[Pitchwife]

Welcome to the Downs, Strange Raven; hope you enjoy your afterlife! It's good to see another new member who's not a spambot but genuinely interested in discussing Tolkien. Maybe you'd like to introduce yourself briefly in our Novices & Newcomers thread over there.

Originally Posted by Strange Raven

Or it more simply says that Trolls are not very bright, and really don't know or care if there is a difference between a king and a steward.

It was the hobbits (specifically Bilbo as the narrator of The Hobbit) who kept mentioning the king and saying that Trolls hadn't heard of him. Anyway, we're talking about the Trollshaws, west of Rivendell, formerly part of the kingdom of Arnor, and hundreds of miles away from Gondor and its Stewards.

Then again, Denethor was a megalomaniac and whose to say Ecthelion was not the same and may well have styled themselves as kings. It runs in the family.

While Boromir may have had some hidden dreams of royalty, his father took his office very seriously and would never have called himself a king openly, as evidenced by this passage (LotR Book IV, The Window on the West):

'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 it always displeased him that his father was not king. "How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?" he asked. "Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty," my father answered. "In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice."'

Or, they could be referring to an otherwise unreferenced Troll King.

To make this fit the context, said Troll King would have to be something like an enlightened monarch who had set himself the arduous task to civilize his people and teach them better manners; no wonder he was so unpopular with his own subjects that most of them hadn't even heard of him!