Hyarnustar

The South-west

The Hyarnustar was the south-western promontory of Númenor, a large region made of two very different halves. Its western and southern coasts were high and stern: great cliffs stood out of the sea, and toward the cape's end the land rose into rocky heights swept by the wind off the ocean. Inland, away from the salt, the country turned warm and dry, and there the vineyards of the island were planted.

Vines and the river-mouth

The wine of the Hyarnustar was famous throughout the realm and was carried in Númenórean ships to Middle-earth. Grapes ripened on the drier inland slopes where grain would have failed, and the wealth of the region lay in them. Eastward the Hyarnustar came down to the southern shore of the Mittalmar, where the river Siril reached the sea through a wide delta of fens and reeds. There the land was low and wet, and the fisherfolk of Nindamos, the largest settlement of the southern coast, lived on the sands and mudflats about the river's mouths.

A working country

Little of the recorded history of Númenor happened in the Hyarnustar. It was a country of vine-keepers, farmers and cliff-dwelling fishers rather than of lords; no royal city and no great haven stood in it, and its coast gave few landings, so that shipping preferred Rómenna in the east and the sheltered bays of the Andustar. What the region gave the realm was provision: wine for the halls of Armenelos and cargo for the fleets that Tar-Aldarion and the kings after him sent east to Middle-earth.

Its fate was the fate of the island. When Ar-Pharazôn raised the Great Armament every region was levied for it, and when the world was changed the cliffs, the vineyards and the fens of the Siril went down together in S.A. 3319. Everything known of the region, its two climates, its vines and the delta at its eastern edge, is set down only in the Description of the Island of Númenor in Unfinished Tales.

The Hyarnustar formed the south-western arm of the star-shaped island, between the Andustar to the north and the Hyarrostar across the southern bight to the east. Its outer coasts were cliff-bound and its western end mountainous; its inner and eastern parts were warm, dry and given to vines. At its eastern border the Siril came down out of the Mittalmar into a broad fenland and reached the sea through many mouths.