Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (iv) Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion

By -
A black, white, and dark blue striped header image with the text Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (iv) Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion

Once more continuing my mini series within a series on the Appendixes at the back of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three: Return of the King, I move along to “Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (iv) Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion”. While last week’s section focused on the northern kingdom on Anor after the empire of the Númenóreans divided, this week’s section focuses on the southern kingdom, Gondor. Much like last week, this section is mostly about the Númenórean descendants having a rough time, often because of their own bad choices. Peoples opposing Gondor included the Black Númenóreans, the Men of Harad and Khad, Corsairs, Sauron and his orcs, Wainriders, and themselves, with each group paralleling people in real-world history and mythology. Fortunately, after pages of violent fighting, the conclusion of this section was satisfying and directly connected to the dialogue portion of the books.

Color Symbolism, Black Númenóreans, and Men of Harad

Black Númenóreans was a term used by the Men of Gondor for descendants of members of their own group who had turned against Elendil, the founder of their empire, as first discussed during “I The Númenórean Kings, (ii) The Realms in Exile”, and become allies of Sauron. These Númenóreans married Men of Middle-earth, whom the Men of Gondor deemed “lesser Men” (357). While the Black Númenóreans possibly had a darker skin tone than their relatives in Gondor, the term could be used to indicate evil.

The duality of black versus white or dark versus light used as a symbol of evil versus good has persisted throughout folklore for centuries. Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature, initially discussed during “Prologue, 4 Of the Finding of the Ring”, listed many concepts in this category: “black” and “white” witches as “malevolent and benevolent” (G220.0.1); the devil is called “the black man” (G303.2.2) and its kindred “the devil as a black man” (G303.3.1.6), “the devil is dressed in black” (G303.5.1), and “the devil in a black cloak” (G303.5.1.1); “dark traitors” (K2260); and the “symbolic color: black” (Z143). These European folkloric beliefs predate the modern “flavor” of racism that arose with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. However, as Thompson compiled the book in the 1930s and expanded it in the 1950s, a few of its entries contain words and ideas that modern readers recognize as racist, sexist, or otherwise unacceptable. Similarly, these old beliefs fueled modern prejudices, with pro-slavery ministers in the American South arguing that Black people did not have souls, and the disciple Judas Iscariot being classically portrayed as Black because of his betrayal of Jesus.

The usage of these motifs throughout The Lord of the Rings have caused some literary critics to declare J.R.R. Tolkien a racist. While I am not a Tolkien apologist, and I do not want to dwell too long on this topic, these critics seem to conflate the perspective written into an in-universe ancient text that Tolkien “translated” with the perspective of the author creating the fantasy world. Tolkien lived in pre-Apartheid South Africa, survived two World Wars, and saw the aftermath of the Holocaust, along with being an expert in Medieval studies. While he claimed to not take any influence directly from real-world events, he understood the systems that created these events and constructed them in Middle-earth. In this way, the language he chose for his “translation” would match not only the language used by the “original author” but also sentiments he had heard expressed by modern people, not necessarily his own sentiments.

This can be seen in the text concerning the Men of Harad who live to the south of Middle-earth. Tarannon of Gondor, first of the Ship-Kings who built fleets to destroy the enemies of Gondor, created a dynasty that defeated this people after several generations. They forced the Men of Harad to pay tribute and kept their sons as “hostages” (Return of the King, 356) in court. This line is written objectively, as if this was a common and acceptable practice, and rulers throughout the ancient world did often do this; the book of Daniel in the Old Testament describes the lives of such hostages in the courts of Neo-Babylonians, Medes, and Persians.

However, a modern reader studying the text through a post-colonial lens would realize that the Men of Gondor were colonial oppressors, as they arrived from another land, continually attempted to expand their territory, and did not respect the culture of those they captured. The in-universe narrator believed the Men of Harad were evil, having allied with Sauron, and the Men of Gondor were good, reiterating the motif of evil versus good as dark versus light, but the text suggests a different framing: free will versus indoctrination. Both the Númenóreans and Sauron came from the West to conquer Middle-earth. The Dúnedain — descendants of the Númenóreans — made their own choices, often poor ones, about how they would capture the land, while those allied with Sauron, sometimes called the Servants of the Shadow, followed the will of a foreign power from the West.

In a 1970 interview, Tolkien admitted that the Men of Harad were modeled after African nations, while the region of Rhun was coded as Asian, making Middle-earth akin to Northwestern Europe. Perhaps he saw the aftermath of the “Scramble for Africa” and the effect of Marxism in both Africa and Asia, so he set up Sauron as Arda’s version of Western thought and colonial power influencing the South and East. He would flatly deny this connection if he even deigned to speak on it. In fact, in the interview, he referenced his friend C.S. Lewis as telling him, “Confound it, nobody can influence you anyhow. I have tried but it’s no good.” Other gems from this interview include “I think I was born with what you might call an inventive mind” and “I was also born with a great love of trees”, “I’m a linguist, and everything is linguistics”, “This was not a Christian myth anyhow”, and my favorite “It doesn’t obsess me” when referring to the fact that he had invented a world’s worth of fictional languages and history just for fun.

Corsairs, Plus Getting Rid of Monuments is Nothing New

After the Ship-Kings came a dynasty descended from both the Men of Gondor and the Rohirrim. Valacar son of Minaclar King of Gondor married Vidumavi daughter of Vidugavia King of Rhovanion, a part of Rohan. Their son had two names: the Dúnedain name Eldacar and the Rohirrim name Vinitharya. Because of his ancestry, some Men of Gondor believed he would be short-lived and did not want him as king. He was attacked at Osgiliath, the original capital of Gondor set up by Elendil, and its palantír sunk into the nearby water, putting the tally at four palantíri down, three to go. Castamir the Usurper, kin to Eldacar on his father’s side, stole the throne and executed Eldacar’s son Ornendil. Eldacar returned with his Rohirrim kindred and killed Castamir himself. The followers of the usurper fled by ship to Umbar and became known as the Corsairs, where they remained until recognizing Elessar Telcontar, one title for our friend Aragorn, as king over the reunited kingdom.

Tolkien chose to “translate” the name of this group as “corsair”, based on a Medieval Latin word for pirate that arrived in Early Modern English by the 1540s. He likely assumed the word “pirate”, taken from classical Latin and Greek, would evoke Davy Jones and Blackbeard rather than a sophisticated, government sanctioned agency. “Privateer”, another synonym, arrived in the 1660s and seems most similar to corsair, although I associate the word with the waters of the coast of New England and the Canadian Maritimes before the establishment of the United States Navy. The nearly rhyming word “buccaneer” came from Spanish and shared an etymology with barbecue, as this was supposedly how Spanish sailors cooked their meals. Finally, from Dutch in the 1560s came “freebooter”, which may have been coined by employees of the Verenigde Oostindische Compangie (VOC) or Dutch East India Company but could also be used to describe the VOC.

When the Corsairs captured Umbar, they tore down a monument commemorating when Ar-Pharazôn the Golden, last King of Númenor, had captured Sauron and held him hostage. This turned out to be a terrible idea that led to the drowning of Númenor and the removal of Valinor from the rest of Arda, so the Corsairs getting rid of it should have come as no surprise, but the Men of Gondor were intent on celebrating this victory from a war they ultimately lost.

Removing monuments has occurred for millennia, and while reasons vary, they typically seem to fall under three categories: a competent ruler or beneficial ideology has its monuments removed because those currently in power recognize its negative effects to their own power and want to prevent glorification of its memory, an incompetent ruler or harmful ideology has its monuments removed because those currently in power recognize its negative effects to society and want to prevent glorification of its memory, or a ruler or ideology unlike that of those currently in power is viewed as foreign and coveted as an artifact rather than the material culture of a society.

Those were a lot of academic words, so I will give examples. During the 18th Dynasty in Egypt, between 1479 and 1458 BC, Hatshepsut daughter of Thutmose I became king after the death of her brother-husband Thutmose II. Her reign was successful, and Egypt expanded its borders. Her successors, beginning with her stepson-nephew Thutmose III, strategically attempted to erase her name from monuments and attributed her deeds to other rulers.

This erasure was discovered millennia later by Jean-François Champollion, the same French translator who first deciphered Egyptian using the Rosetta Stone, as briefly mentioned in “Note on the Shire Records”. In his book, preserved in the Gutenberg Project and translated using the power of Google, he described his initial confusion when translating hieroglyphs about her reign, as the text “spoke of this bearded king, and in the ordinary costume of Pharaoh, by using nouns and verbs in the feminine, as if he were acted like a queen… I observed especially in the legends of the granite propylon, that the first and proper name cartouches of Aménenthé [Greek name for Hatshepsut] had been hammered in ancient times and replaced by those of Thuthmosis II, sculpted in excess.”

In contrast to the success of Hatshepsut being erased and rediscovered, the actions of the southern United States during the American Civil War were forgotten or covered up, and yet a faction of “Lost Cause” supporters — apologists who believe southern slaveowners were benevolent towards enslaved people and the South was unfairly treated after its leaders committed treason against the federal government in the 1860s — put up hundreds of monuments to their heroes in the decades after losing the war. While the movement to remove these monuments began around 2015, the pace of removal peaked around 2020 after police killed George Perry Floyd, Jr. in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In that year, over 160 monuments were removed as tracked by the Whose Heritage? report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization founded in 1971. Statues were even removed from Arlington National Cemetery, former home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The process continues to this day, with argument over what constitutes a Confederate memorial and what does not, since monuments made in good faith but without enough oversight can come across has supporting “Lost Cause” ideology, as was the case for the Garden of Honor Memorial in Allendale, MI that I visited back in January 2023.

Finally, some memorials were stolen by colonial powers. The British Museum is treasure trove of imperialism containing the plundered material culture of societies around the globe to the point that the museum created a section of its website called “Contested Objects Collection”. The Benin Bronzes are among the most famous of these memorials. These were made for ancestral altars to worship oba, similar to kings, in the former country Benin, which covered a wider geographic area than the modern country. During the “Scramble for Africa”, British troops took the bronzes and brought them back to Great Britain. The British Museum has collected these bronzes since 1897, starting with 203 from Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and receiving more through donations. Some bronzes were deaccessioned and disappeared into private collections when museum curators erroneously believed they possessed duplicate bronzes. The Moai from Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, are a famous pair of statues or ariga ora. These depict ancestors worshipped as deities by the people of Rapa Nui until a British survey ship crew stole them in 1868. Rapa Nui historians have actively requested the return of the states since 2018, but six years later, they remain in the British Museum.

Back in Middle-earth, King Tarondor, the great-great-grandson of Eldacar, briefly recaptured Umbar and killed the last of Castamir’s descendants, only for the Men of Harad to take back the area a few generations later. But before all this could happen, everybody got the plague.

Everybody Gets a Plague

A “deadly plague came with dark winds out of the east” (Return, 360) to kill King Telemnar, all his children, and many Men of Gondor. The White Tree of Minas Anor — a descendant of Nimloth brought by Elendil from Númenor, which was the descendant of Galathilion created in the likeness of Telperion or the Silver Tree that later became the moon — also died at this time, although King Tarondor, who was Telemnar’s nephew, planted a new tree in the new capital, Minas Tirith.

As I, like the rest of the world, have survived a plague, I developed further appreciation for technology and medical advancements in the modern world. The COVID-19 pandemic has waned, although its designated tracker is still live on the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) website This plague had similarities to plagues in history: a hypothetical origin determined by scientists and government workers that could never be fully explained, a mythological origin that arose from the public in absence of satisfactory conclusions, and a higher than necessary death count from a combination of limited medical understanding and people not taking the thing seriously enough.

Ancient and Medieval people believed plagues were sent by a divine source, either a god grown angry at the disobedience of the people, or a malevolent spirit exerting power over the innocent. Modern science allows researchers to determine the cause of a plague, such as a virus or bacteria. Many plagues have developed over the same routes.

The Antonian Plague in the Roman Empire began around 165 AD. Modern historians believe Roman soldiers contracted the disease while interacting with Chinese merchants on the Silk Road and brought the plague home with them like a souvenir. Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius blamed Christians for angering the Roman gods and starting a plague, a claim that backfired when Christians became caregivers for the sick, and many Romans converted to Christianity. This was among the earliest events to lead to the fall of the Roman Empire, which I discussed in more detail during “(ii) The Realms in Exile”. Subsequent plagues, including the Plague of Cyprian beginning in 250 AD and Plague of Justinian beginning around 541 AD originated in China and entered the Roman or Byzantine Empire via the Silk Road. Among the best known Medieval plagues was Black Death, last appearing in “On the Ordering of the Shire”. Once again, historians believe this plague had Asian origins and came either along the Silk Road or from Genoese trading ships, as Genoa was the mercantile powerhouse of the 14th century, which I briefly mentioned during “Introduction to Maps”.

Of course, not all plagues come from Asia. European colonists brought their diseases to the Americas beginning in 1492 with the expedition of Christopher Columbus, leading to the deaths of up to 90% of the Native American population. The last global pandemic before COVID-19 was Spanish Flu, which started around 1915 and reached outbreak levels in Kansas, United States by 1918 towards the end of World War I. I first learned about this plague in high school through watching the documentary Influenza 1918 produced by the PBS show American Experience.

The plagues of Middle-earth come from the East, the direction of all plagues on this list with the exception of Spanish Flu. Why was the Silk Road a vector of disease? When researching a scientifically based answer to this question, I came across plenty of articles expressing xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment, but rarely anything helpful. As a person who is neither a plague doctor nor a public health specialist but knows more than the average reader about herd immunity and history, I have developed my own hypothesis.

When traveling on the Silk Road, people of different populations with radically different immune systems came together for the first time to share knowledge, trade goods, and inadvertently spread germs. While many pandemic-causing diseases jumped from animals to people—rats and fleas for ancient plagues, the hypothetical bat of COVID-19 — the diseases spread most effectively between members of the same species, causing the spread to be associated with contact between humans rather than animals.

Humans who live in close contact over a long period develop herd immunity to more diseases than those who have less contact to other humans. The Indus Valley Civilization in modern day India, Nepal, and Afghanistan began around 7,000 BC, with a population peaking around 5 million people and containing cities with thousands of people. Other East Asian societies from modern day China, Japan, and Korea had similarly long timelines of city living. Descendants of these people lived in close contact for longer than other cultures and therefore would have “stronger” immune systems. This would allow members of these cultures to survive diseases that would kill those with “weaker” immune systems. While this is obviously an oversimplification of human migration and disease control, the explanation seems more rooted in history and science than the politically based arguments I have found elsewhere.

Wainriders and the Mongols

The term “Wainriders” was Tolkien’s “translation” of an unknown Dúnedain name for a confederacy of many cultures from east of Middle-earth; elsewhere, these people were called Easterlings. “Wain” was an Old English word for cart, along with a name for the Big Dipper, which will be further discussed two sections from now. The Wainriders rode chariots into battle and enslaved the Men of Gondor living in Rhovanion, not unlike how the Men of Gondor had held hostage the Men of Harad. The Men of Gondor and Men of Arthedain believed the Wainriders collaborated with the Ringwraiths to coordinate simultaneous attacks on these countries. The Wainriders allied with the southern regions of Khand and Near Harad to attack Gondor and its king Ondoher, while the Witch-King of Angmar attacked Arthedain and its king Araphant.

Wainriders bear a strong resemblance to Mongols, who successfully conquered eastern Europe between 1237 and 1242. Called “horsemen of the devil”, similar to the connection that Dúnedain made between Wainriders and Sauron, Mongols incorporated the surviving warriors of defeated people into their ranks, just as the Wainriders were a confederacy. What most impressed me about Mongols was when Ogedei Khan, son of Genghis Khan, successfully invaded Russia, the same country that swallowed up the troops of Hitler and Napoleon. Mongols even reached Moscow. Fortunately for Europe, Ogedei Khan died in 1241 and the Mongols went home to determine the line of succession. The next powerful successor, Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, decided he would rather have the Song Dynasty in China, as becoming emperor was much more prestigious than whatever he could have won in Europe.

Dead Marshes and the Battle of the Somme

The battles against the Wainriders came to an end, but not before the deaths of King Ondoher and his sons Artamir and Faramir. Fortunately, Gondor was saved through the military tactics of the general Eärnil, likely the second or third cousin of Ondoher through King Telumehtar son of Tarondor who recaptured Umbar. Eärnil defeated the Men of Harad and then the Wainriders, driving them into the Dead Marshes to perish. Their bodies remained preserved in the waters for centuries to be seen by Frodo, Sam, and Sméagol as they walked through on their way to Mordor, so I will describe much more about marshes, bog bodies, and trench warfare when I come to the return of the Dead Marches in Part Two: The Two Towers.

This creepy geographic feature turned open grave was based in part from Tolkien’s experience as a Battalion Signalling Officer in Northern France during WWI after the Battle of the Somme, which he described in a 1960 letter to his younger colleague, Cambridge University professor Leonard Wilson (L.W.) Forster. (Forster would later write The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature, where he explained that Tolkien invented his languages first and the characters who spoke them later, much like in my own fictional writing, I research the historical events first and then create a story around it.) Trench warfare near a river led to submerged or floating bodies on both sides.

Back in Middle-earth, Arvedui tried to claim the throne on behalf of his wife Fíriel, the only surviving child of Ondoher, invoking the rule of the Númenóreans that the oldest child inherited the throne regardless of gender, along with making several other decent arguments for reuniting the empire. After much discussion among Pelendur the Steward and his Council, they determined that Eärnil should be king instead. The narrator commented, “It may be that if the crown and the sceptre had been united, then the kingship would have been maintained and much evil averted” (Return, 362). Instead, Arvedui died up north after not listening to the Snowmen and Eärnil died of old age. His son Eärnur was a successful military leader, allying with Círdan and the Lindon elves along with Glorfindel of Rivendell and his apparently immortal white horse, but he disappeared after trying to fight the Witch-King in hand-to-hand combat. After that, the Stewards vowed to “to hold rod and rule in the name of the king until he shall return” (Return, 365), but basically acted as kings. Maybe Pelendur was playing the long game for his descendants when rejecting Arvedui’s claim.

Shout-Out to the Big Dipper

The final pages of the lengthy section contain a nice visual description for the ruling of Gondor in this period of its history: “The Stewards never sat on the ancient throne; and they wore no crown, and held no septre. They bore a white rod only as the token of their office; and their banner was white without charge; but the royal banner had been sable, upon which was displayed a white tree in blossom beneath seven stars.” (Return, 365). I had seen artistic renderings of the royal banner which depicts the seven stars arching around the tree, and I wondered if the stars were symbolic like the tree. Of course, they were. The stars represent Arda’s version of the Big Dipper as it is called in the United States, or the Plough over in Great Britain. The stars are an asterism, a cluster of glowing celestial objects that combine with other asterisms to form a constellation. The Big Dipper is part of the Great Bear or Ursa Major.

In Middle-earth, Bilbo called this constellation “Stars of the Wain” (The Hobbit, 191) while Frodo refers to it as the “Sickle” (The Fellowship of the Ring, 198), likely based on a Quenya term meaning “Sickle of the Valar” used by the Elves in The Silmarillion. In Elvish mythology, the stars were made from dew collected from Telperion and set in the sky by Varda, also called Elbereth. Hymns connecting the Valar to her constellation appear throughout The Lord of the Rings. The Dwarves called the constellation the “Crown of Durin” after the first great dwarf king, Durin the Deathless, and viewed the stars from Mirrormere, called Kheled-zâram in Khuzdul (Fellowship, 355, 374-375). The Númenóreans compared the seven stars to the seven palantíri.

Cultures from around the real-world likewise had their own legends about these seven stars of the Northern Hemisphere. Ancient Mesopotamians called the constellation “the Bear”, as appearing in Job 9:9. Homer described the stars in the Iliad as “the Bear, which men also call the Wain” and attributed its creation to the smith god Vulcan, also known as Hephaestus. In Ancient Rome, the stars became the Septentriones or seven plough-oxen, while by the Middle Ages in England, it was “Charles’s Wain”, spelled Carles wӕgn as a pun on Charlemagne. In Finland, it is called Otava and referenced three times in the national epic poem Kalevala, which last appeared in “Perspectives on the Sea” as a source known to Tolkien and regarded by literary scholars as an inspiration. In the poem, a person or animal rests on the shoulders of the asterism: “Thereupon the bee arising… rests upon Otava’s shoulders, hastens to the seven starlets…”

In the East, the Big Dipper was worshipped as part of a “religious mosaic” combining aspects of Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, and folk practices. For hundreds of years in China, beginning with an endorsement given by Emperor Wen of the Han dynasty around the 2nd century BC and ending during the Qing dynasty, around the 19th century, the Big Dipper was considered the ruling deity of the stars. In Japan, the practice started later in the Heian period around the 9th century and lasted until the Edo period in the 19th century, as the Big Dipper was associated with the star deity Myōken. In India, the seven stars are called Saptarshi, the seven sages or rishis, a set of gods whose names vary depending on the text.

The Big Dipper has cultural significance outside of Eurasia, but these connections are not always reliably documented. A significant amount of material about the importance of astronomy in Native American cultures can be found both in print and online, but many of these reports appear to come from White academics or those claiming to be academics whose original sources seem unclear. In a peer reviewed source, Woodland and Plains Indians including Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow, and Blackfeet were cited as recognizing the Big Dipper, calling the asterism “the Pipe” or “six boys and their sister”. Centuries of colonization and genocide caused significant loss of astronomical knowledge in Indiginous communities, so many no longer know their original star stories.

Disguised Kings and Thinking Hearts

By the conclusion of this section, the timeline had reached the time of the dialogue portion in the books and gave important background information to major characters. After the narrator complained about an unusually long winter that lasted five months, which seems like a British problem, Sauron reentered Mordor and rebuilt his fortress Barad-dûr. Mount Doom erupted, the eastern province of Ithilian was evacuated, and Saruman took over Isengard. After this time, Gandalf brought a mysterious stranger named Thorongil, meaning “Eagle of the Star” (Return, 368), to assist Ecthelion II, Steward of Gondor, as Thorongil had previously worked for King Thengel of Rohan. This stranger was Aragorn in the motif “King in Disguise” (K1812). Ecthelion preferred Thorongil over his son, Denethor II, as did the rest of Gondor. However, only Denethor had the magic of “discerning hearts”, allowing him to seemignly figure out what this stranger wanted but keep the information to himself. Thorongil led an expedition to burn the ships of the Corsairs, overthrow the Captain of the Haven at Umbar, and did not return to Minas Tirith.

Denethor moved on, becoming the Steward of Gondor, marrying Finduilas, and having two sons with her. She died after twelve years, a number occurring regularly throughout world mythology and religion, but in this case, it seems to have a real-world source: Tolkien’s mother died of Late Onset Type 1 Diabetes when he was twelve years old. Depressed and angry, Denethor looked into one of the three remaining palantír, which gave an unreliable view of the future and connected directly to the palantír held by Sauron. The constant battle of wills aged Denethor at the speed of a “lesser” Men. He favored his older son Boromir just as his father favored Thorongil. But while Boromir had no magic, younger son Faramir could “discern hearts” like his father. In modern science fiction, this power would likely be called mindreading. However, throughout the ancient Western world, people believed in a cardiocentric thought process, meaning that the heart controlled the decisions and emotions of a person, rather than the brain. The apostle Paul, philosopher Aristotle, and priests of Egypt all spoke of using one’s heart to make decisions, an aphorism lingering in modern language.

Conclusion

The section ended joyfully, with Aragorn finally returning to Minas Tirith and becoming king, thereby reuniting the two kingdoms, but this hardly lightened the previous fifteen pages of war. Like the sections before it, the stories displayed Middle-earth as a fantasy facsimile to the Western world. The beliefs of the Númenóreans paralleled the understanding of Ancient and Medieval people about their relationship to the environment and other nations. They based their ideology on antagonistic views of the “Other”, an immediate distrust of people unlike them, while developing deep curiosity for the cultures of people who seemed more like them. In this way, they were no different than modern, real-world people.

Because Middle-earth was a world of many cultures sharing the same environment, the hypothetical animated musical must visually and audially draw parallels between different mythologies and belief systems. I will prototype ways to connect objects occurring in multiple cultures, such as the Two Trees and the Seven Stars, possibly combining a musical leitmotif, which is a series of notes representing a concept or object, with a series of “mini-flashes”, brief and consecutive visuals of the object in different times and cultural contexts. The concept of recurring musical themes and rapid display of images in a vision was written into the text, and I anticipate that expanding upon this concept would bring more clarity to the layered references along with creating a rhythm for the work.

Finally, I hope to incorporate text from this section into the main narrative as visuals and extended scenes. The White Tree of Minas Tirith, which died upon the death of Belecthor II, the twenty-first steward, should feature prominently in the city. Beregond the guard, who gets hobbit sitter duty when Gandalf brings Pippin to Minas Tirith, might describe the story behind the tree, and Pippin could question the tree as a symbol for the health of Gondor society. The rest of the stories in this section belong to the Steward family. The story of Thorongil might become an extended scene flashback for Denethor who recycled his trauma onto his own sons, a memory of Aragorn who may regard Ecthelion as a father figure; and Boromir who might obsess over the story of Thorongil as a heroic warrior. Boromir might also tell the stories of other great warriors, such as the first Boromir the Steward who slowly died from the poison of a Morgul-wound, Eänur who disappeared while trying to fight the Witch-King, and Beregond son of Beren the Steward who defended Gondor while sending aid to Rohan. The description of Boromir himself would be given by Faramir and might become lines in a song.


Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical