[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

I think it was both. It is equally lacking to say that it was only Boromir's pride that made him take the task, as it is to say that it was out of pure love: we know it was not. But he had love for his brother, that is a fact.

Originally Posted by Boromir88

I've been trying to unravel Boromir's complicated character ever since I read the story. Granted, it turns out to more a gushy man-crush for Sean Bean's performance, which I think in many ways "softens" the book Boromir. The movies concentrated on the best part of the character, the troubled and conflicted man who "fell," but in the end redeemed himself. In the forefront of the books, you see his arrogance and at times very childish, immature, behavior. Tolkien in one letter calls him the "bossy brother" of Faramir, and that could be a hangover from the earlier drafts where Boromir becomes Aragorn's rival in Minas Tirith.

Although, there is far more to Boromir than his pride and big-brother bossiness:

Certainly high praise from Eomer comparing him to the "swifts Sons of Eorl" and admiration for a "lordly and kindly manner" from Pippin, should warrant some good credit to Boromir's character than simply an arrogant, bossy knumbskull.

Both of these comments are in reply to my original comment,

Originally Posted by Bethberry

In short, I think Boromir is full of himself and that's what makes him insist he take the journey, believing that he alone can do the task.

so I have some explaining to do. And I must beg your indulgence for a long reply that probably isn't long enough. But it’s great to see a thread in Books taking off the way this one did (even if I did have to shock a little to get it going).

I limited my comments to the Council of Elrond because I thought there Boromir’s character flaws—those which made him most susceptible to the Ring—were most revealed and those were the traits which likely most influenced him to insist he undertake the journey to Imladris. We never see the scenes where he is sent to find the meaning of the dream’s riddle; that is simply reported, by himself at the CoE and by Faramir much later in WotW.

Boromir comes to the CoE with all the assumed authority and self-assuredness of those who feel themselves entitled. He makes judgments based on appearance, with both Bilbo and Aragorn (dressed in the poor clothes of Strider). He crosses words with Aragorn but it is Aragorn who comes out of the repartee with dignity, even though Boromir’s more archaic language shows him to be standing on his dignity fairly often. And Boromir is the one who is loathe to destroy the Ring, arguing that the Ring could be used for good purpose.

Originally Posted by Boromir, CoE

The Men of Gondor are valiant, and they will never submit; but they may be beaten down. Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon. Let the Ring be your weapon, if it has such power as you say. Take it and go forth to victory!

Any reader who has accepted Gandalf’s explanation to Frodo about the Ring must surely wonder at that. And for that matter, there is Tolkien’s explanation, in the Foreword to the Second Edition, of how the Ring would relate to World War II, which also can be a gloss upon Boromir’s misplaced self confidence. And then again, when the Nine embark upon their journey, Boromir is reprimanded by Elrond for blowing his horn inappropriately.

It is not until Caradhras that we see any kindness in Boromir. And it is that very kindness which he uses to attempt to persuade Frodo into giving him the Ring. Do we ever see him display love? In his actions, he is mostly what Tom Shippey calls “mere furious dauntlessness” and, as Shippey says, it is Boromir who can most easily be imagined as a Ringwraith.

Most of the good we hear of Boromir comes after his death, like the claims of Eomer and Pippin which our Boro88 has quoted, so it is retold rather than displayed by the character in action. In fact, his positive attributes become the stuff of the archaic and heroic style which Tolkien moves into as LotR progresses. Shippey argues that the hobbits lead the reader into LotR. Something similar could be said of Boromir, except that by example he leads them away from the Ring towards right action. Thus he becomes incorporated into the heroic in the same way that ancient stories reflected earlier stories incompletely.

So Boromir’s good aspects belong to a particular place in Tolkien’s work. And here my argument is very dependent upon Shippey’s discussion of Tolkien’s clash of styles, the ‘higher criticism’, and in particular of the word ‘lays’ (as in Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome) in The Road to Middle-earth and Author of the Century (although Shippey isn’t responsible for my use of it to discuss Boromir).

Originally Posted by Shippey, AotC, 235 ff

It became widely believed that behind the extensive epics of Homer, and Virgil, and the Histories of Livy, and Beowulf, and even the accounts of the Old Testament, there must have been early pre-literate traditions which were used by the later writers—traditions probably expressed in short poems composed at or near the time of the events the commemorated. . . . people learned to read histories and historical poems with a kind of double vision, to see both the event being described and the context in which it was described. . . . [Tolkien] wished above all to create the sense of age, of antiquity with yet greater antiquity behind it.

Boromir’s positive traits do not belong in the modern novelistic passages but in those which echo the old epics, the language of antiquity. Boromir the character moves into the realm of legend or of the timelessness of myth. This is most clearly seen in the passages from the Appendices which discuss the love Boromir has for Faramir in a heroic style, as if the Appendices provided strata of stories to disentangle. It is almost as if the Appendices are texts other than that of LotR, part of the lore and annals which are incomplete. So in LotR there is the Event and there is the Record, and reading LotR involves developing a double vision.

To imagine how Boromir came to be chosen over Faramir to solve the riddle of the dreams, to me, involves seeing this double vision and taking the one which most fully explains his psychology. Those who, possibly, are more in tune with the sense of a greater antiquity behind the story will prefer the Boromir of legend. But I think it isn’t quite so clear that a fact in the Appendices is always of the same canonical weight, as it were, with the story proper.