Family Ties

Boromir stomped through the Steward’s House, a small and very bad-tempered whirlwind.  He made sure that he banged his wooden sword against everything that got in his way, imagining that he was using it against the bigger boys who had enraged him.

‘Oh dear,’ his mother said softly as her second son stirred briefly before settling back into his nap.

The door of Boromir’s chamber slammed, and, just in case nobody had noticed it the first time, opened and slammed again.

Finduilas drew a quick breath as she approached.  Her husband had come home to spend the afternoon working in his study and, if he was disturbed by his son’s bad mood, he would be most displeased.

She opened the door and looked down at the heap of red-cheeked rumpled boy scrunched up next to his army of Gondor’s soldiers, watching as he knocked one proud knight from his horse with a vicious flick of his finger.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ he growled.

Her eyes twinkled with the gleam of sunshine on water. ‘I think you’ve broken that poor soldier,’ she said.

‘He’s not a soldier, mother,’ her son told her impatiently, ‘he’s a knight of Lebennin.’

‘Ahh,’ his mother replied, suddenly understanding some of his mood, and she sat beside him, waiting for him to tell her.

After a while, looking down, his dark hair hiding his face, Boromir released the words that were troubling him.  ‘It’s not fair,’ he said. ‘They keep calling me names.  They say because you’re from Dol Amroth that I’m elfy.  They laugh at me.’

She stroked his hair away from his eyes.  ‘They tease you because you are the Steward’s son, my sweet, and because they are bigger than you – and because they can.  If you laughed back and didn’t care, they would stop.’

‘I don’t want to be elfy,’ he complained.

‘If you are ‘elfy’, then they are, too,’ she told him gently. ‘Mantir’s great grandmother was a daughter of the Swan Prince; Aladon’s grandmother on his mother’s side – and his great great grandmother on his father’s side. There is not a noble house in Gondor that does not share the bloodlines of Dol Amroth.’

Boromir wrinkled his nose.  He could not work up any interest in the complicated lines of ancestry that kept a whole department of library staff in employment.

His mother continued to smooth his tumbled hair. ‘Everybody knows about the elf maiden who married the first Prince of Dol Amroth,’ she said.  ‘Traces of her can still be read in the eyes of many of her descendents – although,’ she added to her son,’ I do not think that I can see them in you.  But she was not the only one to share her blood with the lords of Gondor.  Shall I tell you a story, my son?’

Boromir settled against the soft blue of his mother’s gown and listened.