Q: Who Killed King Valandur of Arnor?
ANSWER: To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet published any text or reference to a text that provides any detail about the life of Valandur. He was the eighth High King of Arnor and according to the genealogy given in The Lord of the Rings he died a violent death in Third Age year 652.
The only significant occurrence in that time frame of which I am aware would have been the war Turambar of Gondor fought against the Easterlings. However, the Easterlings first attacked Gondor about 100 years earlier and Turambar seems to have defeated them soon after succeeding his father Tarostar (aka Romendacil I) in Third Age year 541.
The Easterlings first attacked Gondor in TA Year 490. Tarostar (Romendacil I) defeated them in 500, taking his second name at that time. He was subsequently slain in 541. There is no further activity in the “Tale of Years (Appendix B)” in The Lord of the Rings until TA Year 830, when Falastur begins the line of the Ship-kings. There just seems to be no way to stretch the wars with the Easterlings forward from 541 to 652 in any reasonable extrapolation.
Hence, we are left with nothing but guess-work and assumptions. There are certainly some outrageous possibilities, such as an assassination attempt. Who would do such a thing? Certainly not one of Sauron’s servants for they would not become active for another 350 years.
We know that the Realm of Angmar included men of unspecific origin. They were not Dunedain and may not have been related to the Edain of Eriador. Hence, they could have been descended from First Age Easterlings, from remnants of Sauron’s army in the War of the Elves and Sauron, or from Easterlings who entered Eriador in the Third Age.
Then there were the hill-men who seized control of Rhudaur sometime after 1350. Were they related to the Men of Angmar, the Edain of Eriador, the Easterlings who had settled near southern Mirkwood? We don’t know.
It is plausible to suggest that Valandur fought a brief war with some unnamed tribes in northeastern Eriador. The fact that Elendil had built the fortress city of Fornost Erain in the North Downs seems to suggest there was a threat in that region. Minas Anor was originally built to protect the Anduin valley against “the while men of the dales” in the White Mountains, so there is certainly a precedent in Tolkien’s writing for pitting Elendil and his sons against local enemies who were not directly tied to Sauron’s realm in Mordor.
But Valandur could have led an expedition outside of Arnor; or he could have gone hunting and died in an accident; Tolkien could have envisioned him being slain by some ancient monster such as a dragon or troll; or he could have died at sea. Unfortunately the names of the kings don’t provide any insight into what happened. Tolkien’s cryptic notation marking Valandur’s death-date in Appendix A seems to have been a seed of a tale that bore no fruit.
My opinion is that Tolkien had a passing thought about some conflict which briefly threatened Arnor; but he seems to have moved on from that idea to the concept of dividing Arnor between Valandur’s three great-grandsons. According to The Peoples of Middle-earth (Volume XII of The History of Middle-earth) Amlaith of Fornost (eldest son of Eärendur, the last High King of Arnor) was born in Third Age year 726. Amlaith was too young to have witnessed Valandur’s death. Eärendur himself was only born in 640 (according to Peoples of Middle-earth) so he would have been a child at the time of his grandfather’s death. It seems unlikely, given so much time from 652 to 861 (209 years) that the division of Arnor could have resulted as a consequence of a sequence of events set into motion by Valandur’s death.
That is why I think Valandur’s death date represents a passing thought, although it is annotated in Peoples of Middle-earth with the dagger signifying a violent death; which means the note was made probably around 1950, was incorporated into the published book in 1955, and was left unchanged in the 1965 revision. Either Tolkien never paid attention to this detail again or upon subsequent review he felt it should remain without explanation. This is a very rare canonical choice from the author who eventually composed a story about Queen Berúthiel.
If you are writing fan fiction or developing a role-playing campaign I would say the chances of something even semi-canonical coming to light that might contradict your own elaboration on Valandur’s death are very, very slim.
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