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Old 11-20-2001, 03:11 PM   #9
Mister Underhill
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Good posts all around! Here's my two cents:

“Pride goeth before the fall.”

That’s the quote I always think of when Denethor comes up. For me, the matter of Denethor is much more simple – he is defined almost wholly by his pride and arrogance. Virtually everything he says and does speaks of his almost megalomaniacal egotism.

When Gandalf arrives with Pippin, Denethor wastes precious time questioning Pippin – both to gain intelligence for his own purposes and to repay Gandalf for real or imagined slights in the past when he felt that Gandalf had withheld intelligence from him and/or had attempted to use him for his own ends.

Their dialogue is very revealing of Denethor’s state of mind and his priorities:
Quote:
"But though all the signs forebode that the doom of Gondor is drawing nigh, less now to me is that darkness than my own darkness.”
Even though Denethor admits that “Pride would be folly that disdained help and counsel at need…”, his words belie a proud and haughty attitude: “Yet the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, however worthy.”

Denethor is clearly more committed to maintaining his pride than he is even to the defense of his realm.

He is often quick to boast about all that he knows of what is happening in the wide world, and can’t resist making cryptic comments about the sources of his knowledge.

He judges himself strong enough to wrestle with Sauron using the Palantír without seeking help or advice.

He judges himself strong enough to master the Ring and use it for “good”.

Denethor has an almost Hitler-ian view of his own importance. He alone possesses the wisdom and mental strength to defeat Sauron. He alone has the foresight and the vision, while other, lesser men (i.e., Gandalf and Faramir) conspire to undermine him. Yet when doom and failure seem imminent, it is not himself that he blames, but his unworthy minions. “The West has failed.” And the sentence for their failure? “Go back and burn!” One of the great pities of the war, as he perceives it, is the end of his own line: “Nay, nay, whatever may now betide in war, my line too is ending, even the House of the Stewards has failed. Mean folk shall rule the last remnant of the Kings of Men, lurking in the hills until all are hounded out.” He views Gondor only as an extension of himself, and has a similarly exaggerated view of its importance in the grand scheme of things.

Surely, Denethor resents Faramir for his closeness with Gandalf, but he bears even greater resentment towards him, I contend, because Faramir is his own man.
Quote:
Your bearing is lowly in my presence, yet it is long now since you turned from your own way at my counsel.
His love for Boromir seems to stem in large part from the fact that Boromir is not only his literal heir, but also his psychological heir. He is a mental clone of his father, with an unrealistically exaggerated view of his own (and Gondor’s) strength and importance.

Now, Denethor was surely no Hitler in terms of his social and political practices and policies, but in terms of his leadership style, at least in the last days and weeks of the War, I think the comparison is not unjust.

[ November 20, 2001: Message edited by: Mister Underhill ]
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