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.