Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-29212138-20170526182111/@comment-25101089-20170527170437

I think it could be entirely possible that the nobility of Umbar saw themselves as 'Númenórean', while in reality only possessing a few drops of diluted Númenórean blood, being almost entirely Haradric in terms of actual ethnic makeup. But cultural heritage is more complex than that in reality.

Let's consider the real-world analogue: the Roman Empire. And the Byzantine Empire. Now, I am not a historian, but as far as I know: the people of the 'Byzantine Empire' never actually called themselves that. Nor did they call themselves the 'Eastern Roman Empire'. They called themselves the Roman Empire - because, to them, that's what they were. It didn't matter that they were really more Greek than Roman; from their point of view, they were the true heirs to the legacy of Rome, not those barbarian hordes in the West. And they weren't even entirely wrong to do so, because even in the days of 'Roman' Rome, what made the Romans Roman was not as simple as having Roman blood. The vast majority of the Empire was not ethnically Roman - even on the Italian peninsula. To be Roman was to share a cultural heritage, a set of common institutions... Furthermore, the capital of the Roman Empire was moved to Byzantium well before the fall of the 'Western Roman Empire', so the Byzantine Empire was in a real, meaningful sense just the continuation of the original Roman Empire. And its people were still Roman - despite not being Roman. Kind of.

And then you have the Holy Roman Empire (which was 'neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire') claiming to be the true successor of Rome, and further down the line even Moscow and Nazi Germany saw themselves as being the successors of Rome in some way. People have been identifying themselves with Rome for centuries, regardless of whether they actually were Roman.

Anyway... all that is to say that even as late as the War of the Ring, the ruling Umbarrim could well have considered themselves the true heirs of Númenor's legacy (of course, interpreting that to refer to Ar-Pharazôn and the King's Men, not the Faithful), with Gondor being the usurpers from their point of view. Having said that, I do think it's far too much of a stretch to assume that an actual pure Númenórean bloodline could still exist thousands of years later. And the idea of a ruling caste of ethnically pure Black Númenóreans, Targaryen-style, is certainly misplaced, explicitly refuted by the book. But that doesn't necessarily matter to how they saw themselves.

This view also seems to fit best with the quote. 'But they married women of the Harad and had in three generations lost most of their Numenorean blood; but they did not forget their feud with the house of Eldakar.' They lost most of their Númenórean blood; but they did not forget their feud. If the Umbarrim identified as Haradrim, why would they still care so much about the House of Eldacar in particular as to have a feud with them (distinct from a hatred for Gondor in general)? Because, to them, the House of Eldacar were the Usurpers, and Umbar was the true heir of Númenor.