Erendis

Lineage

Erendis was born in S.A. 771 in the Andustar, the Westlands of Númenor, the daughter of Beregar and Núneth. Her father's house descended from the House of Bëor, and its people were shorter-lived than the descendants of Hador who filled the royal court; she was dark-haired and grey-eyed like the Bëorians of old, and this difference in the length of years weighed on her from the beginning. She was accounted very beautiful, and when the Queen Almarian brought her to Armenelos about the year 800 she quickly won the favour of the court.

The long courtship

At court she saw Aldarion, the King's heir, and loved him from that day. He was then already a mariner of renown and the master of the Guild of Venturers, and his eye was on the Sea; for a long time he hardly noticed her. When he did, the two could not agree on what a life together would be. Erendis wanted a husband who would stay in Númenor; Aldarion could not live long ashore, and each voyage was longer than the last. She refused him more than once. He brought her from Middle-earth a white jewel given him by the Elves of Lindon, and she wore it bound on her brow, so that she was called Elestirnë, Lady of the Star-brow. In the year 858, after a voyage during which Erendis had nearly given him up, Aldarion returned and the two were betrothed; Erendis herself cut the green bough of oiolairë that Númenórean women set on the prows of ships for their kin's safe return. They were married at Armenelos in 870 in the presence of the King and the ambassadors of the Eldar, and Aldarion built her a house with a garden and swore his voyaging days were over.

Emerië

Their daughter Ancalimë was born in 873. Within a few years Aldarion was restless again, and in 877 he sailed, promising to be gone two years. He was gone five. Erendis, waiting, hardened. Before he came back in 882 she left the house he had built and took Ancalimë to her own house at Emerië, in the sheep-country of the Mittalmar, a white house among the downs where no sound of the Sea could be heard. When Aldarion rode there to see her, she received him with cold courtesy, told him that his daughter would be raised without him, and sent him away. He never came again. Under the new law of succession he made when he was King, Ancalimë became his heir, and he took her from Emerië to Armenelos as a young woman; but by then Erendis had taught her to see men as faithless wanderers and to make her own will her only law, and the lesson shaped a Queen who was cold to her father and cruel to her husband.

Death

Erendis lived on at Emerië for a century, growing bitter and increasingly alone. She had refused to cross water even to visit Tol Eressëa, and she never sailed. In the year 985, when Aldarion was expected home from a long absence, she went to Rómenna, and there she died in the water; the record says no more than that. Her death came after the old King had ruled for a hundred years, and he outlived her by more than a century. Unfinished Tales preserves a note that she was buried by the sea she hated, but the tale of Aldarion and Erendis is unfinished and her end is told only in the genealogical summary.

Legacy

Erendis is one of the few women of Númenor whose inner life is recorded. Her story is set beside her husband's as a tragedy of two people who could not yield, and it was remembered in Númenor as a warning of what the call of the Sea could cost. The Númenóreans themselves preserved the tale under the name The Mariner's Wife. Through Ancalimë her mistrust of men entered the royal house and outlasted her.

Died in the water at Rómenna in S.A. 985, having gone there to await Aldarion's return.