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By Root 1746 0

’, who took the crown in the name of Falastur ‘Lord of the Coasts’, and was the first childless king (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, I, ii and iv). Berúthiel lived in the King’s House in Osgiliath, hating the sounds and smells of the sea and the house that Tarannon built below Pelargir ‘upon arches whose feet stood deep in the wide waters of Ethir Anduin’ she hated all making, all colours and elaborate adornment, wearing only black and silver and living in bare chambers, and the gardens of the house in Osgiliath were filled with tormented sculptures beneath cypresses and yews. She had nine black cats and one white, her slaves, with whom she conversed, or read their memories, setting them to discover all the dark secrets of Gondor, so that she knew those things ‘that men wish most to keep hidden’, setting the white cat to spy upon the black, and tormenting them. No man in Gondor dared touch them; all were afraid of them, and cursed when they saw them pass. What follows is almost wholly illegible in the unique manuscript, except for the ending, which states that her name was erased from the Book of the Kings (‘but the memory of men is not wholly shut in books, and the cats of Queen Berúthiel never passed wholly out of men’s speech’), and that King Tarannon had her set on a ship alone with her cats and set adrift on the sea before a north wind. The ship was last seen flying past Umbar under a sickle moon, with a cat at the masthead and another as a figure-head on the prow.

8 This is a reference to ‘the Second Prophecy of Mandos’, which does not appear in The Silmarillion; its elucidation cannot be attempted here, since it would require some account of the history of the mythology in relation to the published version.

9 Gandalf said again ‘Olórin I was in the West that is forgotten’ when he spoke to the Hobbits and Gimli in Minas Tirith after the coronation of King Elessar: see ‘The Quest of Erebor’, p. 426.

10 The ‘strange stars’ apply strictly only to the Harad, and must mean that Aragorn travelled or voyaged some distance into the southern hemisphere. [Author’s note.]

11 A mark over the last letter of Inkā-nūs suggests that the final consonant was sh.

12 One of the poems of the collection of very ancient Norse poetry known as the ‘Poetic Edda’ or the ‘Elder Edda’.

III

THE PALANTÍRI

The palantíri were no doubt never matters of common use or common knowledge, even in Númenor. In Middle-earth they were kept in guarded rooms, high in strong towers, only kings and rulers, and their appointed wardens, had access to them, and they were never consulted, nor exhibited, publicly. But until the passing of the Kings they were not sinister secrets. Their use involved no peril, and no king or other person authorized to survey them would have hesitated to reveal the source of his knowledge of the deeds or opinions of distant rulers, if obtained through the Stones. 1

After the days of the Kings, and the loss of Minas Ithil, there is no further mention of their open and official use. There was no answering Stone left in the North after the shipwreck of Arvedui Last-king in the year 1975. 2 In 2002 the Ithil-stone was lost. There then remained only the Anor-stone in Minas Tirith and the Orthanc-stone. 3

Two things contributed then to the neglect of the Stones, and their passing out of the general memory of the people. The first was ignorance of what had happened to the Ithil-stone: it was reasonably assumed that it was destroyed by the defenders before Minas Ithil was captured and sacked; 4 but it was clearly possible that it had been seized and had come into the possession of Sauron, and some of the wiser and more farseeing may have considered this. It would appear that they did so, and realized that the Stone would be of little use to him for the damage of Gondor, unless it made contact with another Stone that was in accord with it. 5 It was for this reason, it may be supposed, that the Anor-stone, about which all the records of the Stewards are silent until the War of the Ring, was kept as a closely-guarded secret,