Q: Who was Queen Berúthiel?
ANSWER: Many readers have asked about Queen Berúthiel, whose name Aragorn invoked in “A Journey in the Dark” in The Fellowship of the Ring:
`Do not be afraid! ‘ said Aragorn. There was a pause longer than usual, and Gandalf and Gimli were whispering together; the others were crowded behind, waiting anxiously. `Do not be afraid! I have been with him on many a journey, if never on one so dark; and there are tales of Rivendell of greater deeds of his than any that I have seen. He will not go astray-if there is any path to find. He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself. He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel.’
In 1993, writing for the journal Other Hands, Chris Seeman reviewed the history of this passage (as explained by Christopher Tolkien in The Return of the Shadow, Volume VI of The History of Middle-earth). The earliest form read thus:
…Gandalf was guided mainly by his general sense of direction: and anyone who had been on a journey with him knew that he never lost that by dark or day, underground or above it: being better at steering through a tunnel than a goblin, and less likely to be lost in a wood than a hobbit, and surer at finding the way through night as black as the Pit than the cats of Queen Berúthiel.
J.R.R. Tolkien mentioned Berúthiel in three letters from 1954 to 1956. She vanished from his papers until a 1966 interview conducted by Daphne Castell for New Worlds. At that time J.R.R. Tolkien told her:
There’s one exception that puzzles me—Berúthiel. I really don’t know anything of her—you remember Aragorn’s allusion in Book I 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.
The only other information provided by Tolkien is found in a note in Unfinished Tales of Numnenor and Middle-earth, in which Christopher Tolkien writes:
Even the story of Queen Berúthiel does exist, however, if only in a very ‘primitive’ outline, in one part illegible. She was the nefarious, solitary, and loveless wife of Tarannon, twelfth King of Gondor (Third Age 830-913) and first of the ‘Ship-kings’, 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 bear 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 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.
Unfortunately, Christopher provides no information about when this fragment of a story was composed. It may be that the 1966 interview came after the composition but we cannot be sure of that.
In his essay Chris Seeman argued that Berúthiel may have been an Umbarian princess. Although this certainly seems plausible it is not necessarily the only plausible explanation for her background. As the Mouth of Sauron shows, there were Black Numenoreans living elsewhere in Middle-earth throughout the Third Age. According to Appendix A in The Lord of the Rings, “With Tarannon, the twelfth king, began the line of the Ship-kings, who built navies and extended the sway of Gondor along the coasts west and south of the Mouths of Anduin. To commemorate his victories as Captain of the Hosts, Tarannon took the crown in the name of Falastur ‘Lord of the Coasts’.”
Tolkien does not clearly say who conquered Harondor but the text seems to indicate that it was Tarannon who conquered both Anfalas and Harondor, and that his successors concentrated their efforts on Umbar. Hence, it is conceivable that Black Numenoreans may have lived in Harondor south of Ithilien. It is also conceivable that Black Numenoreans dwelt in other parts of Harad south of Mordor. Most readers assume that the Haradrim were one kindred or tribe of Men, but the name simply means “southern folk” or “southern peoples”. By all indications Tolkien was using Haradrim to refer to many different populations.
Therefore while it is interesting to think of Umbar as Berúthiel’s home, we cannot say conclusively that is where she came from.
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