The youngest son of Isildur, left behind at Rivendell as a small child when his father and three elder brothers marched to the Gladden Fields — which made him, when the orc-arrows found them all, the sole heir of the northern line. He became third King of Arnor, and from him the unbroken succession of kings and chieftains descended father to son for nearly three thousand years until Aragorn. Tolkien noted the quiet pattern: the heirs of Elendil endured not through power but through persistence, a candle kept lit in the North through the long dark.