Favourite Female Tolkien Character Poll - Round 1, Match 28
There are three polls today, all featuring women of Gondor and Arnor!
Pick your favourite!
Berúthiel
Vidumavi
Berúthiel
A queen of Gondor remembered for her cats. From a note in Unfinished Tales:
She was the nefarious, solitary, and loveless wife of Tarannon, twelfth King of Gondor and first of the ‘ship-kings,’ who took the crown in the name of Falastur (‘Lord of the Coasts’), and was the first childless king. Berúthiel 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 [my note: sonehow this feels like a metaphor/imagery for Sauron and the Ringwraiths], 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 on the black, and tormenting them. No man in Gondor dared to touch them; all were afraid of them, and cursed when they saw them pass.
…her name was erased from the Book of the Kings…and 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 past Umbar under a sickle moon, with a cat at the masthead and another as a figure-head on the prow.
Vidumavi
She married Valacar prince of Gondor and their son was Eldacar (if you followed the Obscure Tolkien Blorbo poll tournament, you may have heard of him).
Gondor had sought good relations with the Northmen, who lived the plains surrounding the south of Greenwood the Great. King Rómendacil II of Gondor sent his son Valacar to live for a while with Vidugavia, the king or chieftain of lands east of southern Greenwood. Valacar went further than he expected in marrying Vidugavia’s daughter Vidumavi. People in Gondor did not like this, regarding the Northmen as lesser than them, and fearing that intermarriage would make their descendents shorter-lived. After Vidumavi’s death, when Eldacar became king, there was a rebellion and civil war called the Kin-strife, in which Eldacar was ultimately victorious.
