Faramir

• 1. Introduction

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  Faramir is the younger son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, and in Tolkien's telling, the one character most like the author himself. When Tolkien wrote "As far as any character is 'like me', it is Faramir", he was pointing to something deeper than personality. Both men were soldiers and scholars who endured bitter wars, and both carried a recurring dream of inescapable darkness that never left them.

  What makes Faramir so unusual in a story full of warriors and ring-bearers is what he refuses to do. At the moment when every other character bends toward temptation, Faramir holds still. He is presented with the One Ring and turns away from it completely, not out of ignorance of its power, but precisely because he understands what that power would cost.

  Who shaped him that way? Why does his father despise him? And how does a man who never sought a crown end up as the steward of an entire rebuilt civilization?

• 2. The Shadow of Denethor

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  Finduilas, daughter of Prince Adrahil of Dol Amroth, dies when Faramir is five years old. She is, in Tolkien's phrase, "but a memory of loveliness in far days and of his first grief." Her death casts a long shadow. After losing her, Denethor grows cold and detached, and the warmth in the household migrates entirely to the bond between Faramir and his elder brother Boromir, who is five years older than him.

  Denethor openly favours Boromir, and Faramir learns early to give way and hold his opinions back. The one act that most visibly displeases his father is welcoming the wizard Gandalf to Minas Tirith, Gondor's capital. Faramir is drawn to Gandalf for knowledge of Gondor's history, but in Denethor's eyes the association marks Faramir as unreliable. The favouritism is not subtle, and it shapes Faramir's character in a specific direction: toward patience rather than ambition.

  When Gondor's long-threatened border collapses in the year 3018, and the Dark Lord Sauron attacks the ruined city of Osgiliath at the river crossing to Minas Tirith, Faramir is thirty-five years old. He and Boromir hold the defence together. Shortly before that battle, Faramir has a prophetic dream. A voice speaks of the "Sword that was Broken," of "Isildur's Bane," of "Doom" approaching, and of the coming of "the Halfling." Faramir decides to travel north to Imladris to seek the counsel of Elrond the Half-elven. Denethor sends Boromir instead, and that decision sets the entire story in motion.

• 3. The Ring Refused

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  Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee are in the forested land of Ithilien when Faramir's rangers find them. Faramir recognises them at once as the Halflings from his dream. The interrogation that follows is careful and probing. Frodo reveals that nine companions including Boromir had left Rivendell together, and Faramir asks repeatedly about his brother, knowing something Frodo does not: Boromir is already dead. Faramir had waded into the river Anduin one night after spotting a boat there, and found his brother's body inside it, slain by Orcs.

  Sam's loyalty becomes an accidental trap. In a moment of loyalty gone sideways, Sam mentions Boromir's desire for the One Ring, and the secret of what Frodo is carrying comes spilling out. Faramir's response is one of the most direct passages in the novel: "But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo."

  He understands that his brother was tempted beyond his strength, and part of his grief is the wish that he himself had been the one to go on the quest. He gives the hobbits provisions, sends them on their way, and warns Frodo that their guide Gollum is treacherous and that some unnamed terror waits on the pass of Cirith Ungol. That warning is as much as he can offer.

• 4. Fire and Healing

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  Faramir returns to Minas Tirith and reports to Denethor and Gandalf that he met Frodo and Sam and let them continue toward Mordor with the Ring. Denethor's fury is immediate. For the Steward, sending the Ring to Mordor is unforgivable when it could have come to him. The argument foreshadows what follows.

  The Witch-king of Angmar, commanding the forces of Minas Morgul, seizes Osgiliath. Faramir stays with the rearguard and is gravely wounded. The city's cavalry carry him back to Minas Tirith as the Battle of the Pelennor Fields begins outside its walls. Denethor, seeing his unconscious son, concludes that Faramir is fatally injured. He orders a funeral pyre built for both of them. The Hobbit Pippin Took, who has sworn into Denethor's service, alerts Gandalf, and Faramir is pulled from the flames in time. Denethor, mad with grief, stays on the pyre and burns.

  After the battle ends, Aragorn heals Faramir with athelas in the Houses of Healing. Recuperating there, Faramir meets the Lady Éowyn of Rohan, who came to the battle against orders and felled the Witch-king herself. At first Éowyn wants only to find honour in death, and refuses his advances. Eventually she loves him in return. Their courtship happens entirely within the walls of a recovery ward, in the shadow of an ongoing war, which is exactly the compressed timeline that Tolkien understood from personal experience.

• 5. Tolkien's War Brides

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  Tolkien's biographer John Garth, in his book Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, identifies the core parallel between Faramir and his creator: both were soldiers and scholars sustained by reverence for old histories and sacred values through the brutality of war. Tolkien served as an officer in the British Army and fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

  The dream of "darkness unescapable" that Tolkien carried throughout his life he gave directly to Faramir, who narrates the dream to Éowyn. Tolkien wrote that "when Faramir speaks of his private vision of the Great Wave, he speaks for me. That vision and dream has been ever with me -- and has been inherited (as I only discovered recently) by one of my children, Michael."

  The scholar Melissa A. Smith draws attention to Faramir's brief wartime courtship of Éowyn and its roots in Tolkien's biography. When critics questioned whether the romance happened too quickly, Tolkien replied that "feelings and decisions ripen very quickly (as measured by mere 'clock-time', which is actually not justly applicable) in periods of great stress, and especially under the expectation of imminent death". Tolkien himself had married Edith Bratt just before he was posted to the Western Front in France. That specific biographical detail, the hasty marriage before deployment, is built into the bones of Faramir and Éowyn's story.

• 6. Knight and Outlaw

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  Tolkien scholar Elizabeth Solopova traces Faramir's refusal of the One Ring to the courage described in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, a poem Tolkien knew deeply. By turning away from the Ring, Faramir rejects the desire for power and glory that defeating Sauron would have given him.

  At the same time, several scholars have noticed that Faramir does not fight like a knight at all. Marjorie Burns describes a "Robin Hood touch" in the green-clad Faramir and his men hunting enemies through the forested Ithilien. P.N. Harrison notes that Faramir's "wilderness dwelling, his skill with the bow, and his choice of a green cloak, mask, and gauntlets as clothing all invite direct comparisons" with the outlaw of Sherwood Forest. Ben Reinhard, writing in Mythlore, argues that while Faramir's conduct and speech are often chivalric, he leads his attack on the men of Harad in what Reinhard calls a "thoroughly unchivalric guerilla ambuscade," and that his clothing, weaponry, tactics, and concealed refuge all point toward the outlaw in the forest rather than the knight in armor.

  Jane Chance reads Faramir differently again, placing him at the centre of a web of Germanic allegiance-relationships. Sam serves Frodo faithfully but accidentally betrays him to Faramir through the smoke of a cooking fire. Gollum swears an oath on the Ring to obey Frodo and not run off, but Frodo "betrays" Gollum by luring him into Faramir's captivity. Gollum then swears to Faramir that he will never return to a forbidden pool. Faramir, in turn, grants Frodo protection in the manner of a Germanic lord, and Frodo offers his service in return. After the war, Faramir's marriage to Éowyn mirrors Aragorn's marriage to Arwen: one union joins Man and Elf, the other joins Gondor and Rohan.

• 7. An Unplanned Character

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  Christopher Tolkien recorded in The History of The Lord of the Rings that his father had not foreseen Faramir at all. J.R.R. Tolkien invented him only at the actual moment of his appearance in The Two Towers, not as part of any earlier plan. Tolkien himself noted that Faramir's arrival postponed the book's ending and drove much of the further development of the background for Gondor and Rohan.

  In early drafts, Tolkien used the familiar forms "thou" and "thee" deliberately to mark the shift in Faramir and Éowyn's relationship. Christopher Tolkien identified what may be the exact turning point: a moment in the garden of the Houses of Healing where Faramir says "you are beautiful" and then, within the same speech, shifts to "But thou and I have both passed under the wings of the Shadow." In subsequent meetings Faramir uses the familiar forms, but Éowyn does not switch until near the end, when she asks "Dost thou not know?" Tolkien then went back over the manuscript and changed every "thou" and "thee" to "you," erasing the grammatical record of the courtship's progression.

  Faramir's afterlife in the story is substantial. He becomes Steward and prepares Minas Tirith for Aragorn's coronation, then surrenders his Stewardship on the day of the crowning. Aragorn renews the office and declares that Faramir's descendants would be Stewards of Gondor for as long as the royal line lasts. He also names Faramir Prince of Ithilien. Faramir and Éowyn settle among the hills of the Emyn Arnen and have a son named Elboron. Faramir dies at the age of 120, and his grandson Barahir later writes The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen.

• 8. On Screen and Page

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  In the BBC's 1981 radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Andrew Seear voiced Faramir in a production that stuck closely to the books. Peter Jackson later credited that radio drama in the making of his film trilogy.

  In Peter Jackson's films, David Wenham plays Faramir. The actor joked that he and Sean Bean, who played Boromir, were cast partly because they both had large noses. Jackson made a significant change to Faramir's character for The Two Towers: instead of releasing Frodo, Sam, and Gollum immediately, film-Faramir decides to bring them and the Ring to Gondor. He takes them to Osgiliath, and only when the Nazgûl attack and Frodo nearly falls under their control does he let them go. Jackson explained the change by saying he needed another climax because the Cirith Ungol episode had been moved to the third film, and that on Tolkien's timeline Frodo and Sam had only reached the Black Gate when Isengard fell. Jackson also argued that having Faramir immune to the Ring's temptation would seem inconsistent to a film audience when every other character in his trilogy was tempted by it.

  The extended edition of The Two Towers adds an invented flashback in which Denethor's open preference for Boromir, shown at the moment of sending him to Rivendell, gives film-Faramir a father-pleasing motive for wanting the Ring. Critics noted that the extended edition presents Faramir in a noticeably more sympathetic light than the theatrical cut. Faramir also appears as a bonus playable character in the video game The Return of the King, and Wenham recorded commentary for it, speculating that if Faramir had gone to Rivendell in Boromir's place, he might have survived to return to Gondor.