Menaures

Menaures is a mountain hermit whose hidden identity links the secluded world of the mountains to the court of King Unauwen: he is the king’s twin brother, a prince who renounced his rank and claim to the throne. His life offers an alternative to inherited authority, while his welcome to Tiuri and Piak brings that private history into the journey’s present.

Identity and Renunciation

Menaures was born on the same day as King Unauwen and closely resembled him. Unlike his twin, however, he never laid claim to the throne. He gave up his princely status, adopted another name, wandered through the world, and eventually withdrew to the mountains as a hermit. His renunciation was not simply a change of residence: it placed distance between him and the royal identity he had been born to inhabit.

The distinction between his former rank and chosen life remains visible even after his identity is exposed. When Piak remarks on his resemblance to the king, Menaures insists that he should be seen as the hermit Piak has always known, not as a prince or ruler. Tiuri nevertheless perceives something princely in him despite his simple clothes and gaunt figure. The contrast leaves both truths intact: Menaures has relinquished his title, but his origin has not become wholly unreadable.

A Life in the Mountains

The account of Menaures’s earlier travels suggests that solitude was not an incidental feature of his later retreat. Tiuri’s father had made many journeys with him, but Menaures also often went alone, spending hours on a hillside or mountaintop looking and thinking. The mountains therefore appear not merely as the place where he settled, but as a landscape in which he had long sought distance and reflection.

By the time Tiuri and Piak travel through the mountain country, Menaures has been absent from the lands around Unauwen for many years. The toll lord says that he lives beyond the Great Mountain Range of Dagonaut and Unauwen, though he is unsure whether he ought to reveal the hermit’s adopted name. Pilgrims and knights from his former country have sometimes crossed the mountains to visit him. His seclusion is substantial, but not absolute: people still make the difficult journey to find him, and his former life remains known to those who remember it.

Recognition and Welcome

The possibility that Menaures is King Unauwen’s brother first reaches Tiuri and Piak through the toll lord’s account of the two twins. Tiuri immediately thinks of the hermit by the source of The Blue River. Later, when the friends are in bed, Piak voices the question directly: could Menaures be the king’s brother? The connection turns an apparent stranger of the mountains into a figure attached to the history of a kingdom.

When Tiuri and Piak eventually approach his hut, Piak grows unusually quiet as they near the familiar place. It is dark, but a lantern beside the hut marks their way. Menaures comes outside and says he has expected them; he welcomes them, and they soon sit together at his table. The travelers tell him that their mission has succeeded. The scene presents him not as a remote name in a story about kings, but as a host receiving the young travelers who have returned to a place Piak knows well.

Menaures does not deny the kinship once Piak asks. He says that his brother knows how much he thinks of him, then acknowledges that Piak has discovered the truth. His refusal to have greetings carried to the king does not amount to indifference: he describes an ongoing inward attachment while maintaining the distance his chosen life requires. His identity is private, but his brother has not disappeared from his thoughts.

Menaures and Piak

Menaures’s conversation with Piak gives the hermit a role in the younger boy’s difficult decision about whether to remain in the mountains. Piak admits that he would rather stay. Yet he has promised Tiuri he would accompany him, and he fears that leaving now might make Tiuri think he had abandoned him. Menaures does not settle the choice for him. Instead, he asks plainly whether Piak would prefer to stay, allowing the desire Piak has been struggling to express to be spoken openly.

That exchange shows a relationship in which Menaures can ask a searching question without claiming authority over the answer. Piak is caught between affection for the mountain home and loyalty to his promise; Menaures’s response gives space to both sides of that conflict. His own renunciation of princely life does not become a command that Piak should choose withdrawal too. The decision remains Piak’s.

Significance and Limits

Menaures’s story places two forms of identity beside each other: the inherited station of a prince and the life of a hermit made through renunciation. His twin brother occupies the throne; Menaures has chosen a different relation to power, one marked by wandering, withdrawal, and a continuing but distant bond with the king. The narrative does not describe that choice as erasing his past. His resemblance to King Unauwen and Tiuri’s sense of his bearing keep the abandoned rank present even as Menaures asks to be recognized by the life he leads now.

That tension also resonates with Tiuri’s own emerging understanding of knighthood. The king later tells Tiuri that, by completing his mission and keeping his promise to Knight Edwinem, he has shown himself to be a knight even before receiving the formal accolade. Menaures and Tiuri reach their identities by different routes: Menaures steps away from a status into which he was born, while Tiuri’s deeds establish a status he had not yet formally received. In both cases, identity cannot be reduced to title or ceremony alone. The account ends with Menaures established as a hermit and brother to the king; it does not say that he returns to court or abandons his chosen life.