Tumblr crosspost (4 January 2021)

[anghraine]

I’ve posted it before, but I just really love this “my family did the right thing where the kings failed” moment from Faramir in TTT:

“Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. And the last king of the line of Anárion had no heir. But the stewards were wiser and more fortunate. Wiser, for they recruited the strength of our people from the sturdy folk of the sea-coast…”

RESPECT FOR COASTAL GONDOR

Tagged: #people complain about how this made gondor ~~~impure and he's like ... actually? it is where the strength of our people comes from #and it's how we survived where the lineage-obsessed kings faded away and was totally the right move. #yeppppppp. lebennin rocks and its people are better than you #(also belfalas and the mountaineers of ered nimrais. but especially lebennin) #(the rivers! the green haze! PELARGIR! the 'hardy' people there! YEAH) #(also i think it's very possible that the army aragorn brings to minas tirith is majority lebenninian. TRUE HEROES)

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

So right for that, Faramir.

[anghraine]

He really is! It's interesting that so much of the fandom and various characters are constitutionally incapable of talking about modern Gondor without reference to racial impurity, and yet the population most directly and expicitly associated w/ that history are here framed as essential to Gondor's survival and recruiting them into Gondorian society as a mark of wisdom contrasted with the decay of the kings and Dúnedain.

[chestnut_pod]

That perspective on Gondor, especially as expressed by Aragorn and Elrond, has historically been one of the things I struggle with most in Tolkien! That Faramir provides such a welcome other perspective is somewhat comforting, but also contributes to my Doylistic sense of Tolkien’s own somewhat mixed-up racial understandings.

I think, sometimes, of JRRT’s family roots in South Africa and the very deliberate positive migration selection (positive in the taking-action/encouraging sense, not the “good” sense) engaged in there for the maintenance of a unitary racial upperclass. (Which happened and continues to happen all over the place, of course, but does seem particularly clear in that example.) Not a 1:1 correlation, of course, or even necessarily causal, but it does help me think through Tolkien’s own approaches to racial mixing in his work.