Faramir



I have always possessed a way with words, a command of language. For as long as I could recall I have born the ability to contort words, to wrought them into something, something beautiful, something melancholy, or even something repugnant. Over the dying embers of a fire I have harkened to yarns woven by soldiers who have seen scores of winters and endured the carnage of war for decades. Their tales were crude (and occasionally lewd), woven with crimson threads of blood and the black threads of malice. From every tale I earnestly listened to I garnered something, gleaning either a valuable lesson in living or something as trivial as precisely where to procure a pint of Gondor’s most potent brew. When Mithrandir arrived in the White City he encountered a youth with an unquenchable appetite for knowledge, more than eager to merely observe him in his toiling in the vaults of Minas Tirith. I would seek out wayward scrolls of withered parchment or fervently probe the deepest confines of the treasuries for a lost tablet upon which ancient lore was inscribed for the Grey Pilgrim. Then, as the candlelight flickered and waned and if labors had not entirely wearied him I would implore him to relate some epic tale of lore of another age of Middle-earth. And despite the urgency of his quest to Minas Tirith and despite the great torment that I perceived weighed heavily upon him mind he would oblige my request. And Mithrandir would tell a tale which I would listen to with unwavering engrossment and enthrallment. As he would speak, his voice coarse and deep yet somehow melodic, my thirst for knowledge only whetted, I would formulate an infinite number of questions to ask him. He would merely chuckle at my zeal for scholarship and stories, lamenting that if every lad had my appetite for schooling of history many of the grievances of the world would be resolved.

“Those who know naught of the past are bound to repeat its mistakes,” he would lecture though would soon forsake his somberness, emitting another sonorous chuckle.

I have long had an enchantment with words, words of the very sage, words of minstrels interwoven with notes of a melody or merely the words of an intoxicated solider. To hear words, to create worlds with ink and adjectives, to convey epic battles through voice to me is bliss. And then there were the harsh words, the acidic and acrid utterances of my of my father. diligent They were mere words, yet when emitted from a father’s mouth could smote the very soul of a son who’s solitary desire was to be diligent son. And each degrading glance and scornful comment was like a putrid lemon juice being poured over a ghastly abrasion that never quite healed.

Words bear the capability to tell of adoration just as competently and simply as their can tell of abhorrence. Words may depict vast and beauteous vistas or words may sculpt a fetid lair of some foul beast. They can tell of utterly bliss... and unbridled terror.

Words can tell of contrast.

Gondor is a world of contrasts. Of constricting honor and one’s heart fighting an eternal battle. A world where you feign emotions, permitting the true ones to fester and wrought within you a treacherous personality. Gondor is a violently opposing ambiance of black and white, you are either one thing, or the other. A son is either unfailingly loyal and deferential to his father or a disgraceful wretch of a creature, in their narrow perception. I was neither, yet Gondor has not a position for anything save the most extreme of the spectrum.

My father, who breathed the very essence of the Gondorian mentality, is a prime example of such contrasting extremes, for he held them within himself. He taught valiance, while he himself submitting to his gnawing fears. He preached respect, while he possessed none for me. In front of his populace he was a pensive and shrewd leader, while enclosed in the walls of the House of Stewards with his family, he was volatile and often degrading.

And words can tell of harmony. Of love.

I never expected to love yet love, among a legion of other wondrous qualities, is devious. It lurks around shadowy corners, a spider bidding its time, until it seizes you and ensnares you in its web. Yet this is a web of tentative touches, exhilarating hope and agonizing doubt. It is torturous bliss, being caught in this web. And it is blissful torture. Love shall never again to relinquish its firm grasp on you. And you shall never be the same again.

And words can tell of all of this.

Yet there are two things in this world I remain unable to properly convey to another soul, by either a quill or speech. And at that moment one of these things was standing in awe, rendered quite speechless, before the other, having drawn in a swift breath of astonishment. Her golden head was crowned with the light reflecting off the cascade of water, jewels of flickering light interwoven into her flaxen hair. She reached out, as if to catch the elusive beams of light in her palm, the veil of water dividing at the place of her delicate, almost hesitant touch.

“It’s beautiful,” Eowyn almost breathed.

“Aye, it is. Yet its beauty dims in comparison to your own,” I replied from where I stood behind her.

“You can not woo me with words of poetry, man of Gondor,” she said, veering around to face me, her pale cheeks coloring with a blush. “You may attempt to do so, however, because it is not wholly unpleasant,” she jested, encountering my gaze. Something that required no words passed between us and I swiftly strode over to her, eager the fill the chasm of space between us.

She audibly sighed as I traced the contours of her countenance, my fingers lingering upon her lips, wind burnt from our journey on horseback to the haven of Henneth Annun. I tenderly brushed my lips across her brow yet even this chaste display of affection quickened my already racing heartbeat and she visibly trembled at the contact. On the walls of Minas Tirith the day the Enemy was vanquished though at that time we knew it not I had stooped and bestowed a feather light kiss upon this very same brow. Yet she hand abruptly backed away, as if scalded, her haunting, grey eyes conveying her shock and bewilderment.

Today, however, she earnestly intertwined her hands in my dark hair, drawing me down to almost deviously nip at my bottom lip and bless my cheeks with tantalizingly soft kisses. Then her lips finally sought mine. All notion of the wonder of the waterfall was forsaken as the kisses became more and more torrid and the daylight waned and ebbed .

When we reluctantly relinquished our embrace, her golden hair slightly disheveled, my tunic slightly askew, her breathing matched the rapid beating of my heart. It seemed passion had stolen both my ability to properly fit incoherent thoughts into an intelligible sentence and my ability to breath.

Eowyn cast her grey eyes about the dank confines of the cave, it’s crudeness in sharp contrast to the natural splendor of the waterfall.

“Faramir,” she asked in a low murmur, “why did you bring me here?”

Why had I led her on a foray into the wilderness, our final destination naught but a primitive outpost of the Ithilien Rangers? The suffocating, fetid stench of unwashed bodies and mildew hung thickly in the air. The light of the torches mounted upon the wall was minimal and swiftly diminishing and mountains of dark, rain laden clouds hovered formidably and almost menacingly upon the horizon. If it was solitude I had desired we had achieved it; there was not a mortal soul, man or beast within leagues of this haven. Yet we had been granted that very same blissful isolation in Minas Tirith, who’s walls of pale stone I fled. For all the court decorum, ceremony, and legion of well wishers that were required to accompany the wedding of the Steward of Gondor and the sister of the King of Rohan we had been left unattended in the House of Stewards in the week that followed (as was tradition). We had been utterly exultant and joyful and never was there any want of occupation. So why had I fractured that tranquility? Why had I brought her, my wife of merely a week, here?

I cast my eyes about the cave, meditating on these questions, whose weight upon my mind was steadily increasing. I was toiling beneath the ample burden of struggle that was being waged between my enchantment with her and the fear I had previously refused to dwell upon. The fear that she did not return the sentiments I held for her. I yearned to have the truth revealed yet the thought of knowing the truth inflicted fear upon me. What if the actuality was that she did not love me and that the King still held her heart captive? How then would I accept and endure the truth? Yet what if it was the truth?

Jealously is not in my nature but in the mere instances my thoughts lingered upon that ghastly possibility such a scorching envy I had never felt before or since overwhelmed me. If she loved him....

Though I am well aware of how fatuous it appears now but I forsook my characteristically serene demeanor. And I promptly leapt to many lofty conclusions, each more unlikely than the next. Éowyn did not love me. Her heart still belonged to Ellesar. Was it not true that she had never granted me a direct answer to my fervent inquiry of “do you love me or will you not?” Was I doomed to be second best, a consolation prize, for the entirety of my wretched life?

I needed to know if she loved me and that was why I had brought her here. Though I had never vocalized this fear to a soul it had been festering inside of me, creating doubt. Forgive me, but I do believe my thinking was irrational in those moments and I ignored the overwhelming facts that supported her love for me.

“Faramir?” she reiterated, her tenderness for me apparent in her tone. Yet I, in my irrational state, paid no heed to it. Or rather I heard it and refused to acknowledge it. She, so fair, so valiant, so utterly perfect in my eyes could not love me. It would be impossible.

“Yes?” I murmured, abruptly drawn out of my pensive state by her gentle, yet insistent tone. I caught her gaze, adoration and compassion shining in the depths of her grey irises. And then I knew.

I knew without her uttering a mere syllable. I knew without her vocalizing her emotions. I knew that she loved me.

“I was worried about you,” she said quietly “You had knit your brow and had the air of a man undergoing something of great pain,” she murmured, stroking the coarse stubble upon my cheeks. She then unanticipatedly wrapped her arms around my neck, her lithe frame pressed against me, her breath pleasantly warm on my ear.

“I love you, Faramir,” she whispered.

“I know.”

And I had known. In the deepest confines of my soul, in spite of all my doubtfulness and skepticism, I knew that she loved me.

It was then I realized words were not everything. Despite my deeply rooted enchantment with them I became cognizant of another basic truth of life: some things require no words. And love is one of those things.

There we stood, my wife and I, merely savoring the poignant silence, the utter lack of words between us.

Perhaps words are not everything, after all.