Few have Gained such a Victory

Boromir’s arc in The Lord of the Rings is tragic and yet there is glory in it. I am really eager to learn, next year, how my students react to this most noble of men—I’ll be teaching the novel for the first time. It’s already in the planning!

On the one hand, Boromir is a troubling character, especially in his final hours. The temptation to take the Ring is strong and growing the further the Fellowship gets from Rivendell, and the temptation becomes overwhelming as they camp by the Falls of Rauros on the River Anduin. It is here, when Frodo goes aside alone to contemplate his road forward, that Boromir finally falls.

He is overcome with a bout of madness that is born from the deep desire for power, and yet it is not power for power’s sake that motivates Boromir. It will give him the power of Command, he says, to “drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!” This last sounds as though he would claim the throne of Gondor for himself—and perhaps his madness is revealing a deep desire—but the root here is the desire for the power to protect Gondor from the threat of Mordor.

In other words, Boromir’s motives are at least partly good, if not mostly good. The means by which he would win that victory is the problem. Boromir’s wish falls on the wrong side of the debate over whether or not it is possible “to use the power of the Enemy against him.”

By this stage, Frodo is firmly entrenched in the reader’s mind as the sympathetic character, the champion of the Fellowship’s cause. Sam has not yet come into his own, and Aragorn has not yet been tested. It is easy, therefore, to see Boromir as a kind of Judas Iscariot in the Fellowship, the one who seeks the ruin of the Ring-bearer—though, like Judas (perhaps—see the Gospel of Judas), Boromir acts from what he thinks are right motives. 

But those motives are, ultimately, at variance with the goals of the “heroes,” and so it is easy to see Boromir negatively, as an antagonist at least, a villain at worst. The discussion I am interested in having with my students is whether or not they think Boromir’s death atones for his sin. I suspect that many will not see it so.

And yet Boromir does give his life to save Merry and Pippin. Perhaps if he had succeeded and they had been saved from the orcs, more would look on his sacrifice favourably. As it is, he fails to save them and dies anyway. Among his final words spoken to Aragorn are: I tried to take the ring from Frodo. I am sorry. I have paid.Then, after reporting on Merry and Pippin, he declares, I have failed.

But the question I want to ask is this:  Is a person’s sacrifice meaningless if it is ultimately in vain? Is Boromir’s really a failed sacrifice? 

In a world of grand gestures, it is easy to dismiss Boromir’s death as meaningless in the final analysis. And that Frodo is unaware of the facts surrounding Boromir’s death also plays on the reader’s mind. Would it have made a difference had Frodo known that Boromir gave his life for Frodo’s friends a mere hour or so after trying to despoil Frodo of the Ring?

I submit that redemption and restoration is not about how one lives—or, at least, not only about how one lives—but also about how one dies. The Church numbers many Saints among its glorified ranks who were pretty foul human beings, arguably much, much worse than Boromir ever was, but who died well.

Perhaps the most famous is also the first, and as this is the day of that man’s redemption (being Good Friday on the Orthodox calendar today), it is worth mentioning St Dismas, the thief on the cross. This man was being executed as a thief—though the word for “robber” here may be political in meaning. St Dismas, after first reviling Christ, makes a confession that his own death is deserved and that Christ’s is not. When he asks Jesus to remember him, Christ says that the two of them will be together in paradise this very day.

In a kind of parallelto Christ and the thief, it is Aragorn the true King of Gondor who declares that “few have gained such a victory” as Boromir. Aragorn does not judge Boromir. He sees only a man who gave his life for his friends, for a righteous cause. Aragorn doesn’t even acknowledge Boromir’s confession, which is not to say that he doesn’t hear it, nor that it is isn’t important that Boromir owned his fault. But in these dying moments, Aragorn offers comfort instead. 

Note that Boromir makes his confession to Aragorn unprompted. Aragorn does not ask Boromir about Frodo. Boromir’s sacrifice more than makes up for it, but it is a sacrifice made in acknowledgement that he had done wrong before. It is, in other words, penitential in nature. Whomever or whatever he was in life, the fashion of Boromir’s death is worthy of honour and remembrance.

Boromir is my favourite character in The Lord of the Rings precisely because of this arc from fall to redemption. Aragorn never shows much weakness (there is a bit of self-judgment in the first chapter of The Two Towers, but this hardly amounts to real weakness). Frodo suffers in a way that is hard for me to identify with. Sam is far more loyal than I feel I am or could be. Faramir is, like Aragorn, unassailably pure, to the point of being un-tempted by the Ring even when it is right before him and he has the power to just take it. 

Boromir’s fall is also not driven entirely (or even mostly) by bad motives. He wants the power to protect Gondor and destroy Mordor; only, he does not see the risk in that path. Similarly to the Fall of Man in Genesis—for whom the desire for knowledge is a good thing in itself, only that the means they chose to acquire that knowledge are at fault—Boromir’s fall is not a fall brought on by an evil nature. It is a fall brought on by ignorance of the repercussions and by desire for something good in the wrong way.

But more importantly, Boromir shows that redemption is possible after a fall. For Gollum—about whom I will be writing soon—redemption is on offer but ultimately rejected. Boromir, however, knows that what he has done is wrong, and while Frodo is not there for him to make it right, he does the next best thing he can.

In the mythic sense, Boromir has to die following his fall, following his attempted assault on Frodo. He says as much to Aragorn, that he has paid for his sins. He has brought lust for power and personal glory into a quest that needs exactly the opposite of those things if it is to succeed. As the cause of the breaking Fellowship, he presents a definite obstacle to the success of the quest. But as he is not evil, he is granted redemption by Tolkien as he moves off stage.

This sort of language and sentiment, of course, does not fly in the real world for most of us. Death is not deserved for such an act as Boromir’s. But in the realm of myth, his sacrifice purifies the Fellowship and allows them to bond together all the more strongly even at the point that the group fractures. It gives Frodo the nudge he needs to cross the river in the Emyn Muil with Sam. It binds Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli tightly together. 

Even Merry and Pippin gain the opportunity to grow into heroes as a result of Boromir’s sacrifice:  They are captured by the very orcs Boromir sought to hold off, but they are moved, inspired, and motivated—especially Pippin—by Boromir’s selfless defence and fall on their behalf.

So it is clear that Boromir’s “failure” is actually a deeply meaningful sacrifice, even if his death did not accomplish what he hoped it would in the moment. He is clearly an heroic figure: a larger-than-life prince before his fall, and selfless and doomed man after he realises his crime. As a move from desire for power to penitential service on behalf of others to the point of his own death, his example is unique in the legends of Middle-earth.