Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [138]
11 In the list of the Kings and Queens of Númenor in Appendix A (I, i) to The Lord of the Rings the ruler following Tar-Calmacil (the eighteenth) was Ar-Adûnakhôr (the nineteenth). In the Tale of Years in Appendix B Ar-Adûnakhôr is said to have taken the sceptre in the year 2899; and on this basis Mr Robert Foster in The Complete Guide to Middle-earth gives the death-date of Tar-Calmacil as 2899. On the other hand, at a later point in the account of the rulers of Númenor in Appendix A, Ar-Adûnakhôr is called the twentieth king; and in 1964 my father replied to a correspondent who had enquired about this: ‘As the genealogy stands he should be called the sixteenth king and nineteenth ruler. Nineteen should possibly be read for twenty; but it is also possible that a name has been left out.’ He explained that he could not be certain because at the time of writing this letter his papers on the subject were not available to him.
When editing the Akallabêth I changed the actual reading ‘And the twentieth king took the sceptre of his fathers, and he ascended the throne in the name of Adûnakhor’ to ‘And the nineteenth king...’ (The Silmarillion p. 267), and similarly ‘four and twenty’ to ‘three and twenty’ (ibid. p. 270). At that time I had not observed that in ‘The Line of Elros’ the ruler following Tar-Calmacil was not Ar-Adûnakhôr but Tar-Ardamin; but it now seems perfectly clear, from the fact alone that Tar-Ardamin’s death-date is here given as 2899, that he was omitted in error from the list in The Lord of the Rings.
On the other hand, it is a certainty of the tradition (stated in Appendix A, in the Akallabêth, and in ‘The Line of Elros’) that Ar-Adûnakhôr was the first King to take the sceptre in a name of the Adûnaic tongue. On the assumption that Tar-Ardamin dropped out of the list in Appendix A by a mere oversight, it is surprising that the change in the style of the royal names should there be attributed to the first ruler after Tar-Calmacil. It may be that a more complex textual situation underlies the passage than a mere error of omission.
12 In two genealogical tables her father is shown as Gimilzagar, the second son (born in 2630) of Tar-Calmacil, but this is clearly impossible: Inzilbêth must have been descended from Tar-Calmacil at more removes.
13 There is a highly formalised floral design of my father’s, similar in style to that shown in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1979, no. 45, bottom right, which bears the title Inziladûn, and beneath it is written both in Fëanorian script and transliterated Númellótë [‘Flower of the West’].
14 According to the Akallabêth (The Silmarillion p. 269) Gimilkhâd ‘died two years before his two hundredth year, which was accounted an early death for one of Elros’ line even in its waning’.
15 As noted in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings Míriel should have been the fourth Ruling Queen.
A final discrepancy between ‘The Line of Elros’ and the Tale of Years arises in the dates of Tar-Palantir. It is said in the Akallabêth (p. 269) that ‘when Inziladûn acceded to the sceptre, he took again a title in the Elven-tongue as of old, calling himself Tar-Palantir’; and in the Tale of Years occurs the entry: ‘3175 Repentance of Tar-Palantir. Civil war in Númenor.’ It would seem almost certain from these statements that 3175 was the year of his accession; and this is borne out by the fact that in ‘The Line of Elros’ the death-date of his father Ar-Gimilzôr was originally given as 3175,