Son Of Gondor

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

Sword, bow, & axe.

like, for me the heart and soul of lotr is the hobbits, and it always bemuses me to see how underrated they can be in fics or fandom like?? you have these funky little fuckers who are really brave and kind and loyal but also have oddball forms of government and eat and party a lot and get into scrapes and have all these hobbit pals and there's all sorts of shipping options and they have interesting nuanced social politics and second breakfast and pipeweed and they give presents on their birthday instead of the other way around so they're always getting presents and they're hilariously weird about their family trees and they led full-scale guerrilla warfare against these bastards who invaded their homeland but also all they want to do is chill and have nice gardens and probably judge vegetable growing competitions and have pretty dances

This is an event that will be running from the 27th of April to the 3rd of May, in honour of Aragorn being coronated on the 1st. (Apologies for the first post being so soon to the actual event, everyone.) Bring absolutely anything (fics, fanart, gifs, etc) to this event - as long as it's related in some way to Gondor, or Gondor's many characters.

Here's the basic rules.

Prompts:

The Line of Kings, Minas Tirith, "It has come to me, the One Ring. It shall be an heirloom of my people."

The Line of Stewards, Artifacts, "fealty with love, valour with honour, oathbreaking with vengeance"

The Rangers of Ithilien, Nature, "By the blood of our people are your lands kept safe!"

Osgiliath, Grief and Conflict, "I love only that which they defend."

Dol Amroth, Cultural Differences, "the great stone city, vaster and more splendid than anything he had dreamed of"

Minor characters, Tradition, "But there are no travellers in this land: only the servants of the Dark Tower, or of the White."

Boromir with reading glasses.

Ooohohoho I like the way your brain works

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

The note from Boromir's horn bounded high and clear, ricocheting off broken, soot-stained stone. A swell of voices rose into the air, cheering and shouting.

“The King of Gondor has returned!” he bellowed, sweeping his arm to Aragorn over his shoulder. “Long live King Elessar Telcontar, heir of Isildur!”

Aragorn was sitting straight and tall on his horse, his mouth set, but his eyes betrayed the barest spark of shell-shock. Boromir wasn’t going to let him think about it. He squeezed his horse’s flanks and started forward. Aragorn’s horse instinctively followed, and behind them the cumbersome train of their friends, comrades, and vanguard fell into step.

They passed through the first gate, which was no more than the stubs of towers, rimed with ash and gouged by ballistae. Still, gate wardens stood on top of the rubble, and the heralds released a peal from their trumpets. First, the two rising notes that signaled peaceful news to the city, and then the short burst that had been preceding Boromir his whole life. The Captain was entering the city. Growing up, Faramir would buzz it through pursed lips whenever Boromir stumbled out of bed or emerged from the jakes. But following after was a ring that hadn’t been heard from the ramparts of Minas Tirith since the second age. A clear swirl of notes, rising into the morning air.

The King was entering the city.

A snippet from a fic I wrote a few years ago. We all know Boromir Lives is my lifeblood, and one of my favorite concepts is Boromir reinventing himself as the pillar that holds up and legitimizes Aragorn as king.

"I will not go," said Boromir, "not unless the vote of the whole company is against me. What do Legolas and the little folk say? The Ring-bearer's voice surely should be heard?" "I do not wish to go to Moria," said Legolas. -The Fellowship of the Ring

When I center Boromir in narratives, I often cast Legolas as the comic relief, but actually, I've always thought of him in much the same way as Boromir: the son of a lesser ruler who has spent his entire adult life fighting the supernatural threat to his home, aided by no magic, largely unremarkable except in his bravery, skill, and dedication to his people. Another people's prince. Until Elladan and Elrohir decide to show up later in the series, Legolas is the only Elf who sees fit to put his life aside to help the Fellowship. I've always liked him for that, and I think amid all Boromir's weirdling companions in the Fellowship, he would clock Legolas as a kindred spirit---someone who knows strategy, someone who knows how to rely on his own wits and strength rather than mystical solutions. It's the combined masterminding of Boromir and Legolas who get the Fellowship off Caradhras, and in Moria I think they'd see themselves in similar roles. Gandalf seems to be at a loss. Aragorn hasn't had to step up yet. Gimli's expectations of the reception in the mines was wildly different to the grim reality. So I think Boromir would assume that if anybody was going to get them out of the mess they're in, it's him and the guy who can run over the snow, even if he does pass entire nights staring straight at the moon like a little freak.

But mostly, I think Boromir's time amid the Fellowship is mostly just

Like being the only human actor in a muppet movie

Here is what we know: When Denethor was a young man, Aragorn served as a captain in Gondor under the name Thorongil. He was so skilled and wise that he soon became invaluable to Steward Ecthelion, which made Denethor jealous.

So here's today's headcanon: Ecthelion wants to keep Thorongil close while Denethor is constantly trying to edge him out, which means Aragorn is just constantly around. And Finduilas, as we know, is very, very lonely. She's alone in a world of grim, older military men, she dreads being so close to Mordor, and her husband has no emotional fluency. So when Thorongil speaks kindly to her and holds genuine conversations with her, it's one of the only friendly anchors she has. She sees him as closer to her in age--though he's not--and feels like he actually values her for more than just being a quiet, dutiful wife--because he does. He's there throughout her first pregnancy and when she goes into labor with Boromir.

Meanwhile, Denethor's attention has been on being valuable to his father. He's been hoping and praying this baby will be a son, because he thinks it will be what he finally needs to wrest Ecthelion's favor away from Thorongil and back to himself.

But while Ecthelion adores his grandson, he still relies on Thorongil's skills and leadership, and Denethor only grows more jealous. Recognizing this, and perhaps also recognizing that he's become a wedge between Finduilas and Denethor, Aragorn surprises everyone by making that abrupt decision not to return to Minas Tirith after the battle of the Corsairs.

TO BE CLEAR, I don't hc that Boromir and Faramir's parentage is anything other than what's laid out in canon. I'm just saying THERE'S A LOT OF MATERIAL TO WORK WITH HERE.

@butterflyslinky

HEY

FIRST OF ALL

Wh o. do Y

FIRST OF... HOW DARe

Here is what we know: When Denethor was a young man, Aragorn served as a captain in Gondor under the name Thorongil. He was so skilled and wise that he soon became invaluable to Steward Ecthelion, which made Denethor jealous.

So here's today's headcanon: Ecthelion wants to keep Thorongil close while Denethor is constantly trying to edge him out, which means Aragorn is just constantly around. And Finduilas, as we know, is very, very lonely. She's alone in a world of grim, older military men, she dreads being so close to Mordor, and her husband has no emotional fluency. So when Thorongil speaks kindly to her and holds genuine conversations with her, it's one of the only friendly anchors she has. She sees him as closer to her in age--though he's not--and feels like he actually values her for more than just being a quiet, dutiful wife--because he does. He's there throughout her first pregnancy and when she goes into labor with Boromir.

Meanwhile, Denethor's attention has been on being valuable to his father. He's been hoping and praying this baby will be a son, because he thinks it will be what he finally needs to wrest Ecthelion's favor away from Thorongil and back to himself.

But while Ecthelion adores his grandson, he still relies on Thorongil's skills and leadership, and Denethor only grows more jealous. Recognizing this, and perhaps also recognizing that he's become a wedge between Finduilas and Denethor, Aragorn surprises everyone by making that abrupt decision not to return to Minas Tirith after the battle of the Corsairs.

TO BE CLEAR, I don't hc that Boromir and Faramir's parentage is anything other than what's laid out in canon. I'm just saying THERE'S A LOT OF MATERIAL TO WORK WITH HERE.

25 July 1938                                              20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. … I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearings whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and remain yours faithfully

J.R.R. Tolkien.

(Letter 30)

And Gandalf just blinks and is like, “You what now?”

“Yeah, killed it. Had to save Frodo”

In lord of the rings lore, there are three tiers of deities. The highest tier and most dangerous includes Morgoth - Sauron’s master, and Ungoliant, Shelob’s master. The middle tier includes Shelob, Sauron. Then there’s the lowest tier, which includes the wizards Gandalf and Saruman as well as the Balrog (this is why Gandalf couldn’t 1v1 the Balrog). It also explains why Gandalf doesn’t take the ring, the magic of a tier 2 deity would absolutely corrupt him. We even see that happen with Saruman and the Palantir.

This leads to the start of the answer to some interesting questions. Why does Sauron tolerate Shelob being in his territory, and why does Sauron tolerate there being a secret back door into Mordor?

On the surface, he does it because he might not be able to beat Shelob in a fight, after all they’re the same tier of deity. And since Shelob’s domain is the secret way into Mordor, he can’t close it off, and he seriously doubts anyone can use it to get in. He doesn’t monitor the path with guards either - Shelob would eat them.

It gets more detailed than that though. Sauron’s boss, Morgoth, and Shelob’s boss, Ungoliant, made a deal. They’d attack the tree of life together. Morgoth would drink the nectar, and Ungoliant would keep all of the jewels and magic they earned along the way. Morgoth broke this deal because there was a particularly powerful gem he wanted (the gem in Sauron’s helmet), and as a result Ungoliant went to war with Morgoth.

Ungoliant won, Morgoth barely escaped with his life.

So not only does Sauron maybe lose if he attacks Shelob. Even if he were to win, it might provoke Ungoliant into attacking Morgoth again, and Ungoliant wins that fight, she’s already done it once.

With all of that established, how the hell does Sam hurt a deity that powerful?

Well, to start, it’s impossible. Shelob’s hide is so tough Sam could never pierce it with all his might. However, Shelob had grown old and arrogant. During the fight, Sam winds up directly underneath Shelob, and Shelob decides to crush Sam with all her strength.

Unfortunately, Sam is pointing sting straight up.

While Sam lacks the strength to hurt Shelob, Shelob herself is plenty strong. She accidentally impales herself on sting, finding herself injured for the first time in thousands of years. Which is the sort of poetry I really appreciate about Tolkien’s writing.

No matter how powerful or evil or ancient or indestructible your foe, if you stand for what is right and hold your sword out, they will impale themselves upon it.

After discovering that there was Boromir Week event 10 years ago and losing sleep because I was constantly thinking about how much Boromir DESERVES to have an event dedicated to him, I decided to try and bring it back. We'll see what happens!

I can make a separate FAQ post if I get additional questions from people, but here is some info I can provide now:

What is Boromir Week? It is (will be) a week-long event where people can submit fic drabbles (100 words), ficlets (≤1000 words), one-shots, fanart, gifs, moodboards, and headcanons set to prompts that highlight the awesomeness that is Boromir.

When is Boromir Week? It will run June 14-20, 2025. The original event, which was held in 2014 and 2015, ran the last week of March, but that is cutting it VERY close. I chose these dates in June because, in canon, June 19th is when Boromir and Faramir have the dream about the riddle, and June 20th is the attack on Osgiliath and the official start of the War of the Ring. I'm weird about calendars.

What is allowed for Boromir Week? As mentioned above, fanfiction, fanart, gifs, moodboards, and headcanons about Boromir that are tied to any of the day's prompts are allowed. Please tag any ships and/or triggers, and place NSFW/graphic submissions under a "Read More" and tag as such.

What is NOT allowed for Boromir Week? Anything created using AI. This event is intended to show Boromir in a positive light and show our appreciation for the character, so anything that is blatantly anti-Boromir is strongly discouraged. Submitting an AU where Boromir succeeded in obtaining the One Ring or writing a Dark!Boromir AU is different (and hot, let's be real). This also applies to commenting on submissions. Don't like, don't read. Don't yuck on someone else's yum. Ship and let ship. Please keep your comments respectful.

How do I submit posts for Boromir Week? The main tags I will be using will be #Boromir Week and #Boromir Week 2025. However, Tumblr's tag search is pretty much useless, not only showing results that have nothing to do with what you searched for, but also omitting a lot of results. So, the best way for me to know that you've posted is to tag @/boromir-week (without the slash). Depending on how many people participate, I may reblog your submissions as soon as I get home from work (on week days during the event) or it might be the following day.

Who is running this shindig? Hi, I'm @lucifers-legions! I write fanfiction, have way too many OCs, make moodboards (it's therapeutic), and simp over Gondor and Rohan blorbos. I started writing Boromir fanfiction in 2012 and have been obsessed with him ever since. I'm still trying to figure out this whole event mod thing, so please be patient with me, and thank you in advance for your understanding.

What are the prompts for this event? Day 1: Brother of Faramir, Childhood, Protector and Teacher

Day 2: Son of Finduilas, Maternal Family, Grief and Loss

Day 3: Son of Denethor, Paternal Family, Thorongil

Day 4: Teen Years, Captain of Gondor, Friend of Rohan

Day 5: The People's Prince, Rivendell, Member of the Fellowship

Day 6: Change of Fate, Fourth Age, Alternate Universe

Here is my little Pippin & Boromir Comic about Courage!!

To give a little bit of Context, first of all I completely made this up haha I imagine this happening sometimes after setting off from Rivendell but before the Mines of Moria! So in the book after Pippin was alone in Gondor for quite some while, he felt very isolated and alone, very little and weak. (especially after being separated from Merry) and there were times where he stood at the walls of Minas Tirith and looked into the Horizon and could see that you know things are about to happen haha so i asked myself if Pippin ever thought about Boromir during that time, I always felt like that they shared a special bond. Maybe Pip reminded Boromir of Faramir especially when they were younger!

Merry: Pippin. *lays a comforting hand on his shoulder*

Merry: I think it is worth a shot.

Pippin: got it *wanders away*

Frodo: why would you do that

Arwen: well, now I must marry him. we ageed.

Pippin: :D

Aragorn: Arwen please

Elrond: so now my daughter must marry this hobbit

Arwen: I’m comfortable with that

Aragorn: please this isn’t funny

Arwen: you should have thought of that before you accepted the challenge, I’m engaged to Pippin now.