Soon after his accession to Gondor's throne, King Ondoher realised that his kingdom's northern enemies, the Wainriders, had made an alliance with her old southern foe, the Haradrim. To counter this double threat, Ondoher divided Gondor's army into two parts; a larger Northern Army and a smaller Southern Army. The Northern Army he led himself; the Captaincy of the Southern Army he gave to his distant cousin Eärnil.
As Ondoher had foreseen, the Wainriders and Haradrim launched a joint attack on Gondor, in the year III 1944, and Gondor's two armies marched through Ithilien to the defence of the South-kingdom. Ondoher's northern force was all but destroyed by the Wainriders, but Eärnil led his lesser army to a great victory over the Haradrim. Turning north, the Southern Army reunited with the remnant of the Northern, and together they fell on the Wainriders at the Battle of the Camp. Eärnil's victories as the Southern Army's Captain would ultimately earn him the Kingship of Gondor itself.
Notes
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The date of Eärnil's birth appears only in The History of Middle-earth volume XII, The Peoples of Middle-earth. It cannot therefore be considered completely reliable.
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2 |
Eärnil held this title in III 1944, when Gondor was invaded simultaneously from the East and South, and therefore had to divide its forces into a Northern and a Southern Army. This seems to have been a unique situation (we have no other comparable accounts of a division like this), and therefore Eärnil would probably have been the only Gondorian to hold this title. It is not inconceivable that there were other Captains of the Southern Army at other times in Gondor's history, but if there were any such captains, we have no record of their existence.
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- Updated 12 April 2022
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