Let's Read Tolkien 63: Minas Tirith

Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Peregrin Took is sleeping on a horse. He's riding to Minas Tirith with Gandalf; on the way, they see the beacons lit to summon help from Rohan. The wizard and hobbit pass through the wall of Rammas Echor and enter the farmlands around Minas Tirith, and finally arrive at the city of Minas Tirith, built on a spur of the White Mountains overlooking the valley of the Anduin.

Pippin and Gandalf make their way through the city and to the citadel on its highest level. Where the court of Rohan was a wooden hall with rich tapestries, the citadel of Gondor is a bleak place of marble and stone, with statues of dead kings and an empty throne. With no king, Denethor the Steward rules, and he interrogates Pippin regarding the death of his favorite son Boromir. Provoked by Denethor's questioning, Pippin offers to serve in the guard of the Citadel to repay his debt to Boromir, and Denethor accepts.

Afterward, Pippin meets Beregond of the Guard, who shows him around, and Pippin goes wandering around the city with Beregond's son Bergil. They watch the last reinforcements from the south of Gondor arrive, and then the gates are shut, and the city prepares for war.

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So here we are in failing Gondor, as per Faramir and Elrond. As my faithful reader points out, Tolkien doesn't really seem very interested in Gondor as a place that people live in. I've talked a lot about how I think Tolkien is really good with geography - ever since early in the Hobbit - and I feel I should be more specific: Tolkien is great with natural geography. Human geography doesn't seem to interest him in the same way at all.

I talked about Gondor and Gondorian declinism earlier, and it's on display here.

Yet it was in truth falling year by year into decay; and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there. In every street they passed some great house or court over whose doors and arched gates were carved many fair letters of strange and ancient shapes: names Pippin guessed of great men and kindreds that had once dwelt there; and yet now they were silent, and no footsteps rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window.

The contrast between Gondor and Rohan is present throughout, from the liveliness of Edoras to the tomb-like silence of the Citadel, Denethor's and Théoden's personalities down to the furnishings of the throne-rooms. This contrast between the vital, northern men of Rohan and the withering, sepulchral Gondorians is Tolkien at his most Howardian.

Finally, there's another Tolkien anachronism at the very end of the chapter: a blackout.

"Can you find the way?" said Beregond at the door of the small hall, on the north side of the citadel, where they had sat. "It is a black night, and all the blacker since orders came that lights are to be dimmed within the City, and none are to shine out from the walls."

It's quite difficult to think of any "in-world" reason for this, but like the damage-control parties and anti-aircraft batteries of Laketown, no doubt it's a deliberate anachronism looking back to the world wars. The general dark and foreboding feel of the chapter, especially the last part, goes beyond Tolkien's theological contrast between Rohan and Gondor into his experience of "the shadow of war", as he puts it in the second edition Foreword. I think it's this experience that produces a powerful verisimilitude in this chapter.

**

Next time: more horses.