The return

Faramir

Persistent flatterers – that tribe of human houseflies whom I despise more than any other – will have it that the Steward of Gondor is never wrong. Flatterers never stay on truth, but I have known some people who should know better, among them my elder son, express the same opinion despite evidence to the contrary in a host of matters both great and small.

Of all the times I was wrong, the worst was over Eldarion’s wooing of my daughter. I hope and believe that it was not through selfishness I erred, as Eldarion accused me; I had never supposed that she would stay with me for ever, although she always claimed, with passionate earnestness, that she would. Sooner or later she would find a husband to her liking and would leave me; I admit to being selfish enough to hope it would be later rather than sooner.

Was it through false humility? Not false, I think. The purity of the descent of King Elessar was the strongest element in his claim to the throne, triumphing over all the rebellious loremasters’ endeavours to cast doubt on it, and it was further glorified by his marriage to the Lady Arwen; whereas all know that the family tree of the Stewards, noble as it may be, has thrown out some strange branches from time to time; I was by no means the first of our house to court censure in that way. Some say there is royal blood in us (however far off and long ago), many that there is elven blood from the side of Dol Amroth; but none of this compares with the blood of Westernesse unmingled. I was so convinced of the truth, and the importance, of this that it never crossed my mind that Eldarion, raised in the strictest and most hallowed tradition, would be prepared to overthrow it for the sake of my daughter, especially as he had at one time learned to treat her as a younger sister. The conviction blinded me, inexcusably, so that I failed to see what was before my very eyes. Elboron, who always says he has no brains, saw it long before I did, but because he believed that I was never wrong or blind to plain evidence, he forbore to warn me, hating (as he said later in unmerited self-reproach) to be a tale-bearer. It is I, not he, who deserve reproach; but reproaches do no good.  

At one time I thought it strange that Fíriel herself did not warn me. I think she was trying to believe that Eldarion was merely amusing himself during a few weeks of holiday, and would speedily forget her. Flattery annoys her no less than it does me, but she was prepared to endure Eldarion’s flatteries, as she thought them: out of good will, because although she barely remembered it, she knew that he had been kind to her in the past; and out of courtesy and duty, because he was the King’s son. When she realised he meant them seriously, she was shocked and overwhelmed, and she fled. 

I did not fear for her safety. I knew what nobody else knew, even my wife: that Fíriel frequently visited the Elves. She never did this when I was at home, but when I was away, she found that their company eased the ache of separation. Until the day of her flight, she had never stayed long with them, but this time, her absence stretched from days to weeks, and I was compelled to reveal the secret of her whereabouts at least to certain trusted people, to forestall a general panic.

I should explain that while many Elves dwell among us here in Ithilien, they are not subject either to me or to the King, but live according to their own laws. They live in friendship with us and have often helped us at need, but as a rule we go our separate ways, and men seldom venture into what, without a word spoken or written, are known to be elven-woods.

When Fíriel fled Legolas sent me word that Fíriel was among them and was safe – which I knew already – but no other news came from them. Everyone else waited on my word, and I waited on Fíriel’s. Eldarion called loudly on to me to follow her and bring her back, but I would not; I would not have my daughter dragged back to her own home like a recaptured fugitive.

‘Then I will go to my father and have him override your orders and bring her back,’ Eldarion said to me. ‘As he can do.’

‘Indeed he can,’ I answered, ‘and I leave you to judge, Prince Eldarion, whether my daughter will love you the better for it if he does.’

He was silent for a while, and then said in a much milder tone, ‘May I wait here until she returns?’

‘She is much more likely to return, my lord, if she knows you are not here,’ I answered.

He left the next day, and in Ithilien, we continued to wait, like a party of lost travellers in a place where there is no guiding light.

* * *

She returned in the dawn of a misty day in late autumn. I had not slept that night – I had slept only in snatches since she went away – and was sitting by the window that looks over the orchard when I saw a figure through the mist, so dim that for a moment I thought I was seeing the ghost of a past time, when I had found my wife sorrowing there on the wild night that had seen Fíriel’s beginning. Then I understood and ran out to her, even as I had run to Eowyn on that long-ago night, and she swayed towards me and I caught her in my arms.

‘I could not go with them,’ she said in a strange, dull tone, like one repeating a lesson. ‘I am earth’s daughter. I told them I could not go.’

I turned her towards the house and she came with me like a sleep-walker, seeming unaware of who I was. I took her to her little room and sat her on the bed, and suddenly she shook her head and looked up at me, and her eyes were clear.

‘Father? Why do you look at me so?’ she said.

‘How did I look?’

‘So sad and so worried? Is something wrong?’

‘Something wrong? Of course there is something wrong, with you lost to us.’

She looked puzzled. ‘Lost? I have not been long away.’

‘It has seemed long to me,’ I answered, equally perplexed. ‘But you’re tired. Go to sleep now, and all will be well in the morning.’ I was talking as if she were a child again and newly awakened from a bad dream.

She smiled and lay down, and I left her and went to tell my wife the glad news of her return, but as I walked my daughter’s first words pursued me.

Where had she been asked to go? Was it on some journey that had no returning, that would have taken her forever beyond our ken?

I shivered. At least she had come back to me. All our other problems remained, but since she was not lost to me forever, I felt that the rest could be endured.

All the next day she slept, while the news of her homecoming spread through the household and they rejoiced as at the return of one thought dead; but in the evening she came and stood before me as she used to do as a child, when she thought it necessary to accuse herself of some misdemeanour.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ she said.

‘Sorry for what, sweetheart?’

‘For running away. I didn’t mean to be gone long – I did not think I had been gone long. I forgot that time with the elven-folk is not as time with us.’

‘That I understand, but why did you run away from me at all?’

‘Not from you! You know I could no more run away from you than I could stop myself breathing. From him.’

‘Is he so very terrible?’

‘I thought he mocked me. Then I thought he wanted to take me away from you, and I was angry and afraid and I ran away. Then I thought again, and was ashamed to have treated the King’s son so discourteously. Then I was ashamed to have run away, and I came back. Why did you not call me back earlier? You know I would have come.’

She seemed to have forgotten her earlier strange words, as one forgets a dream after the first waking moments, and I did not try to recall them, fearing perhaps that to speak them again would make them true, so that to this day I do not know what really happened. I only answered that I would have her come of her own accord or not at all.

‘You are not angry with me then? I am forgiven?’ she asked anxiously, childlike again for a moment, but when I smiled and assured her there was nothing to forgive for my part, she did not subject me to one of her old strangling embraces but kissed my hand and seated herself close beside me, grave and thoughtful, and I realised with a pang how thoroughly she had left childhood behind. Eldarion had hastened her last steps along that road; the realisation, I must confess, did not endear him further to me.

It was of Eldarion she spoke next.

‘I am glad he has gone from here, but I’m sorry too, in a way,’ she said. ‘He must be regretting his wild words by now, and I am no less sorry for mine. And I should never forgive myself if the understanding between our families was spoiled because of me. Should I write and beg his forgiveness? Or should I wait until he makes it plain that he has forgotten his anger against me?’

I considered. I was by no means convinced that Eldarion had regretted his words, or that he thought them wild, or above all that he was angry with Fíriel; his ardour, like that of all lovers, had only increased as it encountered resistance.

‘Let him be for the time,’ I said finally. ‘I shall send to tell him that you are safely returned – we owe him that at least – and then we shall wait and see. All may be well.’

And I hoped it would be. I did not realise then how thoroughly Eldarion took after his father, who had loved once, and once only, and forever, and whose resolution in pursuit of that love had been without limit. Whether the station of the beloved was far above or far below the lover, it made no difference.

And if the love were not returned?

It still made no difference. When the heirs of Isildur desire a thing, they do not take advice about it, and they do not take ‘no’ for an answer. History, it seems, failed to teach me that lesson, but there was no escaping it in the end.

Author’s note: readers of ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ will identify here an echo of ‘The Last Ship’, in which a mortal girl, Fíriel, is invited by the elves to join them in their voyage over Sea, but refuses because she ‘was born earth’s daughter’. That haunting poem was the origin not only of this chapter but of my Fíriel herself. The name – one of the loveliest ones in Tolkien -   means ‘mortal woman’.