Tar-Míriel

Heir of Tar-Palantir

Míriel was born in S.A. 3117, the only child of Tar-Palantir, the last King of Númenor to turn back toward the Valar. Under the law of succession established by Tar-Aldarion more than two thousand years earlier, she was her father's heir, and she would have been the fourth woman to hold the sceptre. She was raised in the ways of the Faithful that her father had restored, and her name, given in the Elven tongue, marked her as belonging to his cause rather than to the party of the King's Men, whose leader was her uncle Gimilkhâd and whose champion was his son Pharazôn.

Usurpation

When Tar-Palantir died in 3255, Pharazôn had just returned to Númenor from the wars in Middle-earth, rich, famous and loved by the people. He came to Armenelos and took Míriel to wife against her will. The marriage broke the law of Númenor, which did not permit the union of first cousins, and it broke the succession, for the sceptre could not lawfully pass to the husband of the heir. Pharazôn took it nonetheless and proclaimed himself Ar-Pharazôn the Golden, and Míriel he called by the Adûnaic name Ar-Zimraphel. The Faithful held that she remained the rightful ruler, and in the later reckoning of the kings she is counted among them under the name she never bore in her lifetime, Tar-Míriel.

Queen in the shadow

Of her life as queen the histories say almost nothing. Through the sixty-four years of her husband's reign she watched the things her father had cherished destroyed one by one: Sauron brought to Armenelos as a captive and raised to be the King's chief counsellor; the worship of the Dark turning the people from Eru; the White Tree Nimloth, which her father had tended with his own hands, cut down and burned as the first offering in the great Temple; the Faithful hunted and sacrificed on its altar. Amandil and Elendil, her kinsmen through the line of Andúnië, kept the old ways in secret at Rómenna, and there is no record that she was able to help them.

The Downfall

In 3319 Ar-Pharazôn sailed with the Great Armament to seize immortality from the Valar, and in answer Eru changed the world. Númenor was broken and sank beneath a great wave. In the last hour Míriel, so The Silmarillion records, fled up the slopes of the Meneltarma toward the hallow where her father had prayed and her people had once called on the One, but the sea rose faster than she could climb, and it took her with her cry still in the air. It is one of the few particular deaths named in the drowning of Númenor, and it is remembered as the death of the Queen who should have reigned. Her passing ended the direct line of the kings, as Tar-Palantir had foretold, and left Elendil and his sons, of the cadet line of Andúnië, as the heirs of Elros in Middle-earth.

Drowned in the Downfall of Númenor in S.A. 3319, overtaken by the sea as she climbed the Meneltarma.