The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ stay in Númenor for a while, and in Second Age 800 proclaims him the King’s Heir. At a feast of celebration Aldarion meets Erendis: she is immediately attracted, and enters the queen’s household.

      After only six years Aldarion resumes his voyages, dismissing his father’s plea that ‘the need of the King’s house is for a man who knows and loves this land and people’ (p. 178), and that Aldarion take a wife. Tar-Meneldur becomes wrathful, and forbids his wife and daughters from setting upon Aldarion’s ship the Green Bough of Return, cut from the tree oiolairë; but Erendis takes the bough in the queen’s stead, and Aldarion for the first time looks on her with love. Nevertheless many years pass before he seeks to marry her. He had not wanted to be bound; but now Erendis hesitates, not for lack of love, but unwilling to share Aldarion with the Sea. Her mother believes that it is not so much ships, the Sea, the winds, or strange lands which appeal to Aldarion, ‘but some heat in his mind, or some dream that pursues him’; to which the narrator of the story adds: ‘And it may be that she struck near the truth; for Aldarion was a man long-sighted, and he looked forward to days when the people would need more room and greater wealth; and whether he himself knew this clearly or no, he dreamed of the glory of Númenor and the power of its kings, and he sought for footholds whence they could step to wider dominion’ (p. 191).

      For a while Aldarion neglects the Sea and, wooing Erendis, finds ‘more contentment in those days than in any others of his life, though he did not know it until he looked back long after when old age was upon him’ (p. 182). Eventually he persuades Erendis to be his wife, but is seized again with longing for the Sea. He suggests to Erendis that she sail with him; she refuses, having no desire to leave Númenor and fearing that she will die out of sight of land, but nevertheless places a bough on his ship. Aldarion finds Vinyalondë ruined and men in Middle-earth hostile to Númenóreans, and on his return voyage winds drive his ship into the icy North, where the bough of oiolairë withers.

      Despite his absence the love between Aldarion and Erendis remains warm, and they are married at last in Second Age 870. Three years later, their daughter, Ancalimë, is born. But when she is only four Aldarion again sails for Middle-earth, promising not to be away more than two years, contrary to custom that parents stay close to their children when they are very young. Ancalimë never forgets that father put her away firmly when she clung to him at this parting, and this time Erendis does not take or send a bough of oiolairë to Aldarion’s ship. She leaves the home she had shared with him and retires to a house in the midst of Númenor, far from the sea, with only women about her. Aldarion is absent five years, during which time Erendis imparts to her daughter her bitterness against men. On his return Erendis receives Aldarion coldly, and he departs again the next day.

      Aldarion brings to his father a letter from Gil-galad, who believes that a growing shadow in the east of Middle-earth is a servant of Morgoth, and seeks help from Númenor when the assault should come. Tar-Meneldur is in doubt what to do, and decides to resign the sceptre to Aldarion. This dismays Erendis, who refuses to leave her home to attend the proclamation of Aldarion as king.

      At this point the manuscript ends, and no clear continuation emerges from Tolkien’s notes. Tar-Aldarion as King makes other voyages to Middle-earth. Though his achievements there are transitory, they pave the way for the success of later rulers, and for the aid Tar-Minastir sends to Gil-galad in Second Age 1700, which leads to the temporary defeat of Sauron. But there are also unfortunate consequences. Aldarion’s involvement in Middle-earth sets Númenor on the road leading eventually to its Downfall, and Ancalimë’s character suffers from her upbringing and her parent’s differences. Though she is clever, she is also wilful and malicious, and her own marriage is also unhappy. In Second Age 1075 she becomes the first ruling Queen of Númenor, the rules of succession having been changed. At the same time, Aldarion ordains that heirs to the Kingship should wed only those of the line of Elros, for he had come to believe that the root of his troubles with Erendis had been that she came of a line shorter-lived line than his own. The last mention of Erendis is that in old age in 985 she sought Aldarion, who was expected to return from a voyage, and ‘perished in water’ (p. 212).

      HISTORY

      Tolkien worked on Aldarion and Erendis probably in 1960: a sketch by him of a Númenórean helmet, with an inscription referring to Aldarion’s Guild of Venturers, is dated ‘March 1960’ (a redrawn version was reproduced on the dust-jacket of the first British and American editions of Unfinished Tales). Tolkien began, but left unfinished, five sometimes contradictory texts, which tended to move, as he wrote, from annalistic plot outlines to full narrative. The fifth text, which extends for some sixty manuscript pages, has the title The Shadow of the Shadow: The Tale of the Mariner’s Wife: and the Tale of Queen Shepherdess. From this a typescript was made, and at some time after January 1965 Tolkien began yet another typescript, filling out the schematic beginning, but abandoned it after only two pages; this has the title Indis i · Kiryamo ‘The Mariner’s Wife’: A Tale of Ancient Númenórë, which Tells of the First Rumour of the Shadow. He made a few notes and wrote some unconnected fragments of text for the unwritten part of the story, mainly concerning Ancalimë in later life, but little more about Aldarion and Erendis. *Christopher Tolkien notes that the work needed a considerable amount of ‘editorial rehandling’ to prepare it for publication; see Unfinished Tales, pp. 7–8, and *The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996), pp. 155, 351.

      CRITICISM

      The story of the unhappy marriage of Tar-Aldarion, the sixth King of Númenor, and Erendis, and of their daughter Ancalimë, is of great interest, not only for the information it gives of Númenor during the eighth to thirteenth centuries of the Second Age, but also because it is Tolkien’s most detailed study of a human relationship. The tale becomes increasingly sad in its depiction of two people of different interests and temperaments who love each other but cannot live the same life, until eventually love turns to bitterness. Tolkien gives a sympathetic depiction of both sides. (See also *Women.)

      In a review of Unfinished Tales Thomas M. Egan wrote that Aldarion and Erendis ‘really illustrates Tolkien’s power as a story-teller’ and

      answers his critics who have claimed he is insensitive to women, putting them up as plaster statues without real knowledge of their character and conflicts in the strains of married life. Using the structure of Númenor’s idyllic realm, Tolkien explores the war of the sexes as husband and wife find love from their differing characters, then grow gradually isolated. … Isolation and loneliness for Erendis makes her want to punish her adventuresome husband, and her recorded dialogue strikes a strangely modern tone. The result, as Tolkien probes further, is the tragic hatred which grows until it poisons their daughter, and sets the stage for further marital conflict in the next generation. … [‘Fragments of a World: Tolkien’s Road to Middle-earth’, The Terrier 48, no. 2 (Fall 1983), p. 10]

      In another review, Peter S. Beagle called Aldarion and Erendis

      a haunting story out of Númenor which tells of a king and queen who loved and damaged one another, and their daughter as well. Moving even in its sketchiness, it is unlike anything else of Tolkien’s that I know, and it nips strangely at the heart. The man understood more than the grandly heroic; he knew something about sorrow, and about possession, whether by hunger or fury or dreams. [‘A Fantasy Feast from Middle-earth’, San Francisco Examiner, 19 October 1980, p. A14]

      T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth compares Erendis’s retreat to the centre of Númenor, and her statement that the bleating of sheep was sweeter to her ears than the mewing of gulls, to the story of ‘Njǫrthr the sea-god and Skathi, daughter of the mountain-giant, in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. Obliged to marry, these two tried taking turns to live in each other’s homes. But the marriage was a failure. …’ Njǫrthr complains: ‘Hateful to me were the mountains, I was there no longer than nine nights; the howling of wolves seemed ugly to me against the song of the swans’. And Skathi ‘replies СКАЧАТЬ