Boromir

Boromir was a Man of Gondor, born in the year 2978 of the Third Age as the elder son of Denethor II, twenty-sixth Ruling Steward of the realm. Through his father he belonged to the House of the Stewards, a line descended from Húrin of Emyn Arnen, and so counted among the Dúnedain of the South, the remnant of Númenórean blood that had ruled Gondor since its founding. His brother Faramir was born five years after him, in 2983, and the two grew up in a household whose authority rested on an old constitutional fiction: since Mardil the Faithful, the Stewards had governed in the name of a king who had not returned. Boromir was therefore not a prince but the heir of a stewardship, an office held in trust rather than by crown.

He bore a single name, without surname or hereditary epithet, and was distinguished in speech chiefly by patronymic and office: son of Denethor, Captain of the White Tower, and simply Boromir of Gondor when the city itself needed naming. The form of the name is Elvish rather than Westron, following the usage of the Dúnedain of Gondor, who continued to give their children names of Sindarin shape long after the daily tongue of the land had become the Common Speech; his brother's name, Faramir, is built to the same pattern and shares its second element. The pronunciation follows the ordinary rules Tolkien set out for such names: the stress falls on the first syllable, and the vowels are the pure, unglided sounds of the Elvish tongues. The name was not newly minted for him, for an earlier Boromir had held the stewardship generations before and was remembered in Gondor as a great captain against the Enemy.

The name reaches further back still in the posthumously edited matter of the Elder Days, where a Boromir appears among the Edain of the First Age: a descendant of Bëor the Old and a forefather of the line that produced Barahir and Beren. That such a name should reappear in Gondor is consistent with the long memory the Dúnedain kept of their Edain ancestry. Of its meaning, the second element is the more securely glossed: mîr, 'jewel', recurs across Quenya and Sindarin names alike, from Míriel to the Nauglamír, so that the name at least closes on a word of value and brightness.

By the closing years of the Third Age Boromir held the chief command of Gondor's armies, and Appendix A records that his father loved him above his brother and set great store by his prowess. As eldest son of the House of the Stewards he carried its principal heirloom, a great horn bound with silver, cut according to tradition from the horn of one of the wild kine that ranged the far northern lands in the days of the Elder hunters; Faramir later explained that it was the right of the elder son alone and that its call would be heard in Minas Tirith by any of the line who blew it in need. Boromir's recorded service falls chiefly on the eastern frontier, where Gondor's hold on the ruins of Osgiliath had grown precarious. On 20 June 3018 the forces of Mordor made their first open assault across Anduin and drove the garrison from the eastern shore; Boromir and Faramir held the western bank long enough to cast down the last standing bridge, and by his own account only four of the rearguard came away alive, swimming the river while a terror they could not name pressed upon them from the far side.

The event that turned him northward was a dream. On the eve of the assault Faramir dreamed of a darkening western sky and a voice that spoke in verse of a broken sword awaiting in Imladris, of a thing called Isildur's Bane, and of a halfling who would come forth; the dream returned to him, and once it came to Boromir also. Denethor could give no counsel beyond the name Imladris, which few in Gondor could any longer place on a map, and Boromir claimed the errand for himself on the ground that the road was long and dangerous and that the elder brother should bear it. He rode out from Minas Tirith on 4 July 3018 and spent a hundred and ten days on the journey, feeling his way north by half-remembered lore; he lost his horse at the crossings of the Greyflood by the ruins of Tharbad and completed the road on foot. He reached Rivendell by night on 24 October, arriving as if summoned into the very assembly the dream had described.

At the Council of Elrond on 25 October he spoke for Gondor as a realm that had shielded the western lands for centuries at its own cost, and he argued, when the nature of the Ring had been declared, that so great a weapon should not be thrown away: let it be given to the valiant among Men and turned against its maker. Elrond and Gandalf rejected the proposal outright, and Boromir did not press it, though he plainly remained unconvinced. He was also sceptical of the claim advanced for Aragorn, questioning what the heir of a broken line could bring to a city that needed soldiers rather than titles. When the Company was chosen he was named to it as the representative of Men of the West, his own road home lying for a long while beside theirs. The Fellowship left Rivendell on 25 December 3018, and Boromir sounded his horn as they went, saying he would not steal away like a thief.

On the road he proved the most physically capable of the party after Aragorn. It was his counsel to carry firewood up Caradhras, which saved the Company when the storm halted them in January 3019; when the drifts closed the pass he and Aragorn forced a channel through the snow and carried the hobbits down in turn. He opposed the descent into Moria, having no liking for the delvings under the mountains, and it was he who threw a stone into the still water before the western gate. Within, he set his shoulder to the doors of the Chamber of Mazarbul, and after Gandalf's fall at the bridge on 15 January he helped bring the survivors out to the open air. In Lothlórien, which the Company entered on 17 January and left on 16 February, he was ill at ease, and he afterwards told Frodo that the Lady of the Galadhrim had seemed to offer him what he most desired and to weigh whether he would take it.

Down Anduin his thoughts turned steadily homeward, and he spoke more and more of the strength that Minas Tirith might yet muster. The Company came to Parth Galen on 25 February 3019, and on the following day, while Frodo went apart to decide the course of the errand, Boromir followed him. He began by argument — that the Ring in the hands of a resolute man would serve rather than master him, and that Gondor asked only the loan of it — and when Frodo refused he attempted to take it by force. Frodo escaped by putting on the Ring and vanishing. The compulsion left Boromir at once; he fell, and then wept and called after Frodo to come back, and returned alone to the shore. He said nothing of what had passed, and the Company scattered in search of the missing hobbit.

Boromir's place in the story of the War of the Ring is defined by an office rather than by any personal gift out of the ordinary. As Captain-General he was the chief military officer of Gondor, answerable to the Steward and charged with the defence of a frontier that had been contracting for generations; the title Captain of the White Tower belonged to the same command. Appendix A characterises him in terms that fix both his quality and its narrowness: he was likened to Eärnur, the last King, in that he took no wife and found his satisfaction in arms, and he is described as fearless and strong but indifferent to learning except where it recorded old battles. He was, in short, a soldier of the first rank in a realm whose survival had come to depend on soldiers, and his authority was real but wholly institutional, resting on his father's commission and on the confidence of the men he led. He possessed no power of any other kind — no craft, no lore, no share in the counsels of the Wise beyond what courtesy granted him.

Within the Company his usefulness was correspondingly practical: strength, endurance, and a soldier's judgement of ground and weather, which more than once kept the party alive on roads none of them knew. The limits of that competence appear wherever the errand required something other than force. His proposal at Elrond's house — that a weapon of such potency ought to be taken up rather than destroyed — was set aside without much debate, and he offered no argument that could meet the objection; his doubts about Aragorn's claim were likewise answered by others. He read every situation as a question of armies, walls, and the will to use what lay to hand, and a plan whose whole logic was weakness and concealment remained, to the end, outside his reckoning. Faramir, who spoke of his brother afterwards without envy, thought him a man who reached for what he judged necessary, and doubted whether he could have withstood the Ring's pressure for long.

Beyond his own people he was best known in Rohan, where he had passed on his northward road and left a strong impression; Éomer remembered him as a man closer in temper to the quick, forward-driving sons of Eorl than to the sober lords of Gondor, which is as near as the texts come to an outsider's portrait of him. Against Sauron he stood in the plainest and least complicated relation of his life, that of a frontier commander to an enemy across a river, and it is precisely that clarity which failed him when the enemy's instrument was offered as an ally.

Boromir belongs to the later strata of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. In the earliest phases the party that set out from Rivendell was composed of hobbits and Gandalf, with the wandering hobbit called Trotter standing where Aragorn would later stand, and no Man of a southern realm was among them, for that realm had not yet been imagined. It took shape gradually in Tolkien's notes and outlines for the unwritten continuation, where the great city of the South is referred to under the name Ond before the forms Ondor and Gondor were settled upon, and where provision is made for a messenger to come north from it to Rivendell to seek help against the Enemy. The figure grew out of that provision, and by the time the chapter of the Council was drafted at length he was present in it under the name he afterwards kept, speaking for his city much as he does in the finished book.

Two features of the finished portrait can be shown to be late. The dream that turned him northward was in the drafts his own and no one else's, reported at the Council without any second dreamer, because the brother to whom the published text chiefly assigns it did not yet exist; Faramir came into the story unforeseen while Tolkien was writing the Ithilien chapters of the fourth book, long after the Company had been broken, and the sharing of the dream between the two was arranged afterwards. The name itself was older than either of Denethor's sons. It had already been fixed in the genealogies of the Edain worked out in the 1930s, where a Boromir stands in the house of Beor some generations above Beren, so that in bestowing it on the heir of the Stewards Tolkien was drawing on his own earlier stock of First Age names rather than inventing one, and the antiquity of the name within Gondor's own memory is a later rationalisation of that reuse.

Boromir has been voiced or played in three widely circulated adaptations. In Ralph Bakshi's animated film he is voiced by Michael Graham Cox, who took the part again in the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation three years later, so that the same voice stands behind the two older versions. Bakshi's film keeps the essential shape of the character's arc — the Council at Rivendell, the passage of the mountains and the mines, the attempt on Frodo, and his death under orc arrows — but compresses the surrounding material heavily; because the film breaks off after Helm's Deep and never introduces Faramir, everything the book places after the death is simply absent, including the brother who watches the river and the shards of the horn carried back to the city. The radio series, running to twenty-six parts, has room for far more and is generally the closest of the older adaptations to the text, retaining Boromir's argument at the Council, the dream shared between the two brothers, and the sequence at Parth Galen in something near its written order.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy Boromir is played by Sean Bean, and the part is both enlarged and rearranged. The most visible structural change is one of placement: the death, which Tolkien sets at the opening of the third book, is moved forward so that it closes the first film, and the funeral on the river follows immediately rather than beginning the next instalment. The killing blow is given to an invented Uruk-hai captain named Lurtz, who has no counterpart in the novel, and the death scene is expanded into an explicit acknowledgement of Aragorn as his king, a submission the book never records. The dream that sends him north is dropped from the theatrical cut; in its place the extended version of the second film supplies a flashback to Osgiliath in which Denethor charges his son with the journey and makes plain that he wants the Ring brought to Minas Tirith, shifting the motive from a shared vision to a father's instruction. Added scenes of Boromir teaching the younger hobbits swordplay give the attachment the book states more directly on screen.