Denethor II

The name Denethor was already old in Gondor when its most famous bearer received it. A Denethor had ruled long before as the tenth of the Ruling Stewards, so that the later lord is counted as the second of the name, in the manner used for the kings of the realm. Tolkien's published writings give no gloss for the word itself, but its shape is Sindarin, in keeping with the practice of the Dúnedain of Gondor, who drew the names of their houses from the Grey-elven tongue rather than from the speech of daily use. Its pronunciation follows the ordinary rules set out for Elvish names: the medial th is a single voiceless spirant, as in English thin, and never a t followed by a separate breath. A like backward glance governs the names Denethor gave his own sons, for a Boromir had been Steward after the first Denethor, and a Faramir had been a son of King Ondoher, lost in the wars of the Wainriders.

He was born in the year 2930 of the Third Age, son of Ecthelion II and grandson of Turgon, and thus of the House of the Stewards, whose descent ran back through Mardil to Húrin of Emyn Arnen, a steward of King Minardil. That house was not of the royal line of Anárion, though it was of high Númenórean blood, and its lords governed in the name of kings who had not returned. In 2976 Denethor wedded Finduilas, daughter of Adrahil of Dol Amroth and sister of Imrahil, joining his house to the princes of that seaward fief, of whom it was said among the Elves that a strain of Elvish descent still ran in their blood. Their elder son Boromir was born in 2978, and Faramir five years afterward.

In person he was tall and proud, and observers of his own day held that no man of Gondor had borne so kingly a look for many generations, so that he seemed nearer in stature and bearing to the Númenóreans of old than most of his kindred. With this went a mind of unusual reach: he was learned in the records of the realm, long of memory, and far-sighted in counsel. Gandalf reckoned him able to perceive much of what passed in the thought of others, even at a distance, and this faculty made him difficult to deceive and sparing of confidence. He was austere in manner, courteous but cold toward those he did not esteem, and possessed of a will that did not easily bend.

Denethor came to manhood while his father held the rule of Gondor, and he served long in the counsels of the City before he inherited it. Those years were shadowed for him by the presence of a captain who came out of the north in 2957 and took service under Ecthelion II by the name of Thorongil. That man rose swiftly in the favour of the old Steward, who set great store by his advice, and Denethor, then in his late twenties, found himself measured against him and not always to his advantage. He did not stoop to open quarrel, but he watched the stranger closely, and it is recorded that he came at length to guess what Thorongil concealed, namely that this was Aragorn son of Arathorn of the northern line of Isildur, a claimant whose right, if pressed, would set aside the House of the Stewards altogether. In 2980 Thorongil led a sudden raid upon the havens of Umbar, burned much of the Corsairs' fleet and slew their captain in the fighting on the quays, then turned aside at his return and passed out of Gondor eastward, never to be seen there again under that name. Four years afterwards Ecthelion died, and Denethor took the White Rod as the twenty-sixth Ruling Steward.

His rule opened with the realm already pressed on every side, for Sauron had declared himself openly in 2951 and the ruined crossings at Osgiliath had become a frontier rather than a highway. In 2988 Finduilas died, having lived barely twelve years in Minas Tirith, and men said she had wilted there in sight of the shadow of the eastern mountains. Denethor did not marry again. From that time he grew harder and more silent, spending himself upon the ordering of the defences and upon the archives and muster-rolls of Gondor, and receiving little counsel that he had not first weighed and doubted. It was in these years, though no one about him knew of it, that he unlocked the tower chamber where the Stone of Minas Anor had lain unused since the loss of the kings, and set himself to look into it, trusting that his will was strong enough to master what he found there.

On 20 June 3018 the Enemy struck at Osgiliath in force; the eastern ruins were lost and the last bridge broken behind the retreating garrison, which Boromir and Faramir brought off between them. About that time a dream came repeatedly to Faramir and once to Boromir, bidding the dreamer seek Imladris for the reading of a riddle concerning a broken sword and a halfling. Denethor was reluctant to spare either son, but Boromir claimed the errand as the elder and set out on 4 July, riding north on a road no living man of the City knew. He did not come again. In the last days of February 3019 Boromir fell at Parth Galen defending Merry and Pippin, and some while afterwards the two halves of his cloven horn were carried down Anduin and brought to his father's hand, a token that told Denethor of the death but not of its manner.

In the second week of March 3019 Denethor ordered the beacon-fires kindled along the northern spurs of the White Mountains and sent a messenger bearing the arrow-token to Théoden, calling in the old alliance. Gandalf reached the City with Peregrin Took at the same season, and at their first audience Denethor pressed the hobbit closely upon Boromir's last days, then accepted his offer of service, so that a halfling was sworn to the Stewards of Gondor. Faramir came in from Ithilien soon after and reported that he had met the Ring-bearer at Henneth Annûn and let him go on into the mountains; his father heard this as a failure of judgement and said as much before witnesses. Faramir was sent out again to hold the causeway forts and the outwall of the Pelennor, an order many in the City thought a sentence rather than a command, and on 13 March he was struck down by a Southron dart as the retreat was broken and the fields overrun.

The authority Denethor held was that of a regent whose king had not returned for nearly a thousand years. The Stewards ruled in Gondor with the full powers of government, disposing of its armies, its revenues and its provinces, but they took neither crown nor throne; in the hall of the Tower the Steward's seat was a plain black chair set below the empty high seat, and his emblem of office was a white rod rather than a diadem. By the oath sworn when the line of Mardil first assumed the rule, the office was held in trust and was to be surrendered whenever a king should come again, a condition Denethor did not deny in principle though he denied its application in his own day. His writ ran over the City, over Anórien and the southern fiefs, and over such outposts as still stood east of Anduin; beyond that it did not run at all, for Rohan answered him by the terms of an old alliance rather than by command, and the levies the fiefs could send when he called them in were fewer than the muster-rolls of earlier ages would have promised.

His personal capacities were of a wholly natural kind, and the texts are careful about their extent. He was a master of the archives and the traditions of his house, and he possessed an unusual power of reading the minds of others, which Gandalf reckoned effective even over long distances and against men of other lands. To this he joined a strength of will sufficient to use the Stone of Minas Anor without being subdued by the one that Sauron had taken, and his claim to use it rested on lawful ground, since the Stones were among the heirlooms that had descended to the Stewards with the rule. The limits of that instrument, however, were severe. The Stones showed true images and could not be made to lie outright, but the Enemy could govern what fell within their view, so that Denethor saw only such truths as served to break him, and the effort of the contest consumed him and aged him faster than his years.

His hold upon lesser people was the hold of long habit and personal weight rather than of affection. The hobbit he took into his service he treated with a cold courtesy, questioning him for what could be got and then, at the last, formally loosing him from the oath and telling him to spend his death as he chose, a release the hobbit immediately used against him. The household servants obeyed his orders into the tombs past the point where obedience made sense, and the one guardsman who refused did so only by breaking his post and shedding the blood of his fellows, which measures how heavily the Steward's word still bound men whose judgement had already deserted him.

The name was in use in Tolkien's papers long before it was given to a lord of Gondor, and it belonged first to an Elf. In the Elvish matter written during the 1930s, Denethor is a chieftain of the Green-elves of Ossiriand, son of Dan, whose people had turned aside from the westward march and come over the mountains into Beleriand late and lightly armed; he answers Thingol's summons in the first battle against the Orcs of Morgoth and is cut off with his following upon the hill of Amon Ereb, where he falls, after which his people would take no lord again. The figure survived into the later annalistic versions of the same legends, so that the name stood in Tolkien's manuscripts in two wholly separate applications, one Elvish and of the Elder Days, the other a Man of the Third Age.

The element of the Steward's history that now seems most characteristic of him, his use of a seeing-stone, could not have been planned from the outset, since the Stones themselves entered the narrative only while the third book was being written, when the globe cast down from Orthanc had to be accounted for and its nature was worked out in the writing rather than before it. Only thereafter was there a system of Stones for the ruler of Minas Tirith to inherit. The dynastic framework surrounding him was likewise settled late, in the genealogical papers that lie behind the published appendix on the line of Elendil, where the succession of the Ruling Stewards was set down with regnal dates and brief annotations in substantially the form afterwards printed.

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy the Steward is played by John Noble, who appears first in the extended version of the second film and then at length in the third. The screenplays set the palantír aside entirely: Denethor is never shown to possess or use a Stone, so his collapse is presented as the ordinary ruin of a grieving and partial father rather than as the end of a hidden contest of wills, and the deceiving vision of a black fleet no longer supplies the immediate cause of his despair. The beacons of the White Mountains are lit against his wishes at Gandalf's prompting rather than by his own order, and Faramir is sent to attempt the recapture of Osgiliath instead of to hold the causeway forts and the outer wall. Beregond has no part in the films, so the interruption of the burning falls to Gandalf and Pippin alone; nor does the Steward die upon the wood, for he takes fire, runs from the tomb and falls from the height of the city. The extended second film also adds an invented scene at Osgiliath in which he is seen with both sons before Boromir's journey north, giving the brothers' unequal standing an occasion it does not have in the book.

In the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981 Denethor is spoken by Peter Vaughan. Being the fullest of the older adaptations, that version keeps the shape of the book's account, including the Steward's use of the seeing-stone and the reasoning that follows from it, so that his fall retains its cause; the constraints of twenty-six half-hour episodes nevertheless reduce him largely to the events of the siege, with little of the earlier reign surviving. He has no place at all in the animated films of the same period: Ralph Bakshi's version of 1978 breaks off after Helm's Deep and never reaches the affairs of Minas Tirith, so the character is not introduced there.