Lonely Wanderers and the Tales That Almost Were - Page 6
© Michael Martinez
We must therefore assume that certain elements, approaching permanancy through publication, will be expected to persist through the later evolution of the mythology, even though in the end Tolkien was forced to excise a great deal of material from the appendices to accommodate the publishing limitations of the day. Hence, the core story of Imrazor and Mithrellas must be accepted as essentially fixed: she was a maiden of Nimrodel, he dwelt in Belfalas, they met there, and they married. Mithrellas bore Imrazor two children, Galador and Gilmith, and then left him.
Imrazor's birth and death dates (T.A. 1950-2076) are attested to in a marginal note. He was thus too young to recall the disastrous battle of 1944 in which King Ondoher and his sons Faramir and Artamir died. He would likely also have been too young to participate in the expedition led by Prince Earnur in 1975 to destroy the Witch-Realm of Angmar. But Imrazor probably heard about the wars from his relatives, including his father (most likely the Adrahil of Dol Amroth mentioned in the first section of "Cirion and Eorl" as the Captain of the Left-wing of Ondoher's Northern Army).
The connection between Adrahil and Imrazor is questionable. It is not a matter of canon. The texts which discuss these characters are both from the hand of J.R.R. Tolkien. Rather, the questions concern the legitimacy, or consistency, of the traditions. Christopher Tolkien observes, in Note 39 appended to "Cirion and Eorl", that "it is said that according to the tradition of their house the first Lord of Dol Amroth was Galador (c. Third Age 2004 - 2129), the son of Imrazor the Numenorean....The note just cited seems to suggest that this family of the Faithful settled in Belfalas with a stronghold on Dol Amroth before the Downfall of Numenor; and if that is so the two statements can only be reconciled on the supposition that the line of the Princes, and indeed the place of their dwelling, went back more than two thousand years before Galador's day, and that Galador was called the first Lord of Dol Amroth because it was not until his time (after the drowning of Amroth in the year 1981) that Dol Amroth was so named."
Christopher's conclusion is that these apparent inconsistencies were the result of his father's developing two different traditions. The first tradition, that Galador was the first Lord of Dol Amroth, was established in the early 1950s. The second tradition, implying there were Lords of Dol Amroth at least as far back as 1944 and perhaps extending all the way to a time prior to the founding of Gondor, was developed in the late 1960s. Christopher proposes that "Cirion and Eorl" was written about the same time as the essay titled "Of Dwarves and Men", published in The Peoples of Middle-earth. "Of Dwarves and Men" was written around the year 1968, several years after the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings was published (1965).
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