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secret service should have known that motherland s gratitude usually takes strange forms&
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Sonya never found out about Haladdin s mission (as we already know, this had been his
special concern) and remained certain that he and Kumai had perished at the Field of
Pelennor. But time is merciful, so once those wounds had healed she fulfilled her life s
destiny by becoming a loving wife and wonderful mother, having married a worthy man
whose name is absolutely irrelevant to our story.
In my opinion, royal personages are of much lesser interest, since their fates are well-known.
For those too lazy to pick up a book or at least review their sixth-grade history textbook, let
me remind you that Aragorn s reign was one of the most magnificent in Middle Earth
history and is one of the watershed events separating the Middle Ages (the Third Age) from
modernity. The usurper did not try to win the love of the Gondorian aristocracy (such a
project would have been dead on arrival), instead betting correctly on the third estate, which
cared for things like tax rates and safety of trade routes, rather than dynastic rights and other
such phantoms. Since His Majesty had effectively burned all bridges with the aristocracy,
paradoxically this gave him freedom to implement radical agrarian reform, drastically
curtailing the rights of landlords in favor of free farmers. These factors were the basis for
the famous Gondorian economic miracle and the colonial expansion that followed, while
the representative legislative bodies Aragorn had created to counterweight the aristocracy
have survived to our day almost unchanged, earning the Reunited Kingdom its well-
deserved title of Middle Earth s oldest democracy.
It is common knowledge that the king advanced and supported science, craftsmanship, and
sea-faring ventures, appointed talented men to important state positions without regard to
their lineage, and was sincerely loved by his subjects. The only dark stain on Elessar
Elfstone s reputation is the early period of his reign, when his Secret Guard (admittedly a
really scary outfit) had to protect the throne from the feudal lords with an iron hand;
actually, most of today s experts believe that the scale of terror had been greatly magnified
by the nobility s historians. Aragorn s famously beautiful wife Arwen (Elven-born,
according to legend) played no role in matters of state and only imparted a certain
mysterious luster to his court. They had no children, so the Elfstone dynasty ended with its
founder, with the throne reverting to the Prince of Ithilien in other words, things went back
to the way they were.
It is rather hard to analyze the reign of the first Princes of Ithilien, Faramir and �owyn, 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 �owyn 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 S�l Tower Publishers in Annuminas. In any case none
of those portraits have anything in common with the chiseled profile gracing the cockades
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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.
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