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Middle-Earth Revised, Again - Page 7

© Michael Martinez

Christopher Tolkien, of course, covered the history of Beruthiel in a note appended to the section on the Istari in Unfinished Tales:

In a letter written in 1956 my father said that 'There is hardly any reference in The Lord of the Rings to things that do not actualy exist, on its own plane (of secondary or sub-creational reality)', and added in a footnote to this: 'The cats of Queen Beruthiel and the names of the other two wizards (five minus Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast) are all that I recollect.' (In Moria Aragorn said of Gandalf that 'He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Beruthiel' (The Fellowship of the Ring II 4). Even the story of Queen Beruthiel 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 the 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). Beruthiel 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 bare 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 tormening 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 Beruthiel never passed wholly out of men's speech'), and that King Tarannon had her set on a ship alone with her cats and set adrift on the sea before a north wind. The ship was last seen flying pas Umbar under a sickle moon, with a cat at the masthead and another as a figure-head on the prow.

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