Even after the Kings of Gondor began to marry outside of the elite (pureblood, one might say) Númenórean families, there was still great importance placed on the direct line of descent from such illustrious ancestors. ![]() Through the early kings, their line continued back to Elros, Eärendil, and thus many of the kings and heroes of the First Age. ![]() The kings of Gondor and Arnor were not descended from just any Númenóreans, but from the Lords of Andúnië, the most important noble family after the royal house and the descendants of the eldest daughter of an early King of Númenor, before the law was changed to allow women to inherit the throne. The line of kings hadn’t ended because there were no descendants of former kings left, but because there were none “of pure blood, or whose claim all would allow” (Ibid.). Even though the Stewards had long since “hardened their hearts” against the idea of a king returning ( LOTR, Appendix A), Gondor remained a profoundly backwards-looking society in many ways, with an elite very invested in their own Númenórean heritage. Does that not tell you something of him?” ( TTT, IV 5)ĭenethor’s response is particularly telling in light of the position he would later take when actually confronted with the prospect of ceding power. ‘In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice.’ Alas! poor Boromir. ‘Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty,’ my father answered. ‘How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?’ he asked. “And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that always it displeased him that his father was not king. Boromir never quite claimed that “Gondor needs no King” in the book, but during one of his conversations with Frodo, Faramir relates an anecdote of Boromir questioning the convention: ![]() Gondor had gotten along without a king for nearly a thousand years by the time of The Lord of the Rings, so why did it need someone whose ancestors had been kings of nothing, wandering in the wilderness during all that time? Readers are not the only ones to have asked that question. Both the political and the strictly legal situations were products of Gondor’s lengthy history, which was considerably abridged in the movies.ĭespite how popular Aragorn is as a hero, his claim to the throne of Gondor can seem rather suspect, especially to modern readers given the diminished role that monarchism plays in most of our lives. Yes, Aragorn’s claim to the throne of Gondor was borne out by the laws of the kingdom, though there were political complexities beyond the letter of the law that affected the succession.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |