Children

His daughter is three when Gimli gives him another child, another little girl. Har’ili’s cheeks are dusted just barely with feathery auburn stubble, and she resembles her mother more and more every day. This other little girl has dark hair which fuzzes out from her head like a dandelion-head. He wants to give her a Dwarf name, as they’ve given their eldest. Gimli wants to give him a name from the race of Men. 

In the end it is their adopted-son Merry who starts it. He offers up his mother’s name—Esmeralda—to which their other adopted-son Pippen strongly advocates his own mother’s name—Eglantine—and then Gimli’s eyes turned to Boromir. She was named after her father’s mother, her mother had been named after her grandfather’s mother, and that woman had been named after her father’s mother—it was the way of the Dwarves. He knew it caused her relatives to talk and gossip, that Har’ili was given an entirely new name rather than her grandmother’s. 

Boromir knows that Finduilas, or Dwilly as Merry and Pippen call her, will grow up differently than Har’ili. His eldest daughter is already stocky, wonderfully solid like her mother—her hair glints red in the sunlight, like Gimli’s does—and he hopes that her beard grows in to be all that she hopes it will. Har’ili wants to grow a longer, brighter, “more beautifuller” beard than her mother. But Finduilas is going to grow up a bit more willowy—at least for a half-Dwarf woman—than her sister. Her hair will grow in straight and black, glossy almost compared to what grows out of Gimli and Har’ili’s heads. 

He would have much preferred Eglantine, although he keeps this fact strictly to himself. Gimli has given up so much to live here in Minas Tirith with him—Eomer, King of Rohan, offered her dominion of the Glittering Caves beneath the Hornburg, Helm’s Deep. His daughter is named Finduilas, because while he doesn’t know what kind of lessons his childhood under Denethor gave him—especially in the realms of being husband and father—he knows enough that Gimli has sacrificed so much more than he could ever repay her for. 

In his mind he calls her Dwilly, and names their next two daughters Eglantine—a strange but hearty name, which Gimli adores—and Esmeralda, a name which Boromir likes because it reminds him of Numenorian names without actually being one. Gimli flushes proudly beneath her beard whenever her relatives visit—the upkeep on the stonework of Minas Tirith will keep Durin’s Folk enthralled and in employ for another Age it seems—because girls are rare, four of them are unheard of. 

But that was only the Dwarves. Away from all that—in an office which Gimli visited only to rescue him from his own nightmares—he had to defend his wife for the simple fact that she had given him four children and none of them were sons. Only once has someone been foolish enough to mention that his mother bore two sons and then died tragically young—implying that the manner in which sons were gotten was of less import than the sons themselves. Faramir, who had been visiting for a few days, had had to jump between Boromir and the advisor lest the First Steward do a harm to him. 

He had done a terrible thing that day, stating that no matter what (once he had been convinced the man’s blood didn’t belong on his floor for insulting his perfect children) the House of Stewards would continue on and that any further concerns should be taken up with the King. Faramir’s eyes had met his from across the room, shocked and uncertain, at the implication. Faramir’s son Elboron, a boy of eleven, was to be considered the Heir to the House of Stewards. It was something they’d both known somehow that unless Boromir had a son, then Faramir’s Elboron would inherit the Stewardship. But they had never discussed it, not even now—they had been too busy savoring the fact that they did not have to rigorously train their children for battle as they themselves had been trained. 

Boromir went home to his chambers that night and curled up next to his wife. She had a few candles burning on her bedside table, inspecting a few chunks of rock that her cousin had sent her from a recent cave-in deep within Erebor. He sometimes came home and fell asleep on her lap, listening to her rumbling voice go over the finer points of why a certain tunnel’s walls had failed, or why sometimes one had to turn left rather than right when excavating new tunnels. 

Their daughters no longer slept in their parents’ room. Har’ili at age fifteen had her own room, and twelve year old Dwilly’s room was next to hers. Eglantine was nine and slept in a room shared with Esmeralda, who was soon to be seven years old.