Faramir Fiction Archive

Tales of the Telcontars (PG-13)

19 September 2011 | 56124 words | Work in Progress

Title: The Four Tutors of Eldarion Telcontar
Author: Susana
Series: Desperate Hours
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Rating: G
Warning: None.
Disclaimer: All recognizable elements are Tolkien’s

Summary: Eldarion went through four tutors in the first year or so of his educational career, but it really wasn’t his fault.

Beta: None, please excuse any mistakes.

A/N: Set when Eldarion is a young child, just first in lessons, and beginning before he knows that Faramir is his brother, and ending afterward.

Eldarion’s first tutor was a pleasant young man who had been working for his distant cousin Lord Cirdan at the Gray Havens. At only three years of age, most thought Eldarion too young to need a tutor. But Arwen insisted that any child of hers who was capable of reading enough of the title and frontispage of one of “those books” to then ask what the word “ravished” meant, was indeed ready for a tutor, and no one disagreed. The tutor from the Gray Havens believed that young children should learn to express themselves with creativity, and gave Eldarion fingerpaints and chalk. He had not even discovered his charge could read, in the three or so weeks he had Eldarion to student. Aragorn decided that was unacceptable, and a respected tutor from one of Gondor’s lordly families was hired to take over.

That tutor was surprised but impressed by Eldarion’s abilities to read and count, and set to work at improving them, also beginning to teach the toddler the formalities and protocol he would need as a Prince of Gondor and Arnor. Eldarion didn’t particularly like the man, but more for his dourness and the constriction of the heir’s schedule that he represented than for any flaw in his personality. That tutor had been unimpressed by the addition of 14 month old Theodwyn to Eldarion’s lessons, but Thea wanted very much to be wherever ‘Darion was, and the Queen insisted that her dear friend Éowyn’s daughter might stay at the lessons, if she was not disruptive. Theodwyn quickly learned that she must be quiet and pay attention if she wanted to stay near ‘Darion, and surprised the tutor by remembering to call him by his proper title before Eldarion did. That tutor might have lasted for several more years at the least, but that Lady Ynithe, one of Queen Arwen’s ladies-in-waiting, happened to overhear him sneeringly refer to Prince Faramir as “the King’s favored bastard” at a gathering in the city. Ynithe told Arwen, who told Aragorn to find the man another position, after asking her brother Elrohir to have a very frank conversation with Eldarion’s second former tutor.

Eldarion’s third tutor was his Uncle Elladan. That lasted until Eldarion showed his father a drawing he had made in lessons. It was a detailed comparison of the bodies of an orc, a human, an elf, and a dwarf, and where the best places to apply a blade or an arrow would be. That might not have been enough to get Elladan fired, but the drawing Theodwyn had done of the human heart, with the best places to put a dagger, certainly was. Aragorn thanked his older foster-brother for his time, but suggested that it would be best to find another human tutor for the royal brood, for appearances sake. Elladan, who loved his great-niece and nephew but was completely unsure of how to tutor such young children, cheerfully agreed to return as a special sciences tutor when Aragorn’s and Faramir’s brood became older. Much older.

It was a friend of Faramir’s, a young archivist named Hallas, who became Eldarion’s fourth tutor, the one who remained the tutor for all of the royal brood except the youngest, Ecthelion, who was born to Éowyn and Faramir nearly twenty years after Theodwyn. Hallas was particularly suited to teach the histories of both Gondor and Arnor. His father had been one of the Dunedain to follow Aragorn to Minas Tirith in his days as Thorongil, and his mother had been a woman of the city, and a distant cousin of Lord Golasgil of Anfalas. The royal brood had many special assistant tutors, including Uncle Elladan and Lord Erestor. But it was Hallas who, along with their parents, shepherded the educational development of the royal generation who would later help to found the great universities of Gondor and Arnor. Libraries were later named after the gentle, clever, funny man, who had made learning so pleasant for the first Telcontar children.

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