#in rohan and gondor

[bongwateriero]

I WISH I COULD WRITE

[lulii999]

The way I would actually die for Faramir and Eowyn.

[velvet4510]

Never forget that it took Éowyn 2 seconds to recognize Faramir’s worth upon meeting him. I could go on and on about how he’s the first person outside her family to truly and completely respect her but it goes both ways! Denethor never ever saw Faramir’s worth in all his lifetime, but Éowyn took ONE look at him and was like “wow he’s great.” They’re BOTH so GOOD for each other!!

[gandalf-the-fool]

[theladyeowyn]

“… it would ease my heart, if while the Sun yet shines, I could see you still.”

[witchofthewild]

I would rather spend a lifetime with you, than face all the Ages of this world alone.

*t4t indigiqueers your fantasy otp* (inspired by @neechees gif sets!!)

[morethantheycansay]

Some of you weren't there when the Westfold fell and it shows.

[man2al]

Faramir and Éowyn

twt doodle account: @Ma_n2_al

Do not repost, reupload, save or use my work elsewhere

[articoluminos]

Boromir Fate

[alexandra-scribbles]

Humanity peaked when Viggo Mortensen was cast as Aragorn in LOTR.

We’ve gone downhill ever since.

[bretwalda-lamnguin]

The weirdness of the Dúnedain is definitely downplayed in the fandom, but I really don’t think people get how strange Gondorian Dúnedain must seem to the Rohirrim.

There’s a spooky mountain on their border full of ghosts that are trapped there because a Gondorian king cursed them. In the war of the ring the Gondorians talk of their head of state being prematurely aged because his hair began to grey in his 60s. They put this down to him mind wrestling an evil demigod, and they’re right! Some of them can actually read minds, others can command horses with only thought. They’re very tall and have bright eyes that are sometimes described as glowing.

This is very weird! Their main ally is ruled by giants who age weirdly and look like elves with strange powers from a drowned continent.

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

It’s Tolkien Meta Week, and today is LOTR Day. I’d never really describe any of my own random musings as formal “meta” (and certainly not like the brilliant stuff other people think up!). Nevertheless, I do muse away, and so I’ll just blather it all out here informally. Read below, if you are so inclined, for more of my obsession with incredibly obscure characters and Tolkien’s obsession with forcing Gondorian supremacy on everyone!

We know Tolkien loved to set up really distinct narrative parallels between pairs of Gondorians and Rohirrim (think Denethor/Théoden, Boromir/Théodred, Háma/Beregond) so that the ways that they are both similar and different can teach us specific things about the characters as individuals and about their kingdoms and cultures as a whole. And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the life experiences of a much older pair — Valacar of Gondor and Thengel of Rohan — and what Tolkien was trying to communicate with the undeniable connections he drew between these two very different characters who were separated by ~ 1,500 years of history.

First, since these are lesser known characters who exist largely in the appendices, let’s start with the basics:

Valacar was the heir to the throne of Gondor when he was sent to live as an ambassador of sorts among the Northmen of Rhovanion (the people who would go on to become the éothéod and then the Rohirrim). He was meant to learn their language, manners and customs, but he did more than that — he fell in love with the culture, married a local woman (a princess of the Northmen named Vidumavi) and had a son, Vinitharya. Eventually, his time in Rhovanion came to an end and he went back to Gondor, where he met almost nothing but grief. A substantial part of the Gondorian ruling class rejected his wife as being of lesser blood than the Númenórean lines of Gondor, and they certainly rejected his half-Northman son, who they did not want as king when his time came. Despite the fact that Valacar and his family showed only loyalty to Gondor and, in fact, tried repeatedly to bend in the direction of the Gondorian hardliners (for example, they changed Vinitharya’s name to Eldacar to make him sound less “foreign” to the Gondorians), those same hardliners staged a coup against Eldacar, killed his own son, and started a civil war that only ended after much death and destruction.

Thengel was the heir to the throne of Rohan when he left to live in Gondor, by implication because he wanted out from under the rule of his father, Fengel, who was described as greedy, difficult, and often at odds with everyone around him. Thengel threw himself into Gondorian life, learning their languages, joining the military, and serving their steward. He also married a local woman, Morwen, with whom he had 5 children, 3 of which were born in Gondor, including his son. When Fengel finally died, Thengel returned to Rohan and took the throne, where he had a successful reign despite the fact that he had been very resistant to the idea of returning and spent the rest of his life still clinging to elements of Gondorian culture (like holding onto Sindarin as the language of his rule rather than using Rohirric as one would expect). Still, he ruled well and passed the throne on seamlessly to his son, Théoden. 

So. BIG SAME on major elements of their stories — a prince of Gondor who went to live in proto-Rohan and a prince of Rohan who went to live in Gondor. They each embraced those foreign lands, married locally and had sons of mixed heritage before returning to their kingdoms to rule and pass on the throne to those sons. But the paths couldn’t be more different once they got home again. Valacar, who left Gondor as part of a duty to his land and returned willingly, had his wife and son met only with discrimination, resistance and eventually full-on insurrection despite repeated attempts to ingratiate themselves with the Gondorians. Thengel, who left Rohan of his own accord and only came back against his will, had his wife and son welcomed and honored by the Rohirrim despite the fact that Thengel himself continued to show some, shall we say, divided loyalty when he was there.

In terms of outcomes, the text of the appendices seems to come down hard on the people who opposed Valacar, Vidumavi and Vinitharya/Eldacar, because their effort backfired spectacularly. The civil war so thoroughly depleted the ranks of the Gondorian nobility that Eldacar, once he’d won the throne back, had to encourage significant immigration from Rhovanion to replenish Gondorian society. Plus, that depletion and the lingering fear of *another* civil war prevented the Gondorians from resolving a thorny succession crisis years later — lacking any heir whose claim to the kingship would be accepted by everyone, the line of kings in Gondor just came to an abrupt end instead. It’s hard to imagine a bigger karmic smackdown than to have your coup, which was meant to protect the alleged sanctity of the Gondorian monarchy from “lesser” influences, instead result in an influx of those “lesser” influences into your society and eventually the total loss of the monarchy itself! 

On the opposite side of the ledger, the Rohirrim were narratively rewarded for their more open minded approach. Thengel proved to be a decent king and gave them the line that produced Théoden (another good king, one small period of manipulation aside) as well as Théodred, Éomer, and Éowyn, all of whom had critical roles to play in the fight against Sauron, the preservation of freedom in Middle Earth and the survival of Rohan as an independent kingdom. All good things!

So this seems like a clear situation where Gondor did wrong and was punished, and Rohan did right and was rewarded. And so the moral of the story would be to Be Like Rohan, at least in this respect. AND YET,  I’m not entirely sure that’s what Tolkien is really saying because the Gondorians don’t actually seem to have learned their lesson. And that’s fine — what are humans if not bad at learning the lessons of history? — except that the meta narrative of LOTR itself seems to agree with them. 

For starters, the carping of the Gondorian hardliners about the tainting of pure Gondorian blood turns out to be true. Introducing “lesser” bloodlines into Gondor *does* eventually shorten their unusually long lifespans, which had always been the sign of the divine favor that was bestowed on them as a people. So the book buys into the notion that there are real and significant differences of quality between the high Men of Gondor and those from other parts of Middle Earth that have nothing to do with their actions and intentions but come only from genetics. That’s a big ick, but the book definitely validates the hardliners’ position.

For that reason, it’s unsurprising, I guess, that the Gondorians are still invested in these ideas of blood purity — they can see the proof of its effects in their own bodies. Yes, they are more accepting of outsiders marrying into the upper echelons of their society by the late Third Age, but I don’t think their embrace of either Éowyn (who has some Gondorian heritage and, anyway, was not marrying the king!) or Arwen (who is from a race that is fetishized as higher and nobler than the others and that has been present in the Gondorian royal line as far back as the very first king of Númenor) can be offered as proof that they would have similarly accepted a queen from a “lesser” community of Men. Indeed, they still explicitly endorse the same beliefs about the inherent inferiority of other humans, with no less than Faramir himself repeating the idea that there is a hierarchy of Men in high, middle and low tiers (with the Rohirrim only qualifying as “middle”) based on their perceived difference from the gold standard of a descendant of Númenor.

I think it’s significant that it’s Faramir who says this, because he is Tolkien’s self-described Author Insert, and he’s also someone who is established as the very pinnacle of wisdom and judgment. If Faramir believes something to be true, we, as readers, are generally meant to believe that it IS true, as pretty much every other thing he says in any other context is proven out by the narrative. So, again, the book is telling us that not all Men are equal in Middle Earth.

So what are we to make of this? If Tolkien truly meant the Valacar/Thengel parallel to be a cautionary tale that would warn against a mindset of looking down on other Men as inherently inferior — and I really don’t know how else you can read it given how sympathetic the text is to Valacar and his family, how catastrophic the kinstrife in Gondor proves to be, and how Thengel shows us what it looks like to handle a similar situation very differently — why does the story still seem to want us to embrace the very same ideas that nearly brought down Valacar’s family and caused untold suffering in Gondor and elsewhere? Why does the introduction of Northmen heritage into the royal line cause its degradation? Why does The Author’s Favored Character still espouse the Gondorian insurrectionists’ rhetoric about lesser Men? Why is it that the whole world can only be saved by the return to Gondor of a king who has that pure “blood of Westernesse” that the Gondorian nobles of Valacar’s day cared so much about? They were wrong to hold Eldacar’s mixed heritage against him and yet it’s also true that the world can only be set right when someone of “pure” heritage like Aragorn is put back in charge? It seems like a mixed message for sure.

Personally, I think Tolkien got trapped by the allure of a particular religious/moral idea, namely that you can earn divine favor through service to god. That might have been a very appealing concept to someone looking at the world through his particular religious lens, but when he allowed that divine favor to pass down through generations such that people were benefitting from it purely through inheritance and not from independent effort, it becomes a real problem. The Gondorians have to be better than everyone else because they come from the Númenóreans, and the Númenóreans have to be better because they come from the houses of the edain that fought alongside the Valar in the war of wrath and received that divine blessing in the form of longer life *for them and their ancestors.* And now you’ve got to square the implications of that with the otherwise obvious truth that no Man is inherently better or more ennobled than another simply because of where/when they’re born. And you really can’t. It forces you to have Men — in the form of the Rohirrim, most notably — who are acting only in good and noble ways but still have to be subordinated to the glory of Gondor for reasons that have fuck all to do with the behavior or intentions of either group. I think Tolkien recognized this problem, which is why the story feints at the idea that Gondor is wrong, but ultimately he couldn’t let it go and the story ends up bearing out their beliefs. And so here I am, all these years later, finding it infuriating!

[tolkien-povs]

The entire Tolkien Legendarium is literally a game of Monopoly, except Melkor and Mairon are "sneakily" taking everything when the players aren't looking at the board or are busy kinslaying/ ignoring/ grudging each other.

[velvet4510]

Y’all are too hard on Éowyn for marrying Faramir as if having a husband will somehow strip her of her individuality.

Have y’all MET Faramir? This is NOT a guy who saw the attractive Princess of Rohan from afar and was like “I want her to be my ball and chain.”

This is the guy who fell in love with her while she was at her lowest, physically and mentally. He fell in love with her when she was beaten, exhausted, weary, wounded, grieving, and depressed. He fell in love with her when he found out what she did on that battlefield. He fell in love with a kindred spirit, the only person who could truly understand him and his own sufferings. He saw her for exactly who she was - someone strong and brave and bold and unconventional and independent - and that is what he loves about her. When he says “you are beautiful,” he is speaking to her soul too, and not just her face.

As her husband, he will only dote on her and seek her opinions on everything. He already treats her as an equal and cultivates her true self; who says he’ll suddenly stop doing that when they’re married? He would rather die than suppress or hold back the powerful mind and spirit that he fell in love with in the Houses of Healing!

If he was like most other men, would she have married him? Heck no! She has standards, and he meets them.

She married the only guy who would ever let her be herself. This girl got it right. She did not settle, and her being with him does not take anything away from her.

[gandalf-the-fool]

[essenceofarda]

The newly crowned King of the Riddermark made it almost an entire day out sailing with Imrahil's children without notable incident--until, upon arriving back at the docks of Dol Amroth, he finds himself slipping off the dock and into a fisherman's catch (years later he'd still not be convinced it wasn't Amrothos who pushed him). Despite his embarrassment over the blunder, it wasn't ALL for naught, for it prompted the usually stoic Princess Lothíriel to attempt a heroic rescue, and her boisterous laughter at the seaweed caught in his beard was enough for Éomer to forgive the situation :)

SO a while back,, (back in MAY 2024), I asked (I think) for Eothirial themed sketch requests. @konartiste requested: "Lothíriel is laughing at Éomer making a fool of himself."

Ahhhh Thank you for sending in this prompt I really enjoyed sketching this and coming up with a lil story for the request :D Hoping to finish up the rest of the sketch prompts/requests sitting in my askbox over the next few months :>

Timelapse of the drawing process under the cut :)