founded “about 1980 TA” (p. 40) and cites the tale of Amroth and Nimrodel in Unfinished Tales as the source of this statement. Readers familiar with that part of UT will recognize that date as the point at which Edhellond was abandoned by the Elves. Discussing the backstory of Morgoth, Furnish states that after ages of captivity in Valinor he “broke free, stole the Silmarils, and fled back to Middle-earth” (p. 68). It’s understandable for an author to leave things out when giving a summarized history, but this statement crosses the line into misrepresentation by neglecting to mention that Morgoth was freed by the Valar and that he spent a considerable time in Valinor sowing discord among the Noldor (TS, ch. 6-7); had he not had this opportunity the events of The Silmarillion would have played out very differently. Other errors were likely failures of proofreading rather than research. Furnish incorrectly calls Armenelos the geographic name for the island of Númenor (p. 162; it was actually the capital city), refers to Finarfin as co-ruling Hithlum with Fingolfin (p. 42; he goes back and forth between using Finarfin and the correct Fingon multiple times in a single paragraph), and implies that Eärnil of Gondor came to the throne by murder: “King Ondoher and his two sons were killed, and Gondor saved, by the brilliant general Eärnil” (p. 54). Any one of these errors on their own would be understandable, but the cumulative effect of so many (and this is by no means an exhaustive list) casts doubt on the soundness of the research and writing that went into the book.

A quick note regarding citations: I purchased and read the e-book version of High Towers and Strong Places available on the Oloris Bookshop website, which is in the ePub file format. EPub files do not have the same page numbering as their corresponding print editions. Some e-readers will alter the number of nominal pages in a book depending on the screen and font size settings, which makes giving citations difficult. As a partial workaround to this problem I have referred to the page numbers as displayed in Adobe Digital Editions, a free e-reader program which is more consistent with its page numbering. However, these are still not the same numbers as in the softcover edition.

Orcs and “Myths Transformed”

Orcs are one of the chief cultures that Furnish analyzes, so they are mentioned numerous times in the text. For much of the book, Furnish takes the interpretation that orcs are little more than animals and incapable or barely capable of social organization except when under the dominion of a Dark Lord. Furnish does not provide a reference the first time he mentions this idea (p. 70) but he later cites “Myths Transformed” Text X in support of the idea that the orcs were under insect-like control by the Dark Lords and had no sense of individuality or ability to function independently (Furnish, p. 107). This is consistent with the behavior of orcs at the Morannon when Sauron is no longer directing them (ROTK, VI 4), but it is radically inconsistent with the depiction of orcs elsewhere, including Shagrat and Gorbag’s conversation (during which they contemplate deserting) in the Pass of Cirith Ungol (TTT, IV 10). Tolkien recognized this and later in Text X notes that “the number of orks [sic] that were thus ‘absorbed’ was always only a small part of their total”. Furnish does not quote this though he does quote the sentence directly following it. He argues that orcs not under the psychic supervision of a Dark Lord “usually lapsed into anarchy—although they were capable of creating their own ‘petty realms,’ no doubt of a nasty, poor, brutish and short nature” (p. 108).

Of course, as stated in the sentence Furnish chose not to quote, the majority of orcs in the service of Morgoth were not subject to mind control, and while they might not have been as reliable as those who were, they still formed the bulk of Morgoth’s strength in his (mostly successful) wars against the Eldar. Furthermore, Furnish repeatedly misrepresents the level of social organization observed in orcs. He states earlier in the book that the only direct evidence of orcs organizing themselves was the reference to Mount Gundabad as their capital (p. 70) and later says that Gundabad was ruled by the Great Goblin (p. 130). We never see Gundabad in the books -- as the Great Goblin’s realm is located further south, beneath the High Pass through the Misty Mountains, which Thorin and Company were using -- but Gundabad was likely the base of Bolg, the goblin warlord in The Hobbit (TH, The Clouds Burst). Appendix A also tells us about Bolg’s father, Azog, which brings the count of known orcish rulers to three. Two of them evidently had wide-reaching authority and were able to organize large armies for war. In The Lord of the Rings, the Moria orcs, or “northerners”, were a distinct faction in the orc-band that captured Merry and Pippin and served neither Sauron nor Saruman, but wanted revenge for their “folk”. The same chapter gives evidence of orcish morality, such as it is, since the accusation of cannibalism is clearly an insult (TTT, III 3). Also, as mentioned above, the prospect of desertion and setting up on their own was not unheard of even for Sauron’s orcs. Unpleasant as orcs may be, the majority of them are not presented as mindless.

Furnish’s statement that the Great Goblin “seems to have been of extraordinary intelligence (and elocution!) for an Orc” (p. 130) is strange since intelligence and/or cunning is the main distinguishing feature for Grishnákh and Gorbag (TTT, III 3 and IV 10). Azog not only spoke fluent Westron but killed Thrór in a very calculated way as an insult against the Dwarves (LOTR, Appendix A, III). It’s possible that this dismissal of orcish elocution is based on “Myths Transformed”, as Furnish quotes Text VIII of that chapter, which states that orcish “talking was largely echoic (cf. parrots)” (qtd. in Furnish, p. 144). This comes from a note in which Tolkien speculated that orcs were originally animals, but does not seem consistent with their depiction elsewhere. Tolkien seems to have moved away from this idea and Furnish correctly notes on p. 70 that Tolkien described the human origin as the most likely, though like everything else in “MT” this must be taken with a grain of salt. Later, Furnish quotes from Text X -- in which Tolkien mentioned orcish speech without mentioning parrots -- as evidence that orcs could develop culture (p. 158). Furnish simply does not address the inconsistency between these accounts (which arose because this part of “Myths Transformed” was essentially Tolkien’s notes to himself as he tried and failed to firm up his ideas about orcs). This is a prime example of why it is essential to have a methodology before diving into HoMe, since otherwise you’re likely to end up smushing together ideas Tolkien had at different times to create something neither Tolkienian nor coherent.

Source texts and Númenor

As described in the main review, Furnish does not take into account Tolkien’s framing device in which the histories (and the main stories) are written by people living within Arda. The authorship of the Akallabêth is somewhat of an open question; the last version Tolkien wrote ascribed it to Pengolodh, as told to Ælfwine (HoMe XII, The History of the Akallabêth), but Christopher Tolkien removed references to Pengolodh/Ælfwine from the published Silmarillion since he believed his father had decided to replace this idea with Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish” (HoMe I, Foreword). A somewhat later note suggests that the Akallabêth was written by Elendil (UT, The Line of Elros, especially note 16); this is of dubious reliability but it seems reasonable to conclude that the text was put together by the Dúnedain at some point. In any event, the other major source of Númenórean history, LOTR’s Appendix A, is stated to have been based in part on “many manuscripts written by scribes of Gondor: mainly copies or summaries of histories or legends relating to Elendil and his heirs” (LOTR, Prologue). The significance of this is that the records we have are Númenórean history as told by the Númenóreans themselves and/or their descendants. Specifically, the histories are preserved and transmitted by members and descendants of the Faithful faction. This is essential to keep in mind in terms of assessing bias, because Tolkien himself cast doubt on their objectivity in other writings.

Furnish described the earlier stages of Númenórean imperialism as establishing “in effect, a benevolent imperial state” since the Númenóreans, while “lording it over” the men of Middle-earth, were also "civilizing” them (p. 46). Furnish’s source for this is the Akallabêth, which takes a very positive attitude towards early Númenórean imperialism and later, when things get worse, states that “in all this the Elf-friends had small part”. Emphasis is put on their visits to the Elves rather than exploiting the men of Middle-earth (TS, Akallabêth). However, Tolkien wrote another account of the Faithful’s role from the perspective of the indigenous inhabitants of Middle-earth and it (unsurprisingly) looks very different. In the abandoned story “Tal-Elmar”, the Númenóreans show up and tell the people living in what would become Gondor that "Your time of dwelling in these hills is come to an end. Here the men of the West have resolved to make their homes, and the folk of the dark must depart -- or be slain." For such a short fragment the history of “Tal-Elmar” is complex (it was not originally set in Middle-earth at all) and Tolkien considered several different locations and eras to set it in. His final decision, as represented in a note written 13 years after the story itself, was that it “must recount the coming of the Númenóreans (Elf-friends) before the Downfall, and represent their choice of permanent havens”, placing it relatively early in the Second Age (HoMe XII, Tal-Elmar). Furnish mentions Tal-Elmar in a footnote but claims that it is about the King’s Men during the period when Sauron was in Númenor (p. 47 and p. 78), even though Tolkien expressly rejected this idea. Furnish actually quotes the passage I just did in an earlier footnote but replaces the word “Elf-friends” with an ellipsis (p. 76).

Tolkien also wrote an account of even earlier Númenórean imperialism (before the division into King’s Men and Elf-friends began) in the Enedwaith, the region between Arnor and Gondor. The Númenóreans began to fell trees for ship-building which eventually provoked hostilities with the native woodsmen once the tree-felling became “devastating”. The woodsmen began a low-level war with the Númenóreans, who in response cut down even more trees and didn’t bother replanting any. The natives ended up fleeing the area and allied themselves with Sauron during his invasion of Eriador in the hope that he would drive away the invaders. However, the war only increased the destruction of the forests and the entire area ended up a wasteland (UT, Galadriel and Celeborn, Appendix D). Even at this early stage the Númenóreans are described as destroying an ecosystem and a people’s way of life out of spite. The similarities to the American bison being driven almost to extinction may or may not be intentional but Tolkien, a noted tree-lover, was undoubtedly not depicting the Númenóreans as benevolent or in the right. These events receive no mention in Furnish. He also white-washes the history of the Rohirrim and the Dunlendings by merely stating that the Dunlendings hated the Rohirrim and Gondorians without mentioning that the reason for their hatred was that they had been forced to leave their homeland en masse so it could be given to the Rohirrim (Furnish, p. 57-8; contrast with TTT, III 7 in which Gamling of Rohan describes the history of the Dunlendings’ enmity and offers no excuse other than that it happened a long time ago). Presenting a one-sided view of history is never a good look, but since Tolkien all but asked the reader to consider the perspective of the so-called “bad guys” (especially in “Tal-Elmar”) Furnish’s omissions are especially disappointing.

Despite how popular Aragorn is as a hero, his claim to the throne of Gondor can seem rather suspect, especially to modern readers given the diminished role that monarchism plays in most of our lives. Gondor had gotten along without a king for nearly a thousand years by the time of The Lord of the Rings, so why did it need someone whose ancestors had been kings of nothing, wandering in the wilderness during all that time? Readers are not the only ones to have asked that question. Boromir never quite claimed that “Gondor needs no King” in the book, but during one of his conversations with Frodo, Faramir relates an anecdote of Boromir questioning the convention:

“And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that always it displeased him that his father was not king. ‘How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?’ he asked. ‘Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty,’ my father answered. ‘In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice.’ Alas! poor Boromir. Does that not tell you something of him?” (TTT, IV 5)

Denethor’s response is particularly telling in light of the position he would later take when actually confronted with the prospect of ceding power. Even though the Stewards had long since “hardened their hearts” against the idea of a king returning (LOTR, Appendix A), Gondor remained a profoundly backwards-looking society in many ways, with an elite very invested in their own Númenórean heritage. The line of kings hadn’t ended because there were no descendants of former kings left, but because there were none “of pure blood, or whose claim all would allow” (Ibid.). The kings of Gondor and Arnor were not descended from just any Númenóreans, but from the Lords of Andúnië, the most important noble family after the royal house and the descendants of the eldest daughter of an early King of Númenor, before the law was changed to allow women to inherit the throne. Through the early kings, their line continued back to Elros, Eärendil, and thus many of the kings and heroes of the First Age. Even after the Kings of Gondor began to marry outside of the elite (pureblood, one might say) Númenórean families, there was still great importance placed on the direct line of descent from such illustrious ancestors. While the line of kings in Gondor had passed to younger sons and nephews at times, “it was the pride and wonder of the Northern Line that, though their power departed and their people dwindled, through all the many generations the succession was unbroken from father to son” (Ibid.).

Aragorn was not the first Heir of Isildur to claim the throne of Gondor, however, and much of the discussion of his claim centers around the legal arguments made on both sides a millennium prior. Arvedui (Aragorn’s direct ancestor) was the last King of Arthedain, representing the senior and only surviving line of the House of Isildur. He was also married to the daughter of the then-current King of Gondor, Ondoher. When Ondoher, his sons, and his nephew all died in battle with Easterlings in T.A. 1944, there was no clear successor and Gondor was temporarily ruled by a Steward while its Council tried to decide on a new king. Arvedui claimed the throne on the basis of two arguments. First, that his wife was the only surviving child of Ondoher and second, that he was the heir of Isildur. The Council of Gondor rejected the first claim on the grounds that neither Arnor nor Gondor had retained the Númenórean practice of gender-neutral succession, and the seconds on the grounds that Isildur had “relinquished” Gondor to the descendants of his younger brother, Anárion, and that the realm thus belonged solely to the heirs of the House of Anárion (LOTR, Appendix A). The first argument is pretty clearly bunk, since even if the old law had still been in effect, the crown would have passed to Arvedui’s wife, not Arvedui himself. To understand the second argument, however, requires some historical context.

After the destruction of Númenor, Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anárion established the two Realms in Exile: Gondor and Arnor. The fleet escaping Númenor was separated in the tumult, but Elendil and his ships were washed up in Lindon, realm of Gil-galad High King of the Noldor, whom the Faithful Dúnedain were friendly with. Elendil then established the North-kingdom of Arnor adjacent to Lindon. Isildur and Anárion eventually found their way to Pelargir, already a major Númenórean colony inhabited by members of the Faithful. From there they established the South-kingdom of Gondor and ruled jointly, though they remained under the suzerainty of their father, who became High King of the Dúnedain in Middle-earth. During the War of the Last Alliance, both Elendil and Anárion were killed (TS, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age). Isildur thus inherited both the High Kingship of the Dúnedain and the direct kingship of Arnor. After taking two years to set affairs in order in Gondor, Isildur committed the direct rule of the south to his nephew Meneldil and departed for the north with his sons (UT, The Disaster of the Gladden Fields). He never reached Arnor, as Isildur, his three eldest sons, and almost all his party were killed by orcs near the Gladden Fields (later home to Sméagol and Déagol, who would discover the Ring near to where Isildur was killed). This cast the political situation into doubt. Isildur was survived only by his youngest son, Valandil, who was still a child and had remained in Arnor during the war. Meanwhile, Gondor was ruled by an adult, Meneldil, who was said to be “well-pleased at the departure of Isildur and his sons, and hoped that affairs in the North would keep them long occupied” (Ibid.). Arnor, already smaller and less populous than Gondor, never again asserted its primacy, though the heirs of Isildur continued to style themselves “High Kings” for another eight centuries (LOTR, Appendix A). (This stands in contrast to the movies’ description of Isildur as “the last King of Gondor”; he was actually the joint second king!)

The main difference in legal opinion between Arvedui and the Council of Gondor was over the significance of Isildur committing the rule of Gondor to Meneldil. The kings of Arnor believed that Isildur meant to assume the position of suzerain that his father had held while giving Meneldil and his heirs the position previously jointly filled by Isildur and Anárion. The Gondorians believed that Isildur had granted them an independent and coequal status, which in any event quickly became the reality on the ground. Arvedui made the argument to the Council that Isildur had not “relinquish[ed] his royalty in Gondor, nor intend[ed] that the realm of Elendil should be divided for ever”, but the Council of Gondor didn’t respond to him further and instead gave the crown to a royal cousin, “the victorious general Eärnil” (LOTR, Appendix A). Just as the reality on the ground had led to Gondor becoming the more important kingdom of the Dúnedain, Eärnil’s claim had more to do with politics than strict legalism. He had salvaged the disastrous campaign against the Easterlings and avenged the deaths of Ondoher and his sons, saving Gondor from even greater disaster. Eärnil assumed the throne “with the approval of all the Dúnedain in Gondor” and Arvedui backed off since he had no way to force his claim. Eärnil sent overtures north and provided military assistance to Arnor three decades later, though it was not soon enough to save the last remnant of the North-kingdom from near total destruction. Subsequently, the heirs of Isildur had even less political clout, and when the line of kings in Gondor failed with the premature death of Eärnil’s son, the North stayed quiet on the matter (Ibid.).

So why was Aragorn’s claim accepted in Gondor when Arvedui’s had been rejected? Part of the reason is of course that Aragorn was the one coming to the throne as a victorious general who had helped save Gondor from disaster, giving him that in common with the successful claimant Eärnil. However, Aragorn also had the law on his side. Regardless of which school of thought one took regarding Isildur handing over power to Meneldil, there were no more heirs of the Southern line anymore when Aragorn made his claim. With the House of Anárion extinct, and especially with Gondor culturally unwilling to accept a king of less exalted heritage, there was nowhere for the succession to go but over to the other line of descent from Elendil. This line of reasoning was not unheard of in Gondor even before Aragorn came on the scene, as Appendix A tells us that soon after the rule of the Stewards began “many in Gondor still believed that a king would indeed return in some time to come; and some remembered the ancient line of the North, which it was rumoured still lived on in the shadows”. Of course, Aragorn’s claim was bolstered by support from both the elite of Gondor (especially Faramir and Imrahil) and the broader population (as seen at his coronation). But the question of what it took to get him on the throne is different from the question of whether it was rightfully his. On the strictly legal side of things, Aragorn was always in the right.