Amandil

The line of Andúnië

Amandil was the son of Númendil and the eighteenth Lord of Andúnië, the great western haven of Númenor. His house descended from Silmariën, the eldest child of the fourth King, Tar-Elendil, in the days before daughters could inherit, and its lords were the first among the nobles of the realm and the chief of the Faithful, the party that kept friendship with the Eldar and reverence for the Valar through the long estrangement of the kings. Under Ar-Gimilzôr the Faithful had been forced from the west of the island to the eastern haven of Rómenna, and Amandil's lordship of Andúnië was by then more title than possession. He was a great mariner and a Captain of the King's Ships, and in his youth he was a close friend of Pharazôn, the future King.

In the council of the King

When Ar-Pharazôn seized the sceptre in 3255, Amandil stayed at court, respected for his lineage and his seamanship, and he remained on the King's council after the King brought Sauron to Númenor as a hostage in 3262. He saw sooner than anyone what the captive was doing. As Sauron's influence grew and the King turned to the worship of Melkor, Amandil spoke against it, and Sauron, who hated him above all the Númenóreans, had him dismissed. Amandil withdrew to Rómenna, where the Faithful gathered around him and his son Elendil. He did not yet dare to leave Númenor, for the King's spies watched the coasts and the ships of the Faithful were denied the sea.

The stolen fruit

When Sauron urged the felling of the White Tree Nimloth, it was in Amandil's house that the danger was understood. His grandson Isildur went alone and in disguise into the guarded court of Armenelos, took a fruit from the Tree, and came back nearly dead of his wounds; the fruit was planted in secret and the seedling sprang up in the spring that Isildur recovered. Amandil kept it hidden, and it was the survival of that seedling, more than anything else, that carried the memory of Númenor's blessing into Middle-earth.

The voyage West

When the King began to build the Great Armament in 3310 and it became plain that he meant to make war on the Valar, Amandil resolved on a desperate act. He remembered that Eärendil, forefather of the kings, had sailed into the West against the same Ban and won the mercy of the Valar for Elves and Men. Perhaps, he thought, a Númenórean of the Faithful might do the same, and at least win pardon for those who had not consented to the King's madness. He told Elendil his purpose, charged him to prepare ships at Rómenna, to gather the Faithful and their heirlooms, and to be ready to sail east at a moment's warning, and then took a small ship with three servants and sailed by night. He steered first east, to throw off pursuit, and then west, and no word of him ever came back. Whether he reached the Undying Lands, whether he was heard, no tale tells; The Silmarillion suggests only that the Valar's sparing of Elendil's people may have been his doing. His departure made Elendil the leader of the Faithful and, after the Downfall, the founder of the realms in exile.

Legacy

Amandil was the last of the Lords of Andúnië and the man through whom the line of Elros survived the drowning of Númenor. His counsel to Elendil, to keep the palantíri and the seedling of Nimloth aboard ship, preserved the things by which Arnor and Gondor remembered their origin, and his own voyage, unrecorded and unrewarded, was the last act of faith in the history of the island. Through Elendil he is the ancestor of Aragorn and the kings of the Reunited Kingdom.

Sailed west from Rómenna in secret about S.A. 3316 with three companions to seek the Valar; his fate is unknown.