blossoming, still

So firstly I’ve realised this guy is actually the most useful character across the entire legendarium in terms of deciphering Westerly racial attitudes towards the Haradrim (yeah the First Age Elves were kind of racist about Ulfang and the other men from the East but also First Age Elves would have been racist about a bumblebee with one extra stripe so ngl their opinions on this front mean very little to me ☠️). 

Obviously Tolkien’s own deeply conservative views on race are prevalent across the legendarium but it’s exactly that which makes it difficult to pick out, in a Watsonian sense, the individual racial opinions of the Westerly peoples of Middle Earth aside from what the Hobbits swiftly develop from saplings in Scouring of the Shire. And so it is in the section of The Two Towers beginning with Frodo and Sam running into Faramir and his men where we get the majority of any actual dialogue about the Haradrim, as opposed to omniscient narration. Where due to the amount of interiority and political speech afforded to Faramir on this matter, we actually get to see the ideology rather than just its consequences. 

“...they (the Stewards) made a truce with the proud peoples of the North, who often had assailed us, men of fierce valour, but our kin from afar off, unlike the wild Easterlings or the cruel Haradrim." (Book 2 Ch V, THE TWO TOWERS)

And it’s actually in the above quote from Faramir that we see it implied that the Gondorians consider the men of Rhûn and Harad as inferior/separate even beyond the military sense, because obviously Gondor wasn’t exactly friendly with the men of the North either (which he straight up says) and yet they count as kin. And yes, I also wondered whether he might just be referring to the Edain/Blessed Men, but that wouldn’t make too much sense since he obviously married Eowyn, whose lineage is not Edain/exiled Numenorean but Atanatári, ie ‘middle men’ (more on this later). 

And this isn’t just a single moment. I also noticed another quote by Faramir when I was reading ‘The Wretched of Middle Earth’ by Charles E Mills (brilliant essay, go read, etc), where Faramir states: “…the enemy increases and we decrease. We are a failing people, a springless autumn… childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry.” And again, this language of once-great races decaying as the barbarians bay at the gates is prevalent in a racial ideology that was present in Tolkien’s time, but also absolutely present in contemporary racial discourse, and especially so in Western, Central and Northern Europe, where I can point to you multiple cases of this exact language being used in present-day Germany regarding immigration even by seemingly liberal-minded sources.

Now this isn’t a personal judgement of Faramir’s character by any means, and I’m not at all saying he’s an individually terrible character or what not: quite the contrary. It’s clearly just a product of circumstance, in being tasked with defending what was essentially the border at the time, he and his men pretty much have the viewpoint of any border guard now or then, ie a tendency to demonify/dehumanise those outside it in order to keep the artificial border artificially sealed. And considering that border was also a border with orcs, by whose hand so many Gondorian men have died, who are (in-universe) absolutely seen to be inhuman/subhuman/‘created’... it perfectly gels with him being the one who narratively establishes the racial hierarchy, in which ‘men of darkness’ are seen as adjacent to the subhuman. 

[Sam] was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was, and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace… [Book 2 Ch IV, THE TWO TOWERS]

This was actually something that irritated me about the Jackson films: the scene above where Sam in the book looks at the corpse of a Haradrim soldier, wonders if he ever wanted to leave home, what lies and threats must have brought him so far. And it’s quite literally the only moment in the books where a single shred of empathy is shown towards the ‘swarthy men’ on the other side of the war, yet in the films that scene and dialogue was given to Faramir who says it about a very young Haradrim soldier. I assume it was to establish him as kind/soft-hearted from the moment he appears on screen, an impulse I understand (even though his character establishes it multiple times with his other actions), but I just think it’s pretty unrealistic for a military commander whose men actually did the killing to say such a thing. Whereas it’s perfectly characteristic coming from Sam, a figure who just really fucking wants to go home, who knows very little about the men from the South, and in terms of his class position as well, is well placed to understand people being forced to do things they would not normally wish to do. 

Like I said in my first paragraph, the argument for empire is always most dangerous in the mouth of its kindest defender, and Faramir is Gondor's most thoughtful defender: a man who explicitly rejects the crude form of imperial ambition, who tells Frodo in that he would not have Minas Tirith be a “mistress of many slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of willing slaves”, and who makes this declaration in the same conversation in which he describes a taxonomy of Men that places the Haradrim categorically outside the circle of kinship of Men. 

He disavows the slave-mistress model of empire while maintaining the ideology that produces it, and so very clearly demonstrating the cognitive structure of the liberal imperialist: the rejection of empire's worst expression alongside the preservation of the framework of racial and civilisational hierarchy, the language which makes empire's gentler expressions feel less like violence and more like stewardship, the natural responsibility of the high toward the lesser. 

And I’m not pulling this out of my ass, because this is again seen in Gondor’s history with the Haradrim. There’s a tribute system that Tolkien mentions almost in passing: Haradrim chieftains were compelled to pay tribute to Gondor as well as send their sons to be raised in Gondor's courts following Hyarmendacil I's conquests in the early Third Age. Which reads, against the backdrop of the racial taxonomy Faramir establishes here, as darker than standard militaristic tribute systems. The practice of taking the sons of conquered rulers and raising them at the conquering court is obviously ancient and widespread: the Ottomans did it with the devshirme, Rome did it with the children of client kings, the British did versions of it across the nineteenth century in India and Africa etc etc… in each case the stated rationale was acculturation, which essentially produced a leadership class that would govern their people in a way acceptable to the imperial centre.

And similarly, with what is said by Faramir read alongside that moment of Gondor’s history, it’s clear that the Gondorian court doing the acculturating held an explicitly articulated position that the people being acculturated were not kin, were not of the circles of higher men, were inherently ‘cruel’ ‘men of darkness’. And so these boys would have learned Westron, Gondorian law and custom, the history of their own people through the chronicle of their conquerors, essentially learned to see themselves through the eyes of a civilisation that considered them subhuman. 

That this policy resoundingly failed, ie that the Haradrim returned to Sauron's service repeatedly across the Third Age and that by the War of the Ring they were marching in force toward Mordor is, from within Gondor's own framework as well as that of the Oxford-educated early 20th century conservative, inexplicable, because the framework has no mechanism for understanding violent resistance as a rational response to the ‘kindness’ done to the ‘lesser races’. From Gondor and the cultural centres of the ‘irl’ imperial core (see again: Oxford), the trajectory makes perfect sense: that people who were conquered, tributarised, had their sons taken, categorised as inherently lesser by the culture doing all of the above, would ultimately turn once more to Sauron.

And this choice is of course intended to be incomprehensible to both the assumed reader and the Gondorians themselves, because to us it’s narratively clear that Sauron’s deeds were monstrous and his service was destructive both physically and environmentally. Which is why the trajectory makes perfect sense to both audiences: the Haradrim, the Oriental stand-ins, make such a choice because they are ontologically irrational. They will always choose evil, because that is their inherent nature, because they are subhuman, only a few steps removed from beings created for the purpose of evil. Where the tragedy is that everyone had reasons to choose what they did, and frankly I’m not a big Sauron guy at all but I’ll be honest, if all my sons and fathers and everyone was sent to the Gondorian courts to be taught that they suck ass and that I’m bad at Westron class because I’m adjacent to an orc, I might just reconsider and be like okay then fuck it if you bitches say I’m an orc then you know what, I’m an orc. 

Anyway, that taxonomy passage and the childless lords one are some of if not the most explicit statements of Gondorian racial thinking anywhere in the books, and I found it so fascinating how it comes from Gondor’s most morally admirable character. Faramir divides Men into the High (Númenóreans and their kin), the Middle Peoples (those who have had contact with Elvish influence and the Edain tradition and are simply not Edain due to geographical reasons or choices made in the Beleriand days), and the men of darkness (the Haradrim and the Easterlings explicitly, those who repeatedly served the Enemy of their own free will).

And it’s such an interesting statement because it converts a geopolitical and historical situation, where peoples born within Sauron's sphere of influence across many generations, conscripted into his service by the full apparatus of a dark lord's coercive and violent power (do we believe he wouldn’t use orcs to quell rebellion within the Haradrim?), into a statement about moral character/will, something essential instead of contingent. And that’s imperial ideology in a nutshell, where the historical is turned into the ontological, so that the people on the ‘wrong’ side of a military power relationship appear to occupy said ‘wrong’ position because of what they are instead of where, or who, or why they are there.

And the reason I called this ‘ominous’ with reference to the Fourth Age instead of just interesting is because of Faramir’s institutional position after the Ring War. He’s the Prince of Ithilien, ie recovered border territory that would become a frontier zone due to its adjacency to the near south, as well as Steward of Gondor under Aragorn. And due to this position, where Aragorn is obviously now in charge of multiple administrative zones and aside from his Thorongil ship-burning adventures in Umbar, had little prolonged contact with the Haradrim unlike Faramir whose adult life was spent maintaining that border, would make it very likely that Faramir would be made one of the primary architects of the relationship between the Reunited Kingdom and the peoples it is expanding into, ie the enforced surrender of the Haradrim and the retaking of Umbar.

Where the man who builds the policy toward Harad holds a considered view that the Haradrim freely chose ‘darkness’ over and over and are not kin, who is a good man who would not be cruel about it but thoughtful and just and entirely convinced of the justice of what he’s doing, genuinely in love not with the violence but with the White City that must be protected. And I find that chilling because cruelty in a text that abhors wanton cruelty can be identified and condemned and ultimately is meant to produce shame and repentance. But the version of imperial ideology as seen in the Faramirs of the world only engenders more Faramirs, each one more and more considerate, humane, and better able to articulate justifications for the same outcome. 

And like I gestured to earlier, his relationship with Éowyn, the hopeful and triumphant nature of that relationship budding in war like no other has (with A&A’s relationship obviously having started decades prior) just makes this even more interesting. Faramir's taxonomy places the Rohirrim in the middle tier, so not the High Men of Númenórean blood, but the Middle Peoples who came under Elvish influence and are adjacent to but not fully within the circle of the Edain, though they are not fully kin in the way the Dúnedain are kin. The implication of the Gondorian racial categories, ie that intermarriage between Dúnedain and Haradrim would represent a crossing of a civilisational and biological boundary, obviously sits in kind of, er, uncomfortable proximity to his marriage to a woman who is not of Númenórean blood either and is one of those Middle Peoples distinguished from the High.

And yet the racial framework doesn’t collapse under this: partly because of course, the Middle Peoples are viewed as slightly ‘lesser’ but not of darkness, where they are absolutely still human and viewed as almost-equals, where a liaison represents hope and progress… and partly because the racial categorisation just accommodates Éowyn through the mechanism that such frameworks always use to accommodate their exceptions, which is to accept the individual while maintaining the category, extending to a specific person the humanity that their designation withholds. 

Which is something that happens in the book itself… think again about that single poignant moment of empathy extended to the Haradrim youth through the character of Samwise, in a book that so adamantly maintains the impermeability of racial boundaries… or how ‘race mixing’ is seen as hopeful when it comes to Sindar/Noldor or beautiful but tragic when it comes to specific cases of Elf/Mortal romances, yet the racial boundaries are never broken with the ‘unpalatable’ races. Faramir looks at Éowyn and sees Éowyn, looks at the Haradrim and sees the men of darkness, and the distance between those two operations is where the Fourth Age begins.

The tragedy is that Faramir is, by every measure, the best Gondor has to offer, and just makes me think if this guy cannot see it, the structural likelihood of anyone else seeing it is not high. Tolkien leaves him at the end of the primary narrative as Prince of Ithilien, rebuilding the border territory, married to Éowyn, presiding over what is presented as a kind of grace note of hope after catastrophe. And there absolutely is real hope in him because he is not Denethor, not someone driven to madness, the decaying custodian of a city turned inward on its own glory, and his rejection of the slave-mistress model of empire is not nothing, and is imo the slender thread on which the Fourth Age's better possibilities hang. Because he is a person who repeatedly chooses goodness, always reaches for the less cruel option.