Queen Beruthiel and Her Cats: Tolkien's Strangest Mystery
Who was Queen Berúthiel? Why did Tolkien spend a decade trying to figure out the woman he had already named? In this deep dive, we explore the strangest mystery in The Lord of the Rings — a Black Númenórean queen of Gondor whose nine black cats and one white ran a private surveillance state, and whose name Aragorn drops in Moria two thousand years after she was scraped from the Book of the Kings.Married to Tarannon Falastur, the first Ship-king, Berúthiel hated the sea, wore only black and silver, and kept gardens of cypress and yew. This is the only sustained Gothic horror in published…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.