Month: October 2026

“Do You Not Know Death When You See It?” In Which We Learn That Gandalf Does Not Dear Death But That The Morgul Lord Does Fear It.

/ stephencwinter / 3 Comments

The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 809-811

Pippin runs bravely down to the gate of Minas Tirith, down into the heart of the battle, in search of Gandalf and looking for aid in his attempt to save the life of Faramir from his father’s madness; but when he reaches the gate he shrinks in terror, cowering into a shadow. For what he sees is the Morgul Lord, the Witch-King of Angmar, the Lord of the Nazgûl, revealed in all his power, riding through the broken gate of the city.

“In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.”

Pippin is terrified. And rightly so, for he stands in mortal danger. Even the bravest of the soldiers of Gondor flee before the face of this terrible being. But one stands in defiance of him. Gandalf, seated upon Shadowfax, does not flee.

Those who know The Lord of the Rings through Peter Jackson’s films know that this scene does not appear in Jackson’s telling of the story. When the gates are broken by the mighty blows of Grond the battle continues as orcs flood through the shattered defences. In the Director’s Cut there is a scene, almost a peripheral one, in which the Morgul Lord shatters Gandalf’s staff, a scene in which Gandalf appears almost as a broken old man before the horns of Rohan sound and the Witch-King is distracted from what is presented as an inevitable victory over his foe.

But this is not how Tolkien presents the scene and I would like to offer my thoughts here as to why this is.

As we have already seen, there is no sense in which Tolkien seeks to diminish the power of the Lord of the Nazgûl at this moment. He intends us to see him as Pippin does, clothed in a power that he did not display in the camp below Weathertop when he struck the blow that wounded Frodo, or at the Fords of Bruinen when he was almost able to capture Frodo and the Ring, but was defeated by Glorfindel before whom he had once fled in one of the great battles of the Third Age at the end of his kingdom of Angmar, and by the magic of Elrond in the rising of the waters there. There we saw that his power was limited, but here, surely, we see that nothing can stand before him. Not even Gandalf.

The Morgul Lord is sure of this, even when Gandalf tells him that he cannot enter the city and commands him to “Go back!” And so he responds.

“Old fool!” he said. “Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!” And with that he lifted up his sword and the flames ran down the blade.

This is the moment of power that Peter Jackson showed in the Director’s Cut. Gandalf as the old fool, powerless before death in all its terror, his staff shattered as the Witch-king raises his sword. But there is something that the Morgul Lord does not know, cannot know, and that is that Gandalf does know death. He passed through death at the end of his battle with Durin’s Bane, with the Balrog of Moria. There at the end of that terrible struggle on the mountain top Gandalf said that “darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”

Gandalf knows death. As Gandalf the Grey he died in battle against a mighty foe. But he was “sent back- for a brief time until my task is done.” And Eru Ilúvatar sends him back with a task to be completed. Gandalf does not fear death because he has already passed through it and he knows the mission that he must and will complete.

But the Witch-King does not know death. But we know that he fears it even as he serves it, believing death to have the ultimate power. This is why in his speech he gives Death a capital letter. We know this because it was because of this fear that he first accepted the Ring of Power from the hand of Sauron, believing that through his Ring he might escape Death for ever. He has devoted his entire existence to the service of Death and so he has become a wraith. When Gandalf commands him to fall “into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master”, Gandalf speaks words of doom, for soon he will fall in the battle at the hands of a woman and a hobbit.

“A Very Valiant Man”. Thoughts Upon The Journey to Manhood of Peregrin Took.

/ stephencwinter / 5 Comments

The Return of The King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 807-809

It suddenly struck me after I had written and posted my last piece on this blog that the Peregrin Took, the Pippin, that I have been writing about recently was no longer a boy, but a man, and so I decided for my title to go back to the words that Gandalf used about him when he introduced him to the soldiers at the outer walls of the Pelennor Fields. “His name is Peregrin, a very valiant man”.

What I could also have done in looking for a title for this piece would have been to turn to two moments in the events around the inner collapse of the spirit of Denethor, and his orders to prepare a pyre for his own ritual suicide and the murder of Faramir.

We remember that when Denethor dismisses Pippin from his service and asks him to send for the servants who will light the pyre, we read that Pippin “stood up and looked the old man in the eye”. And soon after we read of Pippin’s encounter with Beregond, a soldier of the Guard of the Tower in Minas Tirith, and how Pippin speaks to this warrior with the words, “You must choose”.

These are two moments that show how Pippin has come into his manhood. It is not as a defiant teenager that Pippin speaks to the Steward of Gondor, but as one man to another. At no point does Pippin cease to respect his lord, at no point does he fail to grant that respect to him, but he chooses to speak truth. And when he meets Beregond and bids him do what he can to prevent Denethor from what he seeks to do, he does so with the words, “You must choose”. Again, this is not a boy speaking to a man, but a man to a man.

And here I am reminded of Rudyard Kipling, a poet of the early 20th century, often dismissed merely as a mouthpiece of British imperialism. Many remember his words, “Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, assuming that what Kipling is talking about is an inevitable clash of civilisations, but they fail to go on to read what the poet wrote next.

“But there is neither East not West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, when two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”

And so a hobbit stands “face to face” before the Steward of Gondor and a soldier of the Guard, and there is no hobbit and man. Gandalf is right. This is “Peregrin Took, a very valiant man”.

We have come a long way in a very short space of time from the young hobbit in Moria who dropped a stone into a well out of a curious desire to know how deep it was. We have come a long way from the young hobbit who had to stand with bowed head as Gandalf growled: “Fool of a Took! This is a serious journey, not a hobbit walking-party. Throw yourself in next time, and then you will be no further nuisance.”

And then we remember that in the few days since that unhappy event Pippin had been forced to witness the fall of Gandalf into the abyss with the Balrog that perhaps he had awoken. And he had been forced to witness the death of Boromir at the hands of orcs who had been sent to take halflings prisoner and take them to Isengard, there to be tormented at the hands of Saruman. And he had been forced to endure captivity in the hands of those same orcs and to escape from them during a battle into the Forest of Fangorn. And he had been forced to look into the face of the Dark Lord himself after looking into the Stone of Orthanc, and to endure the humiliation of being discovered as the culprit who had stolen that Stone.

Pippin has been through humiliation and has emerged on the other side, not with resentment but with humility and strength. He has been through a refining fire and has emerged a man who is able to look at another man face to face and not be ashamed or afraid.

“You Must Choose Between Orders and The Life of Faramir.” Pippin Acts Against Orders and For What is Right and Good.

/ stephencwinter / 8 Comments

The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 807-809

After he dismisses Pippin from his service, Denethor gives orders for his funeral and for the funeral of Faramir. We are given a sombre and dignified description of a procession to Rath Dinen, the street of the dead, the resting place of the Stewards of Gondor.

But no-one has died.

The procession does not take place after death but before it. What Denethor has done is to order a ritual suicide. This is what he means by using the word, heathen. Tolkien would have known the description of a ship burial of a Viking lord in which the observer described the ritual murder of slaves who were then placed around the chieftain on the ship before it was set alight. The intention was that he should not make his journey into the afterlife alone and unattended.

But it is not slaves or servants that are to be ritually murdered in Rath Dinen but Denethor’s own son. And so Pippin runs from his lord in search of aid and thus finds Beregond. Pippin and Beregond have become friends in a very short time, the kind of friendship that can be forged in time of war. We saw this with Faramir and Frodo, perhaps most profoundly with Frodo and Sam; and now we see it with Pippin and Beregond. And perhaps what has bound them most closely together is their shared love for Faramir and it is this bond that now leads both of them to act in a way that is unthinkable for almost everyone else in Gondor. They choose deliberately to disobey an order that has been given by their lord.

“But the Lord of the City, Beregond, has fallen before his city is taken. He is fey and dangerous.”

And Pippin speaks of the orders that Denethor has given for his own suicide and the murder of his son, and bids Beregond to do what he can to prevent this crime from taking place. And when Beregond still speaks of orders that he must obey, Pippin declares:

“Well, you must choose between orders and the life of Faramir,” said Pippin. “And as for orders, I think you have a madman to deal with, not a lord.”

Those who have served in the military know how serious a matter it is to deliberately disobey an order, especially an order that has come from the very top, but in the world that Tolkien brings us into there is an added dimension of seriousness. For in the northern world to disobey your lord was to declare yourself to be a non-person.

In the classic Old English poem, The Wanderer, we are told of the sorrows of a man who has no lord, and so is doomed to wander from land to land in search of one who might “show me recognition in his mead-hall.” What Pippin calls upon Beregond to do is to become an exile, to become homeless by choice. And indeed, when later in the story Beregond has to stand before Aragorn and answer for what he has done, he is indeed sent into exile, never to return to Minas Tirith. The judgement of the king will indeed be tempered by a remarkable act of mercy but at no point does Aragorn seek to minimise the gravity of Beregond’s deed, nor does Beregond expect him to do so. The law has been broken and blood has been shed.

All of this takes place in a moment, as Pippin runs down to the heart of the battle in search of Gandalf, and Beregond runs up to the Street of the Dead in order to defend Faramir, if he can. Beregond’s choice is not made as a conclusion to an ethics seminar; and if it had, how much weight could we give to such a choice? Beregond’s decision to put his own body between Denethor’s servants and the lord that he loves and for whom he would happily die is a decision that can only be made when it is literally a decision made between life and death. And before such a choice those of us who read what Beregond does in the pages of Tolkien’s great story cannot sit in judgement either upon him or the men that he will kill. We must sit in silence, recognising as we do so the awfulness of what is about to take place.

And as we do so we recognise that awe is what we are called to. Awe in the face of the horror and beauty of life, and the moment at which life comes to its end, either in peace or in terror.