‘How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?’ he asked. “And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that always it displeased him that his father was not king. Boromir never quite claimed that “Gondor needs no King” in the book, but during one of his conversations with Frodo, Faramir relates an anecdote of Boromir questioning the convention: Gondor had gotten along without a king for nearly a thousand years by the time of The Lord of the Rings, so why did it need someone whose ancestors had been kings of nothing, wandering in the wilderness during all that time? Readers are not the only ones to have asked that question. Both the political and the strictly legal situations were products of Gondor’s lengthy history, which was considerably abridged in the movies.ĭespite how popular Aragorn is as a hero, his claim to the throne of Gondor can seem rather suspect, especially to modern readers given the diminished role that monarchism plays in most of our lives. Yes, Aragorn’s claim to the throne of Gondor was borne out by the laws of the kingdom, though there were political complexities beyond the letter of the law that affected the succession.
