Isildur: Hero or Failure? | Tolkien's Most Misjudged King Explained

A reframing of Isildur Elendilion, the Numenorean prince history remembers only for refusing to destroy the One Ring on the slopes of Mount Doom. Long before that moment, a young Isildur stole a fruit from Nimloth, the White Tree of Numenor, taking near-fatal spear wounds to save the seedling that would become the White Tree of Gondor. On Orodruin he claimed the Ring as weregild for his father Elendil and brother Anarion, reaching for the Anglo-Saxon legal vocabulary of his ancestors against the one object it could not hold. Tolkien returned to the figure decades later in The Disaster of the Gladden Fields, showing Isildur already repentant, riding to surrender the Ring to the Three Keepers when orcs ambushed his column and the Ring slipped from his finger of its own will, betraying him to death. Three thousand years later Aragorn, the thirty-ninth heir of Isildur, finally renounced what his ancestor could not.