Tumblr crosspost (15 May 2020)
Feb. 7th, 2022 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI reblogged this post I made in 2013:
I am generally very meh on the drafts of LOTR (because…drafts), but I love this idea:
See, Pippin swore to serve the Lord and Steward—and was technically released, but given the circumstances it’s not surprising that that would be ignored—when they were the same person. But now the lord of Gondor is Aragorn. Yet the position of Steward (which, after all, existed long before Mardil’s time) is retained by Faramir. In the text as is, it’s sort of elided as Pippin is still serving Gondor, though I think the implication is that Aragorn essentially receives Pippin’s oath.
But here Pippin’s oath is strictly attached to the Steward, transferring smoothly from Denethor to Faramir. It’s not even to ‘the Prince of Ithilien,’ though that’s Faramir’s description there (Tolkien uses ‘the Prince’ and 'the Steward’ pretty interchangeably), and obviously they’re the same person. Rather he serves the Stewardship itself.
In some unlikely scenario where one of Faramir’s children became Steward and the other Prince (…hmm), Pippin would formally be esquire to the first and not the second.
(Well, if Faramir didn’t outlive Pippin by ~20 years.)
Anyway, I really like the idea, both because YAY STEWARDSHIP and because it collapses Pippin’s love for Faramir and oath to Denethor in a really lovely way, I think :)
In 2020, I added: #i'm still deeply committed to this
I am generally very meh on the drafts of LOTR (because…drafts), but I love this idea:
[Pippin] rode with the Prince of Ithilien, for he was the esquire of the Steward
See, Pippin swore to serve the Lord and Steward—and was technically released, but given the circumstances it’s not surprising that that would be ignored—when they were the same person. But now the lord of Gondor is Aragorn. Yet the position of Steward (which, after all, existed long before Mardil’s time) is retained by Faramir. In the text as is, it’s sort of elided as Pippin is still serving Gondor, though I think the implication is that Aragorn essentially receives Pippin’s oath.
But here Pippin’s oath is strictly attached to the Steward, transferring smoothly from Denethor to Faramir. It’s not even to ‘the Prince of Ithilien,’ though that’s Faramir’s description there (Tolkien uses ‘the Prince’ and 'the Steward’ pretty interchangeably), and obviously they’re the same person. Rather he serves the Stewardship itself.
In some unlikely scenario where one of Faramir’s children became Steward and the other Prince (…hmm), Pippin would formally be esquire to the first and not the second.
(Well, if Faramir didn’t outlive Pippin by ~20 years.)
Anyway, I really like the idea, both because YAY STEWARDSHIP and because it collapses Pippin’s love for Faramir and oath to Denethor in a really lovely way, I think :)
In 2020, I added: #i'm still deeply committed to this