Last of three pieces on Denethor and his sons. The first, The Son He Loved Best, is about Boromir; the second, The Son He Could Not See, is about how his father missed Faramir. Each stands on its own.
Two essays have brought me to a single question.
Faramir of Gondor was raised under a father who could not bear the sight of him, carrying the same blood that produced a brother who broke and a father who despaired. And yet he emerged a free man. Free enough to abstain from taking the Ring when he undoubtedly possessed the power to take it.
We know where he looked. He set his gaze upon Gandalf, the Grey Pilgrim who seldom came to his city. And so we must ask how that could possibly have been enough to break free from his family bondage. A father’s verdict is not the sort of thing a son can simply decide to stop believing, and Faramir carried his father’s own nature along with his father’s rejection of it. So how does a wizard who passes through town overturn a lifetime of that?
THE MAN WHO OWNED NO REALM
Faramir looked to Gandalf, outside his family line entirely, and what he received there was a corrective emotional experience. He found someone who contradicted all of the expectations and assumptions about himself, his family, Gondor and beyond. And this was only possible because someone saw him. Someone valued in him precisely what his father counted against him, and asked nothing in return.
There is something almost merciful in the breaking of the pattern. Denethor’s rejection paved the way for Faramir to be open to a different kind of fathering. Boromir, who had his father’s approval, had no reason to look anywhere else. In fact, the approval, mingled with its self-centered projections, made it nearly impossible to do so.
Tolkien stages the lesson directly, on Pippin’s first day in the city, long before the siege closes in. Denethor tells Gandalf that the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, and that “the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.” Note that he knows the terms of his own office, and claims it anyway. Gandalf answers:
“The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, these are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?”
These two men understood stewardship quite differently.
Gandalf’s stewardship is unbounded precisely because he owns nothing. No throne to defend, no lineage to vindicate, nothing that can be taken from him, and so his care extends to every worthy thing in peril, whether or not it belongs to him, whether or not he will be there to see it flower. Notice what he counts as success. Not victory, and not survival. Though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still bear fruit, the task has not failed. Denethor measured by outcome, concluded that the outcome was loss, and despaired.
Gandalf says the same thing to Denethor’s face during their quarrel over the Ring, and says it plainly. “You think, as is your wont, my lord, of Gondor only.” And then: “Yet there are other men and other lives, and time still to be.”
Now trace this perspective to Faramir’s worldview. When Frodo walks into Faramir’s territory carrying the one thing that might save Gondor, Faramir’s reflection lands on a truth his father never could. Gondor’s immediate interest would have him take the Ring, and use its power to achieve victory in war. The greater good says let Frodo pass, for by taking it, he puts all things in peril. He lets him pass, and tells him he would not take the thing if it lay by the highway. These are Gandalf’s ideas applied in a different context. Denethor’s world ended at his own borders, and when those borders were transgressed and the doom of his city looked imminent, he despaired. Gandalf had gifted Faramir a larger world.
There is also the answer to the helplessness that broke the Steward. We cannot control whether what we love survives. Only God has dominion over these things. As Gandalf says elsewhere:
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
We can tend to what we love and ultimately entrust the ending to powers beyond our control. A man who has accepted that does not need power, because he knows that playing his part in what is good does not come with the promise of an outcome. God calls us to be faithful, not successful. A man who has not accepted this will reach for any instrument that promises the mastery over the world.
This is what Faramir inherited, and it accounts for everything he does. His steadiness in Ithilien. His refusal of the Ring. His willingness to ride out under an unjust command without bitterness. All of it is Gandalf’s words lived out. A man holding what is entrusted, pursuing the good in serving what he does not own, his sense of his own worth not staked on whether the thing survives.
Both men were offered the same understanding. Denethor heard it and built his funeral pyre in despair. The seed had fallen on rocky ground. Faramir received it across the wizard’s visits, and he recognized the truth of it. The seed had fallen on fertile soil and it grew into love, wisdom and courage.
TWO WIDOWERS
None of which makes light of what happened to Denethor. His grief was enormous and it was real.
His wife, Finduilas of Dol Amroth, came from the sea country to a city of stone, and Tolkien says she withered there, a flower of the seaward vales set upon a barren rock. He names no illness. What wasted her was the shadow in the east, which filled her with horror, and the sea, which she never stopped missing. She was thirty-eight. Faramir was five.
Sit with what that means for her husband. She was not carried off by something a great man might have cured. The guarded city was the barren rock. The shadow he had spent his life resisting is what filled her with horror. He had organized everything he was around competence, and his competence was aimed at precisely the thing that was killing her, and it did not matter. This is the wound underneath everything he becomes.
And yet Tolkien will not let us make him simply a grieving man. Denethor loved her, he says, in his fashion. The qualification is the author’s own. Whatever was narrow in the way this man loved was narrow before she died. He could not see her; the tunnel vision for his own needs blocked her from view. She withered in plain sight and he never sent her back to the sea. Grief did not invent the pattern. It deepened one that was already cut.
But Middle-earth gives us another man who lost his wife.
Orcs took Celebrían, wife of Elrond of Rivendell, in the Redhorn Pass and tormented her, and she carried a poisoned wound out of it. Her sons brought her home. Elrond, a master of healing, closed the wound in her body and could not touch what had been done to her spirit. She went over the Sea the following year, and he stayed, sundered from her until the end of the world. The same shape exactly: a man of enormous power meeting the limit of his power over the person he loved most.
Consider what he did in the subsequent five hundred years. He kept Rivendell open as a refuge for those who could not repay him. He raised his children. He fostered other men’s sons. He called a council for a war he had no assurance of winning. And most notably, he gave his daughter, one of the most precious remaining treasures in Middle-earth, to a mortal man, knowing it meant a parting beyond the circles of the world.
These acts of self-gift contrast sharply with Denethor’s wounded choices. This is what a father’s love is: he wills the good of the other for the sake of the other, and whatever returns to him is a gift he never made a condition. Grief did not change the direction of Elrond’s giving. It only made the giving cost more.
None of this is offered to shame Denethor. We will not be quick to deal out death in judgement. Grief is not a contest, and no one in Minas Tirith had what Elrond had. The point is narrower and more hopeful than a comparison. The same wound gives room for two responses, which means the wound is not the author of what follows. Denethor’s despair was not the consequence of his loss. It was a man, across long years, deciding what to do with a sorrow that would have bent anyone.
WHY HE COULD NOT HAVE DONE IT ALONE
Given his nature in sharing the same constitution as his father, the personality structure that reflected the same Númenórean blood, Faramir would certainly have been tempted to approach the world in the same manner as Denethor. And he could not have reasoned his way out of what was modeled for him. A person cannot merely argue himself into believing that an alternative choice is acceptable. Belief does not answer to argument. It was never installed by argument. Someone from outside the family system had to reveal to him another way, a way that resonated with deep truths within himself. A way that gave him permission to be who he was called to be. And this needed to occur again and again across those visits, until the old verdict on Faramir’s personhood ceased to remain the narrative. It did not require constant presence. Gandalf came and went, and yet the love offered by the wizard perceived Faramir at his core and valued what his father held against him. This was enough.
This is a simple but important psychological principle. We cannot break a family system through mere self effort. Faramir did not out discipline his father’s house or work hard enough at virtue to overturn the verdict he had been handed. He was adopted out of it, into a different lineage, by a man who owned no realm and loved him as gift.
Boromir, who had no such figure, inherited the wound intact and carried it to the hillside and his moment of temptation with Frodo.
This is a key difference between the brothers, that plays a more crucial role than character or willpower. Faramir found someone outside the house. A mentor. A guide. A teacher who valued in him what his family rejected. God’s fathering is never limited to the most obvious pathways. He comes to us as a father through many experiences.
We are wounded in relationship. We are therefore healed in relationship.
HE WHO LEAVES FATHER AND MOTHER
Christ speaks to us through difficult challenges with regard to family life. That whoever loves father or mother more than Him is not worthy of him. That anyone who has left house or father or mother for His sake will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life. When He is told that his mother and brothers are outside waiting, he looks around the room and asks who his mother and brothers actually are.
These teachings are often misused as permission to discard a difficult family member, and that is not what they mean. Faramir offers a different approach. He never rebels against his father. He rides to Osgiliath at his father’s word, into an assignment that is effectively a death sentence. And he grieves him when he is gone, not for what he was given, but for the loss of his father’s presence. His loyalty was intact to the end.
What changed was not his love or loyalty. It was the source of his identity.
Christ is not against the family. He is against the family being ultimate, being an end, because a family that is ultimate becomes the final court of appeal on who a person is, and no household has that authority. Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father. This is not an insult to fathers, it is a redirection of sons to the actual ultimate source of love. Denethor claimed exactly the authority that line reserves to God. He appointed himself the one who would determine what his sons were worth.
And so someone with more authority, because it aligns with God’s vision, offered something else.
That is what Gandalf did, and it is why he was able to. He was not a rival father competing with Denethor for the boy. He is a servant of something larger than Gondor, and he brought Faramir into it. Denethor’s vision was limited to the bounds of Gondor, and when Gondor looked finished, so was he. Gandalf’s bounds were all of creation, and so his hope never depended on any particular kingdom surviving. When he opened Faramir’s heart, he did not open it merely past the Steward’s line. He opened it past Gondor, to all that is good, wherever it happens to be found.
We can see the result in the shape of Faramir’s affections. He can let a stranger walk out of his territory carrying the one object that his father and brother mistakenly thought would save his city, because the good is not confined to Gondor’s borders. And when he finally loves a woman, she is not a woman of Gondor at all. She is Rohan’s. The heart that expanded past his family also expanded past his people; the same expansion still working outward.
This is what St. Paul describes when he tells the Romans that they did not receive a spirit of slavery leading back into fear, but a Spirit of sonship, and that if we are sons then we are heirs. Both halves belong here. The spirit of slavery leading back into fear is what took Denethor, who could not stop grasping because he could not replace his control in response to fear with trust.
And notice the direction of inheritance, because Denethor had it backwards. Sonship comes first and inheritance grows from it, never the reverse. Boromir died attempting to earn his father’s inheritance, to become the heir according to how Denethor framed it. In Faramir’s case, he was nearly burned for not aligning with that same frame. What Gandalf offered was sonship first, and the true inheritance followed.
This is where the shape of that love becomes visible. On the Cross, Christ wills our good for our sake and requires nothing in return, and the requiring nothing is Love itself. Every father who gives to a child who cannot repay him participates in divine love by way of adoption into it first.
The Kingdom is larger than the family system. This is not a consolation prize for those whose families failed them. It is the proper order of reality, and it is the reason a wound delivered by a father does not get to be the final word about a son.
WHAT LOVE MAKES POSSIBLE
Then Tolkien puts the whole argument into a single scene.
Denethor, unable to hold what he loved, builds a pyre and lays his unconscious son on it. The two of them will go into the fire together, on his authority, at the hour he chooses.
Two men stop it, and neither of them is family.
The first is Beregond, the same soldier who shared with Pippin his love for his captain. To reach that door he deserts his post in the hour of the siege and kills the man guarding the Hallows. To do what is good in a manner that has expanded beyond the borders of what Gondor requires. Here, again, we see Gandalf’s teaching reaching through Faramir into the heart of Beregond. Both leaving his post and slaying the guard are capital offenses, and he is a career soldier of Gondor who is clear about the penalty, as Faramir was when he gave leave to Frodo. Beregond does it anyway, for a captain who is unconscious, who did not ask, and who may die regardless. This is the cost of love, to will the good of the other for the sake of the other, even at the expense of the giver, in suffering and even unto death. This is the model that Christ offered.
The second is Gandalf. The wizard who owns no realm, who was never family, who had quietly formed this young man across years of occasional visits, reaches into the flames and carries him out.
Now look at the scope of that room. The father, bound to his son by blood and by law and by every natural obligation there is, attempts to take his life by fire. A soldier and a wizard, bound to him by nothing but love, carry him from it.
And Faramir came to spend what he received. The man pulled from the pyre later meets Éowyn in her grief and finds her lovely independently of her sorrow. Love cannot be contained, when we are filled up, love emanates outward. What is given as a gift of self becomes ours to keep, and then becomes someone else’s, because it participates in a Love that is eternal.
And then the end of the chronicling of Faramir’s tale, in which what was inherited through relationship becomes manifest through other expressions of the gift. The man who refused the Ring, who never sought the office, who was never supposed to inherit anything, receives dominion over land that he served in without counting the cost. He becomes the Steward of Gondor and Prince of Ithilien, under a king he is glad to serve. The one who would not grasp for the gift is the one who ends up holding it. That is not an earned reward. It is the only way an inheritance can be received at all, as gift, by open hands.
Faramir modeled the actual design of the office of Steward. The steward’s vocation is the ordinary one: entrusted with what is not his, faithful where no one notices, holding what he did not make and will not keep. Service. Tolkien himself said Faramir was the character he most identified with.
What’s more is that being shaped by love does not flatten a person into a type. It paradoxically reveals uniqueness. A silent Dominican at his desk and a barefoot man preaching to birds both resemble Christ and yet are very different saints, with very different ways of living the Gospel. Every saint who ever lived gives witness to the fact that the more they belonged to Him, the more they became themselves. Conformity to Christ reveals a person rather than hides him.
Denethor loved the son who was least like him, and lost them both. No one can love a son he cannot see. Need makes an heir. Love makes a son.
This series began with The Son He Loved Best and continued in The Son He Could Not See.