Queen Beruthiel and Her Cats: A Strange Tolkien Mystery

Queen Berúthiel is the strangest mystery in The Lord of the Rings — a name Tolkien wrote into Aragorn's casual line in Moria without knowing who she was, and then spent a decade quietly trying to discover. In a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden he confessed: I have yet to discover anything about the cats of Queen Berúthiel. The answer he eventually produced is the only sustained Gothic horror passage in published Tolkien. A Black Númenórean queen of Gondor, married to Tarannon Falastur, the first Ship-king. She hated the sea, wore only black and silver, kept gardens of cypress and yew filled with tormented sculptures, and ran a private surveillance state through nine black cats and one white. Tarannon set her adrift on a ship that was last seen passing Umbar under a sickle moon. Her name was scraped from the Book of the Kings — but the proverb survived two thousand years.