The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [195]
It is rather hard to analyze the reign of the first Princes of Ithilien, Faramir and Éowyn, in political or economical terms – it appears that they had neither politics nor economics over there, but only a never-ending romantic ballad. Nearly all the contemporary poets and painters must have contributed to the creation of the captivating image of the Fairy of the Ithilien Woods (weird, isn't it – Ithilien, the industrial heart of Middle Earth, had forests once!), since Faramir's modest court had become a sort of a holy shrine to them, and not making a pilgrimage there was the height of bad taste. But even correcting for the unavoidable idealization, one has to admit that Éowyn must have been an exceptionally pure soul.
Thanks to that army of artists we have several portraits of Prince Faramir; the best one I know of is reproduced in a monograph entitled Philosophical Agnosticism and its Early Adepts recently printed by the Amon Súl Tower Publishers in Annuminas. In any case none of those portraits have anything in common with the chiseled profile gracing the cockades on the mustard-colored berets worn by the commandos of the Ithilien Paratrooper Regiment. By the way, the famous 'mongooses' – a special anti-terrorist unit whose soldiers were on every TV screen in Arda recently when they brilliantly freed the passengers of a Vendotenian airliner captured in Minas Tirith airport by the Hannani fanatics from the Northern Mingad Liberation Front – are part of that regiment, as well.
Faramir had committed exactly one act of foreign policy during his entire reign – he approved Baron Grager's request to send him south of the river Harnen to conduct a series of intelligence and sabotage operations: "…by all signs the fate of Middle Earth will be decided there, in Near Harad." Strangely, the subsequent fate of Grager of Aran (often called, not without justification, the savior of Western civilization) remains the stuff of unverified legends and anecdotes. The only thing that is known is the end result of his efforts – the massive rebellion of nomad Aranians against their Haradi masters, which had led, domino-fashion, to the fall of the entire ominous Harad Empire and its fracturing into a non-threatening bunch of warring tribes. Nobody knows how this adventurous intellectual had earned his iron-clad authority among the fierce savages of the Harnen savannah. The fairy tale of him accidentally buying a son of an Aranian chieftain at the Khand slave market appears entirely unreliable; the idea that his way to power went through chief priestess Svantatra's bed is cute and romantic, but people familiar with the realities of the South can only laugh at it. Even the manner of the baron's death is uncertain: either he perished in a lion hunt, or was killed accidentally while mediating a conflict over summer watering-hole rights between two small Aranian clans.
But the fate of Éomer is so incredible that some authors are still trying to prove that he was a legend rather than a real person. Having ascended to the throne of the Mark of Rohan after the Mordorian campaign, he had discovered – to his great surprise and displeasure – that there was no one left to fight any more, at least in the near Middle Earth. For some time the famed warrior had tried to amuse himself with tournaments, hunts, and amorous adventures, but quickly tired of it all and fell into depression. (Historical veracity impels me to admit that on the battlefields of love this chevalier sans per et sans rеproche was characterized by a total lack of taste combined with