#they also have aragorn's elvish ancestors on their father's side! #as well as mithrellas on their mother's (via @bretwalda-lamnguin)
Yup! I think their Silvan-Elrosian-Edainic background is an interesting context for the emphasis on how staggeringly beautiful Boromir was, including Legolas's "he was so pretty, RIP" eulogy:
There was a tall man with a fair and noble face, dark-haired and grey-eyed
His fair and pleasant face was hideously changed
“From the mouths of the Sea the South Wind flies, from the sandhills and the stones,
The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moans,
‘What news from the South, O sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?
Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.”
His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest
His face [after death] was more beautiful even than in life
Pippin gazing at him [Faramir] saw how closely he resembled his brother Boromir ... looking on the fair face of Faramir, [Ioreth] wept
Meanwhile, the description of Boromir and Faramir's part-Silvan mother Finduilas:
She was a lady of great beauty and gentle heart, but before twelve years had passed she died. […S]he withered in the guarded city, as a flower of the seaward vales set upon a barren rock. The shadow in the east filled her with horror, and she turned her eyes ever south to the sea
[To Faramir, a small child when she died, she was] but a memory of loveliness in far days and of his first grief
Legolas, meeting Finduilas's younger brother, Imrahil, is struck yet again by this incredibly hot family:
At length they came to the Prince Imrahil, and Legolas looked at him and bowed low; for he saw that here indeed was one who had elven-blood in his veins.
“That is a fair lord and a great captain of men. If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”
Meanwhile, Boromir's father:
Denethor looked indeed much more like a great wizard than Gandalf did, more kingly, beautiful, and powerful; and older.
Denethor was a proud man, tall, valiant, and more kingly than any man that had appeared in Gondor for many lives of men
Indeed he [Denethor] was as like to Thorongil [Aragorn] as to one of nearest kin
[Denethor] was very tall and in appearance looked like an ancient Númenórean
his [Denethor’s] appearance of premature old age, first observable when he was not much above sixty years old (UT); he bought the knowledge dearly, being aged before his time (Appendix A)
Also: the passage that basically all the information specifically about Mithrellas and Imrazôr comes from (the Dol Amroth family tree in Peoples of Middle-earth) pretty strongly implies that the princes of Dol Amroth did not traditionally intermarry with the "royal offshoot" noble houses that got to use Quenya/were descended from the Noldor, Vanyar, Sindar, and Maiar via Anárion (multiple times over, undoubtedly), including the Stewards.
I'd guess this was only possible over that length of time as a very deliberate policy; the princes are described as nearly autonomous rulers of their own province apart from sending tribute (a form of taxes, presumably) to Minas Tirith, and they may have deliberately held themselves apart from the rest of Gondor and almost exclusively intermarried within the heavily Númenórean population of their own principality for most of its history. If so, it seems like Prince Adrahil had ... different priorities than pretty much all the preceding princes, given that his cousin married the heir to the throne of Rohan and this alliance carried weight with Adrahil's son, and Adrahil's daughter married the heir to the lordship of Gondor.
At any rate, the marriage of Denethor and Finduilas seems to have been envisioned as very probably the first time that the main part-Elvish "lineages" in Gondor intermarried—the descendants of Mithrellas and Imrazôr in Belfalas (a rumor confirmed by Legolas in LOTR) + the descendants of Anárion constituting the uppermost echelon of the Númenórean nobility elsewhere in Gondor, including the House of the Stewards. So the house of Dol Amroth, the other Númenórean houses they've intermarried with, and the house of Eorl are all descendants of Mithrellas, a Silvan Elf; Aragorn, the junior branches of the house of Isildur, and the Stewards and other nobles of "royal origin" are all descendants of Elendil and thus Elwing and Eärendil; Faramir and Boromir's Elvish heritage, therefore, includes Silvan Elves, Grey Elves, and High Elves (Noldor and Vanyar).
Honestly, I would guess this combination of Elvish heritages is pretty damn uncommon among Elves themselves. There's something—I don't know, a little bit apropos—about these factions of Elves, whose relationships with each other ranged from "tense" to "open warfare" over centuries, only becoming a single bloodline through the marriage of two mortals from Gondor, Denethor and Finduilas: strange and eldritch mortals with their own peculiar forms of development and aging, but doomed to die nevertheless, and both dying prematurely. Legolas's colony of Silvan Elves in Ithilien live under the aegis of a prince and princess, Faramir and Éowyn, who both owe their existences in part to a Silvan Elf fleeing into Gondor.
if completing tasks feels so good and reminds me completing tasks is easy then why is starting them the emotional equivalent of sending my first born to war
the world has been horrifying recently but i have personally witnessed something that brought me joy
Every year, California’s largest sheep and fiber festival, Lambtown, takes place in Dixon, CA. On the second day of Lambtown, teams of eight compete in a “sheep to shawl” competition, where the teams must start the day with un-spun wool and end the day with a 72” woven shawl. Teams may “warp” a loom ahead of time (where you thread the loom with its foundation of parallel threads), but on the day of competition they must spin their wool into yarn and weave it into a complete shawl.
This year competition was stiff, and very very close, and the winning team finished their shawl with two and a half minutes to spare.
I frequently hear about “needing to keep “politics” out of fiber arts, but art is inherently political.
These were beautiful, masterfully spun, woven, and finished shawls and that in itself is worthy of note.
But watching this team of eight would fight for hours, and pour their love for their community into their art was deeply moving and I am still reveling in the opportunity to have seen this win.
There are few things to rejoice in today, but they do exist. The horrors may persist, but so do we.
We reposted this epic thread by Jesse Hamm over on our Bluesky account. It was one of the best things Jesse ever wrote on twitter and we didn't want it languishing over there in that awful place, so we ported it over to Bluesky in its entirety. Go read it!
"I have never seen a cat that showed affection/love for it's owner"
is the pet ownership version of
"I don't believe in Female Orgasms they don't exist, after all, my wife has never had one"
