"The Siege of Gondor" - Eric's Thoughts

So much happened in this chapter (I read it over a couple of interspersed days) that I had to review the Cliff Notes before writing this blog post to make sure I covered everything important.

The heart of this chapter is Denethor's descent into madness.  Although the reason for his hopelessness is explained further in later chapters (i.e. Denethor has his own Palantir), the descent is understandable even without the Palantir reveal. Ben and I used to play a tower defense game in college where waves and waves of monsters would try to get by strategically placed towers that would automatically shoot. In the higher difficulty settings, the monsters would overwhelm the towers despite our best efforts and we would lose. That's pretty much what's happening here.

Notwithstanding my earlier critique of Sauron's forces being objectively underwhelming (only 30,000 strong), this chapter does an excellent job of truly making the odds of Gondor surviving seem insurmountable. To begin his assault, Sauron tosses the heads of those who were killed to weaken human resolve. Sauron uses fear as a primary weapon in his quest to subdue the world--both literally and figuratively. What does it matter that Sauron only has three-dozen thousand troops if Gondor does not even have the morale to resist?

Denethor's response to this oncoming wave of monsters demonstrates the power of fear combined with pride. Rather than turtle, as he should have done, he sends out his son in a suicide mission, implying that he expects his son to win, as Boromir "obviously" would have done. You can tell Faramir suspects his father's order will kill him, but he dutifully nonetheless obeys the command. The poisoned dart upon the return of course sets the stage for Denethor trying to burn his own son alive.

Woven into the different scenes is the Ring, of course. Denethor implies that he is aware that Faramir let the Ring go, and that Boromir would have thought to bring this gift back to him for Gondor's defense. There is a tense stand-off between Gandalf and Denethor, where Denethor asserts that he only would have used the Ring if absolutely necessary. During this confrontation, the fact that Denethor cannot even acknowledge his own fallibility of course tells the reader that he was woefully unprepared to come in contact with the Ring -- and that Faramir was right to let Frodo go. There is, of course, some logic to Denethor's position: better to use the Ring and perhaps fall than face numberless hordes and have the world fall under the Dark Lord's dominion. The reader judges Denethor only with the benefit of hindsight: if Frodo's mission had failed, perhaps Dark Lord Denethor (only a mortal) would have been a better result than Dark Lord Sauron.