Denethor I

Denethor I stands in the roll of the House of Húrin, the family in which the stewardship of Gondor became first hereditary and at last sovereign in all but name. Appendix A traces that house to Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a man of high Númenórean descent whom King Minardil took as his Steward; thereafter the kings drew their stewards from his kin, so that the office and the house were bound together long before any Steward ruled. When the southern line of Anárion failed, authority came to rest in that same family, Mardil being the first to govern in the name of a king who did not return. Denethor I belongs therefore not to a royal dynasty but to a stewardly one, standing ten places into the count that begins with Mardil.

The name itself is nowhere glossed in the works published in Tolkien's lifetime, and no meaning should be pressed upon it. What the roll does show is a habit: the Stewards bore names of Elvish form taken from the far older lore of the Elder Days, among them Húrin, Beren, Barahir, Dior, Turgon, Túrin, Ecthelion and Egalmoth, so that the governors of a waning Gondor carried the names of figures out of Beleriand. Denethor is one of these borrowings. The list gives his name between those of Dior and Boromir, which fixes his place in the sequence but not his parentage; Appendix A says only that the stewardship passed from father to son or to the nearest kinsman, and it does not record which of the handings-on were which. The numeral attached to him is an editorial convenience of the chronicle, distinguishing him from the much later Steward who bore the same name.

The older bearer of the name was no Man at all. In the tales of the First Age, Denethor was the son of Lenwë, a lord of those Nandorin Elves who had forsaken the westward march at the Misty Mountains and long dwelt in the vales of Anduin; he gathered such of them as would follow and led them over the Ered Lindon into Ossiriand, where they took Thingol for their overlord. That earlier Denethor has no kinship with the Steward of Gondor and no bearing on his life. The repetition is a matter of memory rather than descent: an ancient Elvish name, preserved in the lore the Dúnedain kept, given again in a late age of the Third Age to a man of Númenórean blood.

The roll of the Stewards records years of death and nothing more, so the length of Denethor I's government must be read from the names set on either side of his own. Dior, ninth of the line, is given the year 2435 of the Third Age, and Denethor the year 2477; between the two lie some forty-two years of rule. What he took up was the governance of a realm long past its widest reach. Minas Ithil had been lost to the Ringwraiths in 2002 and had become Minas Morgul, and the western city was renamed Minas Tirith in answer to it; Osgiliath, the old seat astride Anduin, had never been repeopled after the Great Plague and stood largely empty. Ithilien was still inhabited in his day, but it lay under the shadow of the valley opposite, and the eastern march was watched rather than secure.

For the first quarter-century of his stewardship the wider situation was outwardly quiet. The chronicles call that long lull the Watchful Peace; it had begun in 2063, when the shadow that sat in Dol Guldur withdrew from Mirkwood and the north grew still, and it lasted while four Stewards before him held the white rod. In 2460 the lull ended: the power returned to Dol Guldur, and returned stronger. Three years afterwards the Wise formed the White Council to consider what should be done, though no Steward of Gondor is named among its members, and the counsels of the north were taken far from Minas Tirith. In the same year, in the Vales of Anduin, the One Ring passed out of the river into the hands of the creature afterwards called Gollum, an event which no chronicler of Gondor recorded at the time.

The renewed malice reached Gondor in the form of a new kind of enemy. In Denethor's days there came out of Mordor orcs of a breed not seen before, black and tall and of great strength, whom the annals name Uruks. Earlier troubles on the eastern border had been raids to be endured and answered in kind; this was an army, and it did not stop at the frontier. In 2475 the Uruks swept across Ithilien and took Osgiliath, so that the crossing of Anduin itself passed for a time out of the Steward's keeping. The loss was the gravest reverse Gondor had suffered on that river since the Ringwraiths came out of Mordor four and a half centuries before.

The counterstroke is credited by the chronicle not to Denethor but to Boromir his son, who drove the Uruks out and won Ithilien back. The province was recovered, but Osgiliath was not: the city was ruined in the fighting, and its great stone bridge over Anduin was broken, so that the two halves of the old capital were severed. After that no one dwelt there. What had been the chief city of the South-kingdom, and remained a garrisoned crossing long after its people had gone, became a ruin held only for the sake of the ford beneath it, and it stayed a ruin for the rest of the Age. The military judgement behind breaking or letting fall the bridge is nowhere set down; the annals give the outcome without the reasoning.

Denethor died two years after the ruin of Osgiliath, in 2477, and Boromir succeeded to the stewardship. Nothing is recorded of the manner of his death, nor of any deed of his own hand in the campaign; the chronicle gives the war to the son and the dates to the father. This is the ordinary condition of the middle Stewards, whose entries in the roll consist of a name, a year and, at most, a sentence of event. Denethor I is better attested than several of his fellows only because the crisis of 2475 fell within his term and had to be told somewhere.

The frontier that took shape in his last years proved to be the one Gondor kept until the end of the Third Age. Ithilien remained nominally the Steward's land, but it emptied by degrees; in 2901 most of those still living there abandoned it because of the Uruks of Minas Morgul, and the men who held it afterwards did so from hidden refuges rather than from towns. Osgiliath was never rebuilt, and the broken crossing was still being contested when the last war came. Seen from that distance, the years 2475 to 2477 mark the point at which Gondor's eastern border ceased to be a boundary between settled lands and became a battlefield with a river through it.

The authority that came to Denethor I with the white rod was the whole governance of the South-kingdom: the making of law, the command of its armies, the keeping of its fiefs and frontiers. What the office withheld was everything ceremonial. The Ruling Stewards took neither crown nor sceptre and did not sit in the throne of the kings; their place was a chair of black stone set at the foot of the dais, and the rod they carried was the only outward sign of their standing. They governed in the name of a king who had not come back, under the undertaking that they would give up rod and rule to a returning heir of Anárion, and not one of them set that condition aside.

Beyond the office there is nothing to credit him with. The Stewards were of Númenórean stock and lived somewhat longer than other Men, but no gift or art is attributed to them in the sources; what a Steward could do was what a capable man with a realm behind him could do. The one thing of extraordinary reach kept in Minas Tirith, the seeing-stone housed in the White Tower, does not enter his story at all: no Steward before the second bearer of his name is recorded as having dared to look into it, and the later accounts treat that use as both an innovation and a hazard. Denethor I therefore had no means of watching Mordor or Dol Guldur except scouts, garrisons and report.

The limits of the office showed most plainly in what it could not hold. The Steward's writ ran over the provinces and fiefs of Gondor, but writ and possession had parted company in more than one direction. Calenardhon, the wide land between Anduin and Isen, was his in name and largely empty in fact, its people long since thinned by the Great Plague; thirty-three years after his death Cirion granted it to the Éothéod, and Gondor's northern march became another realm's country. What his term illustrates is that a Steward's power reached no further than the men who stood in the land: he could command an army and win back a province, and still lose a city he had no one to rebuild.

The only personal tie the chronicle grants Denethor I is his son, and it grants it chiefly because the son is the more memorable man. Boromir, who took the rod after him and held it for twelve years, is one of the few middle Stewards given a character in the annals: a captain of great strength and bearing, whose looks were said to recall the old kings, and of whom it is claimed that even the lord of Minas Morgul went in fear. The same account adds the cost. In the fighting on the eastern march he took a wound from a Morgul-blade, and the hurt never left him; he dwindled under it and outlived his father by little more than a decade. Set beside that portrait, Denethor I is the quieter figure, and the pairing tells something about how the roll was compiled: a Steward enters the record either by dying at a datable moment or by doing something the memory of Gondor kept, and this father did the first while his son did the second.

Of adversaries he has none who can be named. The enemy of his last years is given as a breed rather than a person, and behind it stands the power in Minas Morgul, whose chief was never known by any name a Gondorian scribe could write. This marks a change in the kind of enmity the South-kingdom kept. Earlier Stewards and kings had faced foes with captains, embassies and demands; what faced Denethor I across the valley was a garrison of the Nine, silent, permanent and beyond negotiation. A relationship of that sort leaves no correspondence and no treaties, and the annalists accordingly record no dealings between the Steward and anyone beyond his own borders.

The remaining silences are worth naming as silences. No wife is recorded for him, no mother, no daughter and no brother; the roll of the Stewards is a column of men's names against years, and the households behind them go unmentioned throughout. One echo does survive. In the last generation of the line the same two names fall in the same order, a Denethor followed by a son called Boromir, which suggests that the house kept its own memory of the pair who held Ithilien when Osgiliath fell, whatever the chroniclers chose to leave out.