Pippin tells Gandalf that Denethor has finally lost it, and Gandald decides he has to rescue Faramir since no-one else can. At the hallows, they find Beregond has broken in and is trying to stop Denethor's servants from finishing the titular funeral pyre. Gandalf and Denethor argue, and Gandalf grabs Faramir off the pyre. Denethor reveals that he has a palantír, in which he's seen the corsair ships coming up the Anduin - but completely misunderstood their significance. He sets himself on fire and dies on the pyre, and the building eventually collapses on top of him - although apparently someone goes in and digs out the palantír later.
**
The Steward of Gondor is dead; long live the Steward of Gondor. Like the other climactic chapters of Book Five, this is also a short one.
Earlier, Gandalf remarked that the blood of Númenor ran particularly pure in Denethor, whatever that's supposed to mean. I think it needs to be noted that for all of this racist obsession with bloodlines, clearly the pure blood of Númenor doesn't stop you from being a complete horse's ass and not only abandoning your post in wartime but damn near murdering your son as well. In this context, Gandalf gives a rare theological statement:
"Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death," answered Gandalf. "And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death."
The word "heathen" is interesting here; it really does apparently come from the same root as heath, and the meaning is something like those who live out in the wastes. So it does kind of make sense to use it of the people who lived in what is now Gondor before the Númenorans came, but it does bring up the question of religion in general. What, exactly, distinguishes the people of Gondor from the heathens? We've encountered some forms of religious ritual, most prominently with Faramir's men in Ithilien. The Rohirrim and the hobbits have nothing like it, though. Would you call hobbits heathen? It's a funny word to use. Tolkien's problem seems to be that nobody in Middle-earth can be a Christian, since they don't have the gospel, but he doesn't want them to be pagans either, so they hover in this state between a Christianity with Eru standing in for God and a society that seems almost completely unreligious.
Denethor's obsession with death and the end of his house is, of course, the culmination of Tolkien's idea of the "Egyptian" character of Gondor, with Denethor wanting a royal funeral so he can travel to the afterlife with his son. It's almost bitterly ironic that Denethor declaims on the failure of the West, like so many racists of Tolkien's time and ours, when everything that happens in this chapter is really a failure of his character and leadership.
It's also kind of funny to me that Denethor accuses Gandalf of the same things Moorcock and others have: ordering everyone around and seeking to remake Middle-earth in his own image. It's no coincidence that he says many of the same things Saruman did.
Gandalf seems to take it a little hard that he had to go rescue Faramir, and while he was busy, Théoden was killed. This raises two questions in my mind. First, why did he feel he had to rescue Faramir in the first place? Denethor had already abandoned his command, and Gandalf and Prince Imrahil were de facto in charge. If Denethor burned himself and Faramir, what difference would it have made to the battle? None that I can see.
Secondly, what would have happened if Gandalf had ridden out and confronted the Witch-king? Would he have destroyed him, or would the boss Nazgûl have lived to fight another day? You can certainly argue that Gandalf is "no man", but a more Tolkienian reading here would be that Sauron's corruption of Denethor accidentally leads to the destruction of the Witch-king. But even Gandalf isn't omniscient.
**
Next time: leechcraft.
2 comments:
I wonder if Tolkien planned out that Faramir would marry Eowyn thus wrapping up her character in a period appropriate bow?
Also, I had been dissatisfied enough with Jackson's 'The Two Towers' that I ended up skipping his RotK. When I heard about the 'Flaming Denethor' it just confirmed my decision to never watch that silliness. Anything I see about that movie just confirms my lack of desire.
Luckily Jackson's Return of the King was so intolerably long, with like three false endings, that I can barely remember anything any more. But it was certainly consistent with the previous two in its relationship to the book.
And I'll talk about the Faramir-Éowyn marriage when we get there! From what I've read of the History of Middle-earth series so far, I kind of get the impression Tolkien didn't plan much, and when he did, he often ended up doing something else.
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