Berúthiel

A queen from the South

Berúthiel was the wife of Tarannon Falastur, who reigned as twelfth King of Gondor from T.A. 830 to 913, built the fleets that extended Gondor's power along the coasts, and was the first of the ship-kings. Unfinished Tales preserves what the histories of Gondor had suppressed. She was a Black Númenórean from Umbar or the lands inland of it, one of the peoples who had followed Sauron in the Second Age, and the marriage was probably a matter of policy. She was a woman of a cold and solitary temper who loved nothing and no one, hated the sound and smell of the sea that her husband loved, and shut herself away in the King's House in Osgiliath. She dressed only in black and silver and would allow no colour or ornament about her, and she filled the house with tormented sculptures.

The cats

She kept ten cats, nine black and one white, and treated them as slaves. She set them to go about the realm and pry into whatever men wished to keep hidden, and she was said to be able to read their minds when they returned, so that the secrets of Gondor were laid open to her. The white cat she set to watch the black ones. The people of Gondor came to fear the cats and would not touch them, and cursed at the sight of them.

Disgrace

Tarannon at last put her aside. He had her set on a ship alone with her cats and cast adrift before a north wind, and the ship was last seen passing the coast of Umbar in the light of a thin moon, with one cat at the masthead and another at the prow. The king ordered her name erased from the Book of the Kings, and Tarannon died childless, the first king of Gondor to do so; he was succeeded by his nephew Eärnil I. Berúthiel's name survived only in a proverb. Three thousand years later, in the blackness of Moria, Aragorn said of Gandalf that he could find his way home in the dark better than the cats of Queen Berúthiel.

Set adrift alone with her cats in a ship before a north wind, last seen passing Umbar; her end is unknown.