Finduilas, the Lady of Dol Amroth, and wife of Denethor II, the Steward of Gondor (T.A. 2950 –???) - Finduilas and Denethor [2 of 3]
She met Denethor when she was twenty four. It was a off-hand visit to Minas Tirith, and her first impression of him was, funny enough, not unlike the impressions of the people who took account of her but would never truly know her. He seemed stand-offish, and a man of little humor, or the good graces to know when to laugh at himself: Self-important, really. Denethor was stern in face, and keen-eyed with lovely dark brown hair that caught the sun in such a way that it hard not to watch the light follow him, rude as it was to stare after a certain period of time. (She did it anyway.)
Denethor was a close friend of her father and mother. But neither she or Denethor had any real interest in each other, not when she was twenty four, and perhaps less so when she was twenty five. Going to and from Dol Amroth and Minas Tirith had become such a frequency that Finduilas outright asked her parents if they were trying to pair her up with their old friend. Both denied the accusation, but hoped she found happiness with Denethor it was her wish to be with him.
The relationship that would ultimately come to be between the two was a slow-going thing. Their shared interest in lore connected them, and his access to the archives of Gondor excited her, but Finduilas couldn’t see a great love forming between them, hypothetically. Still, there was nothing she enjoyed more than expanding her knowledge base and it would seem he enjoyed her happiness among things of the past.
Denethor was not so much remiss to express his feelings to her, so much as it was clear that he had not been raised in an environment where vulnerability was looked kindly upon and was conflated with weakness. By the time of her twenty-sixth birthday, Denethor was practically struggling say how he felt and she was filling in the blanks, waiting for affirmatives. Her encounters with Ecthelion, then the Steward of Gondor, were brief, but were always bookended with Denethor’s frustration that his father’s favor seemed to lay with the Captain Thorongil, someone she barely knew.
And though the man was, it seemed, genuinely oblivious of the discord between father son, and meant only extend his friendship to both herself and Denethor, Finduilas found it hard not retroactively dislike him because Denethor could not – publically, anyway. When Denethor proposed, he offered her the world that he could provide as the Son of the Steward Ecthelion II. Finduilas was reluctant to separate herself from her home. However much she had come to love Denethor, Dol Amroth was where she felt she should remain and tried, at least once, to persuade him to join her there. There they could both be happy and raise their children without Ecthelion or Thorongil to worry about. It was the ideal picture of happiness, at least for her.
Denethor argued his obligations as the only heir of Ecthelion kept him bound to Minas Tirith. Finduilas bitterly suspected he simply wanted to continue the silent competition between himself and Thorongil and the accusation sparked a fight between them. She returned to Dol Amroth to consider his offer of marriage without so much as saying goodbye. Ivriniel and Imrahil thought she was being a bit dramatic about the situation. They urged her to come out of the darkness of the archives she was so dedicated to and spend more time with them, as they feared they would see less her, once she was married, than they did now with the preoccupation of their own lives.
Finduilas mourned the idea of relocating from Dol Amroth to Minas Tirith. “It’s such a dreary place, and the court is full of social climbers. I don’t want to be surrounded by that every waking day for the rest of my life,,” She said. Yet, she felt she was put upon to decide between one and the other aspect of her personal happiness.
To Denethor’s dismay, Finduilas did not return until the end of the year almost. By the time she entered the gates of Minas Tirith, she had long stopped crying and busied herself with relaxing her swollen eyes.
Ivriniel and Imrahil, followed by several handmaidens that would remain with her from thereon out, saw her safely to Denethor and were made comfortable in temporary quarters. Finduilas and Denethor were married in November of 2976 and it was a joyous occasion despite the parting that would soon follow. Leaving home was part of growing up, she told herself, she would get used to Minas Tirith and circumvent its discomforts if she could.
Alyssa Sutherland and Daphne Selfe as Finduilas
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