Tombs of the Kings

The royal tombs raised for the rulers and worthies of Minas Tirith, on a shelf of land between the city and Mount Mindolluin that rose behind it. This secluded place was reached by the Silent Street, Rath Dínen, that ran down from the sixth circle of the city. Along it were ranged the Houses of the Dead, which included the House of the Kings, though certain Kings were evidently entombed within individual houses of their own.

Counting from Meneldil, the first independent King of Gondor, there were thirty-one Kings before his line came to an end. Most of these would have been buried among the Tombs, though there would have been exceptions (notably the lost final King, Eärnur, whose body was never recovered from Minas Morgul).

Originally. the founding High King of the Dúnedain, Elendil, had a Tomb elsewhere in Gondor, in a hallow on the slopes of the Halifirien. At the time of the founding of Rohan, however, Elendil's mortal remains were removed from that original Tomb and reinterred among the Tombs of the Kings. Long afterward, Aragorn refounded the line of Kings, and he too was laid to rest among the Tombs of the Kings. He thus re-established a tradition that had ended with Eärnil II, the father of lost Eärnur, nearly a thousand years beforehand.

References to the Tombs of the Kings are almost always to the Houses of the Dead on the Silent Street, especially where the term is used as a capitalised proper noun. There are examples, however, of the phrase being used (without capitalisation) for a different set of tombs. These were the tombs of the Kings and Queens of Númenor, who were buried in the rock beneath the mountain of the Meneltarma in Númenor's Valley of the Tombs.