First of three pieces on Denethor and his sons. Each stands on its own.
No one chooses the hands that first shape them. By the time we are old enough to have opinions about who we are becoming, a great deal of the shaping has already occurred.
We are molded by a household, a father’s tone, a mother’s presence or absence, a thousand small moments in which we learned what we had to be in order to maintain relationship. We arrive at adulthood already leaning in a direction; we have patterns of relating to others that are reinforced by the fear that we could lose them if we behave otherwise. The task before us is to see those patterns before we exercise our freedom to break them.
This is possible because leaning is not the same as fate. The language of formation slides easily into determinism, and determinism neither reflects what our faith teaches nor honors what makes us human. Our experience sets the conditions we begin from: the voices we hear, the ways we cope, the unchallenged perceptions that feel like plain common sense. But this does not settle who we become. A person can come to see what shaped them and choose otherwise.
So the question is not whether we are shaped. We are all formed by our circumstances. The question is in what ways we were shaped, and whether we will choose to act in freedom despite those influences once we see them. Further, we can settle into less than we are called to be, or we can become who we are. What makes the difference is love. Love received from someone who contradicts what we were taught about ourselves. Or love given freely, even by a man who never received it.
Tolkien puts all of it in one house. The son who gave that love. The son who received it. And the father who did neither.
TWO SONS OF THE SAME FATHER
Boromir and Faramir grew up in Minas Tirith under Denethor, son of Echthelion and the Steward of Gondor. Same blood, same city, same inheritance of duty, same war pressing in on the walls. And they became two very different men.
Boromir is the elder, the favored, the war captain that everyone loves. His bravery is revealed through his valor. His love for Gondor runs deep. When he hears at the Council of Elrond that the plan is to walk the Ring into Mordor and destroy it, he objects in a manner that is expected of a loyal soldier. Why throw away a weapon in the hour of need? He is acting nobly. He is being useful, which is the only way he has ever known how to be loved.
Faramir is the younger brother who sat at Gandalf’s feet when the wizard visited Minas Tirith. His father did not object to the learning; Denethor was a lore-master himself, as deep in the archives as anyone in Gondor. He objected to the teacher. Later, asked outright whether he wished his sons’ places had been exchanged, he would say that Boromir “was loyal to me and no wizard’s pupil.” When the Ring falls into his power in Ithilien, he does not take it. He tells Frodo he would not take the thing “if it lay by the highway.”
The easy reading is that one brother was strong and the other weak. But this misses something critical. What made these men different was not their character, as many in Gondor could attest to. It was what formed their character. And to see it, you have to look at their father.
So how does one house produce two such different men? And why was it the father, of all the people in that city, who could not see what he had?
THE FATHER WHO COULD NOT BEAR HIMSELF
Here the story becomes strange and sad. We tend to assume Denethor favored Boromir because Boromir took after him, and neglected Faramir because Faramir did not. Tolkien says the reverse. Gandalf, riding toward Minas Tirith with Pippin and preparing him for the Steward’s reception, remarks of Boromir: “He loved him greatly: too much perhaps; and the more so because they were unlike.”
Later, settled in the city, Gandalf makes the irony explicit. Of Denethor he says the blood of Westernesse “runs nearly true in him; as it does in his other son, Faramir, and yet did not in Boromir, whom he loved best.”
Sit with that thought for a moment. It was Faramir who inherited his father’s deeper nature: the old Númenórean air, the foresight, the restraint, the interior complexity. And it was Faramir who got the colder treatment. Denethor doted on the son who was unlike him: bold, straightforward, a soldier’s soldier, uncomplicated in a way Denethor himself never got to be.
That is not favoritism. That is a man who cannot bear a part of himself.
This is a very complicated dynamic to name. It rests on the principle that there is a parallel between how we relate to ourselves and how we treat others. A parent who has never made peace with his own interior by looking compassionately upon each of his parts, unconsciously finds in a child similar to himself something to reject, and so rejects his child. The child becomes a mirror, and the parent’s discomfort with his own reflection is delivered to the child as a verdict about the child. What the child receives is not my father is at war with himself. What the child receives is there is something wrong with the way I am.
Meanwhile the other child is loved for being the antidote. Which is its own kind of poverty, because what is being loved is a function, not a person.
THE VOICE IN THE HOUSE
Each of us carries inside ourselves voices about our worth, our value, our goodness. They did not originate with us. They came from the people God charged with loving us, and we took them in so early that we do not experience them as opinions. We experience them as facts about reality.
In the best case, the voice says you are loved for who you are; it is good that you exist. Far more often it arrives with a qualifier attached: I am loved only if I am perfect, only if I am winning, only if I am the one holding this together. Or, worse, without any qualifier at all: I am not loved.
That voice is an inheritance. Not a metaphor for one. We truly inherit all that is contained within the voice.
Denethor’s wife died when Faramir was small, and the Steward turned inward. A man in that condition does not stop loving his children. But he begins to need them. And need, wearing the face of love, is a very difficult reality to recognize from the inside.
So Boromir was handed a role: the savior, the proof that Gondor could still produce a man who could impact the world around him, the relief from his father’s own interior despair. And Faramir was handed the opposite assignment without knowing it: to be the reminder of Denethor’s own failure to keep his wife alive. Their exchange before Faramir rides out to the near-certain death of Osgiliath is quietly devastating. Faramir offers to go in his dead brother’s place if his father commands it. Denethor commands it. And as Faramir goes he says, “Then farewell! But if I should return, think better of me!” His father answers, “That depends on the manner of your return.”
Conditional regard, stated out loud. That almost never happens in real families. Usually it is transmitted in silences and small preferences, implicit messages related to the particular quality of a father’s attention when you win versus when you don’t. But the mechanism is identical. The child learns the terms, and the terms become the shape he takes, until someone gives him a reason to doubt them.
WHAT BOROMIR BECAME
So as we walk with Boromir on the road south, it quickly becomes clear that he is not a bad man that is corrupted. He is a man blended with a part of himself, with the Ring playing on a wound reflected in a compulsive need to earn his father’s approval.
We are each of us both a unity and a multiplicity. There is the unity of who we are, that person that we are named. But also we can discern that we have different parts of ourselves, distinct from the free-acting Self, which are younger versions trapped in developmental stages. Some of those parts stopped growing at the moment they were wounded, sometimes those moments occurred before we had the words to articulate our experience, and the parts are left carrying the weight of those moments. The child in us keeps trying to solve adult problems with the only tools he was ever handed. This is what we mean by blended.
Let’s look at what was actually transmitted to Boromir. He did not inherit his father’s temperament. Gandalf tells us plainly they were unlike. What he inherited was his father’s wound. Denethor’s covetousness for the Ring echoes in his son’s heart across a difference of nature, because the disorder passes down a channel that resemblance has nothing to do with. When Frodo will not hand it over, the part of Boromir that seeks to earn his father’s love by saving Gondor, unlike how Denethor could not save his wife, does not see his efforts to take the Ring as theft. That part sees rescue. Every word he says on that hillside is the logic of a man formed to believe that his worth and his usefulness are the same object.
The Ring did not put that in him. It found it there, already load-bearing, and leaned on it.
THE LAST HOUR
And yet we cannot leave Boromir on that hillside, failing to see his error.
Within the hour Boromir is standing alone against a company of orcs, blowing his horn, dying for two hobbits of no strategic value whatsoever to Gondor. Two hobbits who cannot save his city and will not remember him in any way that changes anything. There is nothing useful in it. Which is precisely what makes it the first fully free act we see him perform. An act informed by Love. With his last breath he confesses that he tried to take the Ring, and in his freedom he sees his transgression, and experiences deep remorse. The true king of Gondor takes his hand and tells him, “You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace!”
At first this line seems to be hyperbole. Have few truly gained such a victory? Though if we situate it in all that we have said, then Boromir’s act of freedom, driven by Love, had to overcome significant inertia from his family history. This truly was heroic virtue. The mold is not the verdict. A man formed by need can, in his last hour, be re-formed by love.
WHAT DENETHOR WAS AFRAID OF
And what of the father? Because none of this began with the sons.
Denethor was not always the man we meet. Tolkien tells us he grew grim and solemn after his wife died. Finduilas of Amroth withered in that stone city and was gone young, and something in her husband closed behind her. That is where the closing began, and it is worth asking what a man in that position is actually facing.
He was facing helplessness. Not defeat. Helplessness, which is worse. He had learning, lineage, foresight, and the rule of the greatest kingdom of Men, and none of it kept his wife alive. A man who has organized his life around competence, meeting the one thing competence cannot touch.
Trace any defense down far enough and you hit fear. Trace the fear far enough and you hit abandonment, the terror that the people who matter will not stay. And trace abandonment all the way to the bottom and you hit death, the separation made permanent, the ending of the story before we were ready.
So he reached for power. Not out of ambition, I think, but as overcompensation, the only answer available to a man who has discovered he cannot hold what he loves. He took up the Palantír, which is a machine for seeing everything and controlling nothing. He refused to yield his authority to any returning king. He turned the arithmetic of the war over and over in a mind that had already concluded it was lost. Every one of those is a grasp at control by a man who learned in the worst way that he had none.
Note what the Ring actually offers such a man. Dominion that does not end. Life stretched past its term. It is, at bottom, an anti-death device, which is precisely why it was the perfect temptation for the house of Denethor. And note, too, that this is the inheritance Boromir received. Not his father’s mind, not his father’s gifts, but his father’s terror, translated into a soldier’s language: the conviction that if he did not personally secure the thing that would save Gondor, it would not be saved.
None of which was forced on him. Grief opens a door. It does not push anyone through it, and the rest of Denethor’s story is a man walking through that door again and again on his own feet. He chooses the seeing stone over counsel. He chooses his own arithmetic over his son’s report from the field. He chooses, when a different way of holding his office is offered to him, to answer that he will have the rule of Gondor or nothing. Each of those was a live moment in which something other than despair was available to him, and each time he declined it. Despair did not happen to Denethor. He kept selecting it.
And notice how the Steward’s story ends. He builds a pyre and burns himself alive, and tries to take his surviving son with him. He and Faramir were the same. And both had failed in Denethor’s eyes. Read it as despair and you have it right; read it as the last move of a man who could not tolerate helplessness and you have it more precisely. If he could not defeat death, he would at least command it. Choose the hour. Choose the manner. Take with him the son whose survival he could not control. It is the final and most terrible form of grasping. Denethor is reaching for authority over the one thing no man has authority over.
That is what it looks like to be ruled by fear, all the way to the end. A father who could not bear himself, a son shaped to be his relief, and a fire lit in the last hour to prove that something in this world would answer to him.
It would be an unrelieved tragedy, except for one thing. There was a second son. He grew up in that same house, under that same shadow, carrying that same blood. The son was a reminder to his father that in all his wisdom, he could not control death. And when the Ring of Power came within reach of this son, freely, with no one watching, at the exact moment his father and his brother would have taken it, he set it down and walked away.
That is the harder and far better story, and it is the one I want to tell next.