Isildur

• 1. Introduction

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  Isildur carried a stolen fruit through a royal court in disguise, bleeding from wounds he suffered escaping with it. That fruit was all that remained of Nimloth the White Tree after the King of Númenor ordered it burned. The tree survived because of him. Years later, he would stand at the fires of Mount Doom with the power to end evil, and walk away. That single choice set in motion everything that follows in the stories of Middle-earth. Who was this man, descended from half-elves and the founder of Númenor itself, who saved a tree and lost a Ring? How did a king who outlasted a seven-year siege die at the hands of wandering orcs in an obscure bend of a river? And what did J. R. R. Tolkien keep rewriting about him, across decades of unfinished drafts, before he finally settled on the version the world now knows?

• 2. Son of a Drowned Island

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  Elendil, Isildur's father, was descended from Elros, the half-elven founder of Númenor. Because Elros carried elvish blood through the marriage of Beren to the elf Lúthien, his line lived far longer than ordinary men. That inheritance made Isildur's family different from the start. Númenor itself had been created at the opening of the Second Age as a reward to the men who fought against Morgoth, the First Age's primary antagonist. By Isildur's youth, the island kingdom had fallen under the influence of the fallen Maia Sauron, who pushed the reigning king, Ar-Pharazôn, toward cutting down Nimloth the White Tree. Isildur entered the royal court in disguise and stole a fruit from Nimloth before it was felled. The escape cost him severe wounds, but the seedling grown from that fruit would travel with the family across the sea and into a new age of the world. When the creator Ilúvatar destroyed Númenor entirely, Elendil's family escaped in nine ships. Isildur carried with him the living continuation of something the king had tried to erase.

• 3. Building a New World

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  Elendil landed in the north of Middle-earth and founded Arnor. Isildur and his brother Anárion landed in the south, where together they built Gondor and established the cities of Osgiliath, Minas Ithil, and Minas Anor. Isildur ruled from Minas Ithil on the east bank of the River Anduin; Anárion ruled from Minas Anor on the west. They governed Gondor jointly from Osgiliath between them. Sauron attacked and captured Minas Ithil, destroying the White Tree Isildur had planted there. Isildur and his family escaped by boat down the Anduin, carrying a seedling of the tree with them, and sailed north to find the Elven King Gil-galad and their father. While Isildur went seeking allies, Anárion defended Osgiliath and pushed Sauron back. The resulting coalition, the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, defeated Sauron's army at the Battle of Dagorlad, then advanced into Mordor and besieged Barad-dûr. Anárion was killed by a stone thrown from the Dark Tower before the siege ended. The campaign ran for seven years before Sauron himself came out to face the besiegers. Elendil and Gil-galad both died fighting the Dark Lord, but Sauron's mortal form was broken in the exchange. Isildur, using the hilt-shard of his father's broken sword Narsil, cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand.

• 4. The Ring and the Scroll

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  Elrond and Círdan, Gil-galad's lieutenants, urged Isildur to throw the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. He refused. He claimed it as his own, influenced by its power. Before leaving Mordor, he wrote a scroll describing the Ring and copied out its fading inscription. That scroll was deposited in the archives of Minas Anor, the city later renamed Minas Tirith, and it lay undiscovered for nearly an Age until Gandalf found it. Tom Shippey, the Tolkien scholar, notes that Isildur's own words in the scroll give him away: his phrase "It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain" echoes the word Gollum would later use obsessively for the same object. Shippey reads this as Tolkien's deliberate signal that Isildur was already becoming addicted. After a year in Gondor restoring order and defining the kingdom's boundaries, Isildur planted the seedling of the White Tree in Minas Anor as a memorial to Anárion. He left his own helmet as Gondor's crown, since Anárion's helmet had been crushed at Barad-dûr. He installed Anárion's son Meneldil as King of Gondor, then turned north toward Arnor, where his wife and his youngest son Valandil had waited out the war at Rivendell.

• 5. The Gladden Fields

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  On the 5th of October in the second year of Isildur's reign, his party was ambushed by orcs at the Gladden Fields along the middle course of the Anduin. Tolkien left two differing accounts of what happened there. The Silmarillion states that Isildur had set no guard at his camp, believing all enemies defeated. Unfinished Tales gives a fuller account: Isildur had left Minas Anor with roughly 200 soldiers. Most of their horses were beasts of burden rather than mounts. They had two dozen archers, too few to change the outcome against a force Sauron had specifically deployed east of the Misty Mountains to catch stragglers from the Last Alliance. Those orcs had waited, concealed, when the main armies passed. The first orc attack at sunset was beaten off, but the orcs regrouped and surrounded the party. When nightfall came they attacked from all sides. Isildur's son Ciryon was killed. Aratan, another son, was mortally wounded trying to rescue Elendur, Isildur's eldest, who urged his father to flee. Isildur put on the Ring, hoping invisibility would let him escape. He shed his armor and swam for the far bank of the Anduin. The Ring slipped from his finger of its own accord midway across. Freed from its weight, Isildur rallied and nearly reached the other bank. But the Elendilmir gem he wore betrayed his position to orcs waiting there, and they killed him with poisoned arrows. His squire Ohtar escaped with the shards of Narsil before the orcs could close the circle. Estelmo, squire to Elendur, was found alive under his master's body, knocked unconscious by a club.

• 6. The Long Making of Isildur

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  In The Fall of Númenor, written before 1937, Tolkien had two brothers named Elendil and Valandil escape the island's destruction and found two kingdoms. Valandil was a precursor figure: not Elendil's son but his brother, and the one who went south. The Lost Road, started shortly after, was a time-travel story in which a father and son were to reappear across human history. Only two chapters were completed, one set near the present day with an Oswin and his son Alboin, and one set in Númenor with the father as Elendil and the son as Herendil. Tolkien abandoned that story before writing the escape, but the characters survived into new work. In an early Lord of the Rings manuscript dated 1938, in the chapter that became "The Shadow of the Past", Gandalf tells Frodo's precursor Bingo that the ring had "fallen from the hand of an elf as he swam across a river". Isildur was not yet an elf, but the drowning image was already there. In the next version Isildur appears under the name Ithildor, then Isildor. His father at that stage was called Orendil, not Elendil. The name and the role shifted for years before Tolkien fixed them into the shape readers now know. Paul H. Kocher observed the deliberate contrast Tolkien built into the finished work: where Isildur claimed the Ring as his own, his descendant Aragorn immediately renounces all claim to it upon hearing the argument that as Isildur's heir the Ring belongs to him. Aragorn's own explanation was that he had searched for the Ring to help Gandalf, since "it seemed fit that Isildur's heir should labour to repair Isildur's fault".

• 7. Interpretations and Adaptations

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  Catholic scholars have drawn a parallel between Aragorn's descent from Isildur and the Christian genealogy in which Jesus descends from King David. The Tolkien scholar Nicholas Birns connects Isildur's survival of Númenor's drowning to Plato's Atlantis, the Biblical fall of man, and Noah's flood; he notes that Tolkien himself called Elendil a "Noachian figure". In Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film, Isildur appears as the events of the Last Alliance are shown in silhouette, identified only as "Prince Isildur of the mighty Kings from across the Sea". In Peter Jackson's film trilogy he is played by Harry Sinclair, appearing in voiced-over flashback sequences. Shippey noted a revealing gap in Jackson's adaptation: the voice-over says Isildur had "this one chance to destroy evil for ever", while Tolkien's Elrond elsewhere recalls believing evil had been ended after the defeat of Thangorodrim and being proved wrong. For Tolkien, even the best of men were fallen and victory was always temporary; a dramatic film required a cleaner divide. In the streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the young Isildur is played by the English actor Maxim Baldry. The showrunner Patrick McKay stated the intention was to show Isildur as sympathetic and burdened with heavy responsibilities, comparing him to Michael Corleone from The Godfather trilogy. In the video game Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Sauron revived Isildur with one of the nine rings after his death at the Gladden Fields, tortured him into submission, and made him a Nazgûl with the power to raise the dead. The game's protagonist Talion ultimately chose to spare Isildur and release his spirit rather than subdue him, though Talion then took the ring for himself and became a Nazgûl in turn. During the War of the Ring, the Nazgûl scoured the Gladden Fields looking for traces of Isildur's remains and found nothing. Saruman had arrived there first and had deliberately misled them. When Gimli opened a hidden closet in Orthanc after Saruman's fall, he found the original Elendilmir, the gem that had given Isildur away to the orcs on the riverbank and was believed lost the night he died.