Faramir

Faramir was born in the year 2983 of the Third Age, the second son of Denethor II, twenty-sixth Ruling Steward of Gondor, and of Finduilas, daughter of Adrahil of Dol Amroth. His brother Boromir was the elder by five years, and their mother died while Faramir was still a small child, so that the household in which the brothers grew was governed almost wholly by their father. By people he belonged to the Men of Gondor, the southern remnant of the Dúnedain, and by house to the line of the Stewards, which traced itself to Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a steward of King Minardil, and through him held its ancestral seat in the hills of Ithilien across Anduin from Minas Tirith. The office his family held was not a kingship but a trust: since Mardil the Stewards had ruled in the name of a king who had not returned, and Faramir was raised within that long deferral rather than beside a throne.

The name itself is nowhere glossed in Tolkien's published writings, and the safest that can be said is that it belongs, like Boromir, to the Sindarin-shaped naming of the Stewards' house. The two brothers share the final element mîr, which the lists of name-elements gathered from Tolkien's philological papers render as "jewel"; the first element of Faramir has no equally secure equivalent, and it is better left unexplained than furnished with a guess. In pronunciation the stress falls on the first syllable, and the i is sounded as in English thief rather than as a short vowel, following the guidance given for Sindarin names in the appendix on writing and spelling. In life he was addressed by rank rather than by epithet: Lord Faramir in his father's city, Captain Faramir among the men he led, and simply the Steward's son among those who measured him against his brother.

In temper he was drawn less to arms than to lore, music, and the older learning preserved in Minas Tirith, and it was those archives that drew Gandalf to the city; across visits that began in Faramir's childhood he gained from the wizard an understanding of the past that his father regarded with suspicion and named the schooling of a meddler. He commanded the Rangers who kept watch in Ithilien, the same country from which his house had come, and he was said to take no pleasure in war for its own sake, valuing what a sword defends above the sword. From his youth a dream returned to him of a vast dark wave rising over green land and drowning it, an inherited memory of the fall of Númenor surfacing in a man born long after.

Faramir's recorded part in the War of the Ring begins with the loss of eastern Osgiliath. On 20 June 3018 Sauron's forces crossed Anduin and took the ruined city's farther half; the bridge was broken behind the retreating garrison, and of the rearguard that held the western bank only four came away alive by swimming, Faramir and Boromir among them. In that same season a dream visited Faramir on several nights and Boromir once, in which a voice spoke of a broken sword, of a place named Imladris, of a thing called Isildur's Bane, and of a halfling who would stand forth. Denethor gave the matter little credit, but when it was resolved that one of the house should seek the northern valley for its meaning, Boromir claimed the errand, though it was the younger brother to whom the dream had come oftener. Boromir rode out of Minas Tirith on 4 July, and Faramir remained to hold what could still be held east of the river.

Boromir was killed near Parth Galen on 26 February 3019, and word of it reached his brother not by messenger but by a sight on the water: keeping watch by Anduin at night, Faramir saw a small grey boat of Elvish make drift past, and in it his brother's body, a broken sword laid upon his knee. The two halves of Boromir's cloven horn came afterwards to Denethor in the City. Some days later, on 7 March, Faramir's Rangers ambushed a company of Haradrim marching up the road to the Black Gate, and in the aftermath his men found and took two hobbits, who were led blindfolded to the hidden refuge behind the waterfall at Henneth Annûn. There Faramir questioned Frodo through an evening and learned what Isildur's Bane was — not from Frodo, who kept it back, but from Sam, who let the name fall while speaking up for his master — and although the thing lay within his reach and its taking might have altered his standing with his father, he held to a promise made before he understood its cost. When Gollum was found trespassing at the forbidden pool below the fall, Faramir spared him at Frodo's asking; on the morning of 8 March he provisioned the hobbits, set them on their road, and warned them against both the pass above Minas Morgul and the creature guiding them.

Returning to Minas Tirith as the siege closed in, Faramir gave his father a full account of the meeting in Ithilien, and Denethor answered it as a squandering of the one chance that might have saved Gondor. Faramir went back to the outer defences and was sent to the crossings at Osgiliath and the causeway forts — not, the chronicle is careful to say, by his own choosing, but because the Lord of the City was master of his Council — positions that could not be kept. The enemy broke through, and on 13 March, covering the retreat of the last companies across the Pelennor while the Nazgûl drove them, Faramir was struck by a dart and carried back senseless; Gandalf rode out from the gate to bring in what remained of the rearguard. In the days that followed he lay in a fever that no craft of the city could touch. Denethor, who had looked too often into the palantír of the White Tower, judged both his son and his realm already lost, and had Faramir borne to the tombs in Rath Dínen to burn with him. On 15 March, through the intervention of Pippin, the guard Beregond, and Gandalf, Faramir was taken living from the pyre; his father died in the fire.

That night, after the battle on the Pelennor Fields, Aragorn came unproclaimed into the Houses of Healing and called Faramir back from the shadow of his wound with the herb athelas; waking, Faramir answered him at once as king. He was still too weak to march when the host set out for the Black Gate on 18 March, and Aragorn left him in Minas Tirith as Steward to govern the City and the land in his absence. In the Houses of Healing he met Éowyn of Rohan, who was mending from her own hurt and chafing at being kept from the war, and in the days of waiting the two walked together on the walls. On 25 March the darkness in the east broke and the Barad-dûr fell; standing on the wall as the wind changed, Éowyn set aside her desire for death in battle, and she and Faramir declared their love.

Faramir's place in Gondor's order of command was a field captaincy, not a seat of government. The Rangers he led were a small force quartered on the enemy's side of Anduin, charged with watching the roads out of Mordor and striking at what moved along them, not with holding ground. Because their work depended on concealment, the powers he exercised were those of a commander in hostile country: strangers who came upon the refuge behind the fall were blindfolded or killed, the pool below it was forbidden on pain of death, and both sentences lay with him to pass or remit. His writ went no further: captives taken in Ithilien were properly the Steward's to judge in the City, and in sending the hobbits on their own road he took a liberty he knew he would answer for.

The faculties credited to him are of judgement and learning, not power over the world. He questioned Frodo through an evening without threat and read the shape of what was withheld; the name of what they carried came out only because his own courtesy had put Sam off his guard, and Faramir spoke it back to them as the answer to the riddle, by no art of his own. His study in the archives gave him the histories of Gondor's decline and of Isildur to weigh against what he was told, and this more than his sword made him valued by Gandalf. What he lacked is as plainly marked: the foresight that visited him came unbidden and he could not construe it, he never used the seeing-stone his father kept, and the terror the Nazgûl carried worked on him as on other men.

The refusal at Henneth Annûn is the act on which his place in the story rests. He was not proof against the Ring by nature; he had bound himself with a word spoken before he knew what he was disclaiming, and kept it when the cost was plain, having both the men and the occasion to do otherwise. His later dignities were bounded similarly: the stewardship confirmed in his house under a crowned king was an inherited office and a governorship, not the rule his fathers had held, Ithilien came to him as a fief, and the guard set about him there, the White Company, was assigned by the King's sentence on Beregond rather than raised at his own word.

The two bonds that formed him stand in the record against each other. Toward Boromir he claimed no rivalry, speaking of his brother with plain affection while judging him without illusion: he saw in him a hunger for mastery and a readiness to trust the sword's answer that he himself did not share, and when he heard how that trust had ended he grieved for the trial rather than condemned the man. Toward his father he was obedient and, so far as the record shows, unresentful, though Denethor weighed the sons against one another to the younger's loss. At their last full meeting in the City the Steward said outright that he wished their places had been exchanged; Faramir did not dispute the estimate, answering only that he would attempt in his brother's stead what he could.

Outside his house he was better valued than within it. The Rangers who served under him — Mablung, Damrod, Anborn are the ones the narrative names — spoke with him easily and obeyed without being driven, and Beregond of the Citadel Guard deserted his post and shed blood in the Hallows to keep his captain from the pyre, an act the King afterwards punished and rewarded in the same sentence. Sam Gamgee, hostile through the whole of the questioning at the refuge and betrayed by his own temper into naming what Frodo carried, ended by reckoning the younger brother the sounder of the two. His one flat mistrust was of Gollum, whom he spared only on Frodo's word while requiring Frodo to answer for him; that reading of the creature proved the more accurate.

With Éowyn the pattern of accurate seeing held. He perceived that what she had wanted from Aragorn was his love, which she said in as many words, and that her wish for a brave death in battle had taken its place only once he gave her understanding and pity instead; he named both aloud and offered her something he was careful to distinguish from pity. Her turning from arms to healing followed that recognition rather than preceded it. Taken together these attachments describe a man doubted chiefly at home and trusted by nearly everyone else who dealt with him, and one whose marriage bound the Stewards' house to Éomer's line as firmly as any treaty between the two realms.

Faramir was not planned. The drafts of Book IV gathered in The War of the Ring show him arriving unannounced in the course of writing the Ithilien chapters, at a point where the narrative had no use foreseen for a second son of the Steward. In the first workings of the encounter at the ambush the captain who takes the hobbits is not Faramir at all but Falborn son of Anborn, a Ranger who declares himself of Boromir's kindred rather than his brother, and who questions Frodo along much the same lines that the finished chapter would keep. Only after the decision was taken to make him Denethor's younger son did the name Faramir enter; Anborn, released from its first use as a patronymic, was afterwards given to one of the Rangers under his command, the one who catches Gollum at the pool. The substance of the refusal — a promise made in ignorance and held to once its price was understood — survived from these early pages with little alteration, so that the figure was in temper nearly complete before his place in the House of the Stewards was fixed.

Two features of the finished character reach back further or were settled later than his invention. The recurrent dream of a dark wave rising over the land belongs to a motif Tolkien had already worked twice in abandoned time-travel narratives, where it visits Alboin Errol in the fragments of The Lost Road and Alwin Lowdham in the Notion Club Papers, both of them carrying an inherited memory of the drowning of Númenor; its transfer to a man of Gondor came late and gave the Númenórean material a foothold in the main story. The attachment to Éowyn, by contrast, was reached only in the drafting of the Houses of Healing and the chapters after it, and the outlines composed before them foresee other ends for her, including a death in battle at Théoden's side and, at an earlier stage still, a match with Aragorn. Neither variant leaves any residue in the published text beyond the speed with which the two are brought together.

The fullest of the older versions is the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation broadcast in 1981, adapted by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell, in which Faramir is played by Andrew Seear. Its twenty-six half-hour episodes leave room for the Ithilien material at something near its written length, so that the questioning at the refuge, the decision not to take the Ring, and the later scenes of convalescence in Minas Tirith are all retained, including the attachment to Éowyn that shorter adaptations tend to drop. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 does not reach the character at all: it follows the story only as far as the battle at Helm's Deep and breaks off there, before the hobbits' road through Ithilien, and the second part that would have contained him was never produced.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003 Faramir is played by David Wenham, appearing in the second and third films. The best-known departure from the book is the reversal of the refusal: rather than letting the hobbits go from the hidden refuge, this Faramir declares that the Ring will be brought to his father and has Frodo and Sam escorted under guard to Osgiliath, releasing them only after Frodo is nearly taken there by a Ringwraith, so that a decision the novel presents as settled by a promise becomes a change of mind forced by what he witnesses. Gollum is treated more harshly on his order than in the book, and the extended edition of the second film adds a scene, absent from Tolkien, of the brothers together at Osgiliath before Boromir's departure, which makes Denethor's preference explicit. In the third film his father's command to ride against the occupied city is staged as a deliberate sending to death, and his rescue from the pyre and recovery are compressed: there is no healing by Aragorn in the Houses of Healing, and his meeting with Éowyn survives only in the extended version.