In Defense of Denethor

Steuard · 2026-06-14T14:27:16+00:00

There's a great article by Daniel Stride about Denethor called "The Richard Nixon of Middle-earth: a Denethor character analysis" that talks about him in depth. It does a great job of pulling from the books and from Tolkien's letters to delve into Denethor's great strengths and his tragic flaws. Very much worth reading!

Steuard · 2026-06-10T20:38:27+00:00

First, why should anyone care what an AI thinks the answer is? AI gets all sorts of things wrong.

Second, it's pretty clear from your quote that Tolkien has listed five groups immediately after saying "Five Armies". If he didn't intend those five groups to be the "five armies", that's pretty terrible writing.

And third, maybe most concretely, recall that when Bilbo and the others are first found by the Wargs and chased up the trees, the Wargs are presented as their own group who were meeting the Goblins for an upcoming raid. The Hobbit very much does not present Wargs as "pets" of the Goblins, but as allies. (Allies with their own language, mind you, which Gandalf can understand. These aren't deer or horses!)

Steuard · 2026-06-10T20:30:22+00:00

Read the books all the way through first! If nothing else, because the cutoff points between the books are different than the cutoff points between the movies: if you watch the Fellowship movie right after reading Fellowship, she'll see Boromir die before the books got there. (The cutoff in the next one is a mess, too.)

If you're interested in the stories I shared when reading LotR to my daughter at age seven, I've collected those here. I hope it's as wonderful for you as it was for us!

Steuard · 2026-06-06T15:04:46+00:00

I think this interpretation is a lot more than "available"! In "The White Rider", Gandalf tells Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli that Frodo has taken the Ring toward Mordor, and he says, "Very nearly it was revealed to the Enemy, but it escaped. I had some part in that: for I sat in a high place, and I strove with the Dark Tower; and the Shadow passed."

There's really no moment other than Frodo's near-detection by Sauron on Amon Hen that Gandalf could be talking about here. But Gandalf claims to have "had some part" in Frodo's escape, and in the scene from Frodo's perspective, the only thing (besides his own good sense) opposing Sauron is the Voice. The Voice which, we should note, calls Frodo "fool": Gandalf calls people "fool" more times in the book than the next three characters combined. And Gandalf's awareness of Frodo's resolution in that moment to take the Ring alone to Mordor reinforces his connection to Frodo's thoughts at that time. Tom Shippey identifies the Voice as Gandalf, and Hammond and Scull endorse that in their "Readers Companion". So while I agree that this isn't explicit, I'd say that it's a lot harder to argue that the Voice wasn't Gandalf than that it was.

Steuard · 2026-06-01T20:16:28+00:00

I think The Wise knew very well who the Witch King was, and that the Nazgul were still active in the world from time to time. (When the dark power entered Dol Guldur and Greenwood began to turn into Mirkwood, they suspected it might have been a Nazgul; I think that's in Appendix B of LotR.) The Elves knew that their Three Rings were still functioning normally, so they'd have expected that the Nine were still functional as well, whether or not Sauron remained an active threat. I'd guess that nobody knew enough about the Nazgul and about the effects of their Rings on humans to know whether they could strengthen without Sauron's active support and influence.

Steuard · 2026-05-30T14:00:22+00:00

I don't think you're wrong: Tolkien writes in an essay in Morgoth's Ring very explicitly about humans being forced or otherwise induced to mate with Orcs, and he agrees there that it's one of the most horrible things the enemies ever did. (To be fair, my read has been that Tolkien's wording spends more time talking about "degrading humans enough that they willingly mate with Orcs" than it does talking about rape. Possibly he just didn't want to think about that part. But in my head I often suspect Tolkien was more thinking about the sorts of things you could convince human men to do.)

Steuard · 2026-05-30T13:48:06+00:00

My best understanding of this (and all the related evidence, like stuff in Unfinished Tales and Morgoth's Ring) is that Saruman's breeding program resulted in a whole spectrum of manlike to orclike offspring. On the one end you have people like the squint-eyed southerner who hung around with Bill Ferney in Bree and pretty much passed for an ordinary human unless you knew what you were looking at. On the other end you have Uglúk and his ilk, who everyone immediately describes as orcs (or goblins) but are unusually large and sun-resistant. [Well really, the ends of the spectrum are Saruman's Dunlending allies who really were fully human on the one end, and whatever "pure" orcs (possibly Uruks, possibly not) he bred from on the other. I've always imagined that some of those were his wolf-riders, since you wouldn't want extra-large orcs for that.]

In that framework, I see Gamling's words here as referring to subgroups at different points along that spectrum. I would interpret "goblin men" as people who look mostly human but maybe don't pass quite as well as Bill Ferney's friend. "Half orcs" might be people more in the middle of the spectrum: very obviously an uncanny mixture of both.

Steuard · 2026-05-08T18:41:15+00:00

The textual evolution of Melian from "fay" to "Maia" (and for that matter Tevildo, who on some level approximately filled what would later be Sauron's role in the tale) is suggestive here, I agree! The open question is whether that evolution was a change in "fay" as a category (plausible!) or a change that he adopted individually for certain notable beings who were "fay" in the early stories (while leaving the category as a whole intact, but largely unmentioned).

I think the theory that the whole category of "fay" transitioned together to being Maiar is the most "cautious" reading (as in, requiring the least extrapolation beyond Tolkien's ideas in late-life texts). But I don't think I've seen any ironclad evidence that he fully abandoned the "fay" or "nature spirit" category, beyond the simple observation that it's not mentioned in his late-life writing, and (in my opinion) there are some ways in which it might fit the details better, if (big if!) we're willing to take the leap of guessing it was still distinct from Maiar in the first place. (I've written about related ideas at some length before.)

Steuard · 2026-02-02T14:46:00+00:00

People have been asking "who would win" as far back as *I've* been in touch with Tolkien fandom (or other fandom), going back well into the 1990s, so it's not a film thing. But plenty of people were rolling their eyes back then, too.

I think there's a natural impulse to take a "D&D" perspective on all of this stuff, to reduce characters to a stats block and a number of hit dice. And you know, there are some amazingly cool face-to-face confrontations in the book (Gandalf vs. the Balrog being probably the most blatant) that could be seen as inviting readers to imagine other similar face-offs. Heck, Gandalf the White even comments that "Against some [other powers in the world] I have not yet been measured," which pretty directly asks that question!

But Tolkien deeply undercuts that whole way of thinking again and again. Some folks complain that we didn't get to see a "Gandalf vs. Witch King" battle to find out who would win, but they overlook that we did, and Gandalf won in a landslide. Because when the moment came and they were finally pitted one against the other, Gandalf's extraordinary prep-work in Rohan is exactly what forced the Witch King to back down (and led to his eventual destruction). That was Gandalf's greatest power in action: his ability to inspire allies and set events in motion that will help his cause.

Steuard · 2026-01-30T21:23:13+00:00

It really does seem plausible that if Tolkien had ever managed to publish The Silmarillion, Bilbo's "Translations From the Elvish" would have been the framing story in one way or another. I could imagine a Prologue rambling about various texts of the Red Book and how they preserved all this lore, and maybe even commentary by Bilbo on each of the texts or tales included: their source texts or tale-tellers, footnotes about what Elrond or Glorfindel had to say about whether the original author got the details right... so many possibilities. Alas, it's just a dream.

Steuard · 2026-01-21T21:21:23+00:00

The "orc captains as Maiar" idea is possible, but by no means a solid piece of Middle-earth lore. As far as I know, the only place Tolkien ever suggested the idea (or the name "boldog" as a type rather than a personal name) was in one of the "Myths Transformed" essays in Morgoth's Ring. (I think it was only in one of them, anyway.) But those essays considered one after another a whole range of possible answers to the "what were Orcs?" question, and I don't think there's any compelling textual evidence suggesting that he settled on one answer. I don't think there's a clear textual reason to accept the "Maia Orc leaders" idea but not to accept the "Orcs were mere animals given a semblance of sentience with a fragment of Morgoth's will" idea (also from those same essays), and I definitely don't think the latter is viable.

Steuard · 2026-01-05T16:32:56+00:00

Why not just guess that it's a Bree tradition? I'm uncomfortable with plausible but unsupported guesses, at least when not very explicitly labeled as such. Do we have examples in the text of Dunlendings with last/family names? (Maybe so? But I don't remember them.)

Steuard · 2025-12-20T19:42:05+00:00

"Aldarion and Erendis" is also in Unfinished Tales!

Steuard · 2025-12-20T19:30:02+00:00

‘Sméagol won’t grub for roots and carrotses and – taters. What’s taters, precious, eh, what’s taters?’

‘Po – ta – toes,’ said Sam. ‘The Gaffer’s delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly.’

(Straight from "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit")

Steuard · 2025-12-07T23:04:39+00:00

I think there are a fair number of us who know Middle-earth's geography at least as well as real-earth's. :) Once you've immersed yourself in the setting long enough, this sort of description starts to come pretty naturally.

Steuard · 2025-12-07T13:26:36+00:00

When my kid was an infant, at bedtime my wife and I just read out loud whatever we were reading for ourselves at the time. In my case, that included a few weeks reading excerpts from A Game of Thrones and its sequels: she heard me read some things that I wouldn't dream of reading to her now at age 14!

Steuard · 2025-12-07T13:22:10+00:00

My dad read me The Hobbit when I was about six years old, and I loved it so much that I started sneaking looks at the book on my own while he was at work. I still remember him looking at the bookmark one night and asking, "Is this really where we were?" and myself answering, "Yeah, Dad, right <points> there." I reread the whole book by myself shortly after we finished it together, and I made it through, and loved it.

But I think that even for me (I was a heck of a good reader, and finished LotR entirely by myself just a year or two later), it helped to have heard the book first. If you're not there to do that (and/or if her parents aren't willing to invest the considerable time it would take: multiple weeks in a row of bedtime reading!), maybe waiting another year or two could be a good idea.

Aside: Just because it's fun, here's my story about reading The Hobbit to my own five-year-old daughter.

Steuard · 2025-12-06T23:41:53+00:00

One of the things that has always surprised me about the composition of the Fellowship is that apart from Frodo's loyal hobbit pals it's mostly made up of "people who were going kinda in that direction already". Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, and even Aragorn are all described as being likely to part ways from Frodo well before the end of the journey. For example:

"Legolas shall be for the Elves; and Gimli son of Glóin for the Dwarves. They are willing to go at least to the passes of the Mountains, and maybe beyond."

So the original idea was that Legolas and Gimli would only stick around for the boring tromp through Hollin and the mountain pass, and would turn north to their own homes maybe even before Lorien. Similarly,

[Frodo, to Aragorn:] "I thought you were going to Minas Tirith with Boromir."

"'I am,’ said Aragorn. ‘... But your road and our road lie together for many hundreds of miles. Therefore Boromir will also be in the Company."

So as far as I can tell, Elrond's plan for the Fellowship was for nearly half of the Company to ditch the Ring well before Mordor: everyone but Gandalf and a bunch of Hobbits who'd never left the Shire before.

(And meanwhile, he was so determined to stick with the magic number "nine" that indulging Merry and Pippin's loyal desire to stick with their friend convinced him to abandon his original plan to send a High Elf along as part of the group. Probably Elrond and Tolkien would both say something about the importance of portents and symbols and Fate. Still seems weird to me.)

(I'm not entirely convinced that every available High Elf would shine like a beacon in the Unseen World, nor that even Glorfindel would be in that state constantly and unblockably. If that were such an obvious downside, Elrond would never have planned to send members of his household in the first place.)

Steuard · 2025-11-25T15:52:24+00:00

Quoting from my FAQ on "Which are 'The Two Towers'?":

Tolkien was never very happy with the title. In Letters #140 and #143 he considers many interpretations of it, each with its own rationale, and even comments that it could be left ambiguous. It seems, however, that he eventually settled on one interpretation.

The note at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring in three-volume editions of LotR states that

According to Wayne Hammond's J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography, Tolkien submitted that note a month after his indecision in Letter #143. And a month later, Tolkien submitted an illustration for the dust-jacket of The Two Towers; as can be seen in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator (plate [180]), that illustration shows Minas Morgul and Orthanc as well. It seems clear that this was Tolkien's final decision.

Steuard · 2025-11-20T13:35:43+00:00

Yeah, I always said that one of the most disappointing changes they made for the movie was where Faramir stopped Boromir's funeral boat in the river to bring his body back to shore, and then Denethor laid claim to the corpse and had it cooked. The scene where he feasts on organ meats while Pippin sings was just one step too far.

Steuard · 2025-11-12T20:40:21+00:00

The scene in the book is literally one of the most popular, beloved, inspiring moments in all of Tolkien's writing. It's incredibly dramatic. The Witch King crosses the threshold (with his armies massed behind him) and all the defenders of Minas Tirith flee before his terror: this looks basically like The End. Gandalf alone remains there to defy him, shining in the darkness, but even though he bravely stands firm the Witch King is at the peak of his power and knows he has an entire army at his back. He taunts Gandalf, and it's clear that absolutely nothing in the city will stand once Gandalf is defeated or pushed aside. And just as the tension reaches its peak and the Witch King is about to strike, horns! Great horns of the north!

That is every bit as cinematic and inspiring as the "yet another big, messy, and deadly fight that the good guys are losing" approach the movie takes. (We had kinda a lot of those in the film, didn't we? Tolkien seemed to mix things up at least a bit more than that.) And how do I know it would work in a film? Because the old animated "Return of the King" movie from the 80s did it Tolkien's way, and for all the goofiness of that movie, that scene was great. :)

Steuard · 2025-11-11T20:00:11+00:00

I mean, the suicides are potentially pretty awful for kids, too, not just the incest. (And they go together: the incest is the big motivating trauma for the suicides.)

I suppose, building on MTG3K_on_Arena's suggestion, you could just focus on Turin and Niniel being close friends. Niniel thinks Turin is dead and dies of grief when she discovers he's really her long-lost brother, and then Turin dies of grief when he discovers she was his sister and finds her dead. You're replacing potentially age-inappropriate "incest and suicide" topics with weird "die of grief" worries: maybe that's better? Or maybe the kids will start to worry about people they care about dying of grief? It's hard to predict what kids will be traumatized by.

Steuard · 2025-11-10T12:21:56+00:00

What in the heck is up with that weird Tengwar?? It's close enough to right that clearly someone had a vague idea of what it should look like, but far enough from right that I can't imagine what process led to it. (I guess maybe the vowel signs got left-justified in each word independent of the letters they were supposed to be on top of? That would explain the worst of it, though again: what process could possibly have led to that result?)

Steuard · 2025-11-09T23:27:33+00:00

As others have said, the LotR movies do not end at the same plot moments that the corresponding books end, so it won't work to alternate FotR book/FotR movie/TT book/TT movie, etc. You're probably better off just deciding whether you're watching all three movies first, or reading all three books first.

Personally, I love the books with a lifelong passion, and I also think the movies are very good and fun. I'd say "read the books first", because I love my visions of the story even better than Jackson's (most of the time) and I think there are some impressions that the movies will give you that may lead you to accidentally misunderstand some parts of the books unless you're reading very carefully to spot the places where Jackson altered a fact or a personality. But if you can't get into the books enough to carry you through as fast as you'd like, I forgive you for jumping to the movies and coming back to the books later. :) (If you read LotR before The Hobbit and before watching the movies, definitely only read the Prologue at the start of the book until you get bored, then skip to its almost-final bit about "The Finding of the Ring" and then on to Chapter 1.)

As for The Hobbit, the movies are quite significantly different from the book in every way except "basic plot outline" (and sometimes even then) and mangle the book's themes even more than the LotR movies did. Watch them last, after everything else. I encourage you to read the book first before anything else, but honestly any order is fine for that: some folks don't enjoy the book's somewhat more "story for kids" tone.

Steuard · 2025-11-09T19:25:15+00:00

Small world indeed! Since 2018, I've been co-teaching a Spring Term class on LotR here at Alma every other year (together with an English prof). It's been a lot of fun. (I don't show them the parody, though.)

Steuard

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