the warrior

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

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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.

“I Do Not Love The Bright Sword For Its Sharpness, Nor the Arrow For Its Swiftness, Nor The Warrior For His Glory.” Faramir Speaks of War.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 874-878

Faramir is a warrior. When Éowyn first meets him in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields she assesses him shrewdly as a warrior herself, “bred among men of war, that here was one that no Rider of the Mark could outmatch in battle”.

But Faramir does not love war or the way of the warrior. After the War of the Ring and after he marries Éowyn of Rohan he will devote his life to the arts of peace. Together with his bride he will restore the land of Ithilien to its former beauty. Later in his encounter with Frodo and Sam Faramir will say of the Shire, “Your land must be a place of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour”.

Faramir would be a gardener himself, not an industrial scale food producer, one who reduces the land to compliant submission with pesticides and chemical fertilisers, but one who would allow the land to find its true wildness in which the growing of food would take its natural place. In essence he would be one who would re-unite the Ents and the Entwives, if that were possible, working as a sub-creator to make a land where both could live at peace with one another. When Treebeard met Merry and Pippin and learnt of the Shire he commented that it was a land that the Entwives would love. The Ents would love the Old Forest, a land in which the hobbits felt themselves to be alien. Is there a land where both could live together in harmony?

But here we must return to the reality of war. Faramir is now a warrior by necessity. Mordor has already seized control of Ithilien and Faramir and his men are operating behind enemy lines. And they would take the rest of Gondor too and then land by land the rest of Middle-earth also. Mordor is an empire that would make the whole earth its slave, that would make it like Mordor itself. So, as Faramir puts it himself, “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all”.

So Tolkien was not a pacifist in an absolute sense, one who regards war as unjustified in all cases, even that in which an enslaving enemy seeks to devour a peaceful land. But neither Tolkien, nor Faramir, love war for its own sake.

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.”

This is a theme that runs throughout all Tolkien’s works. That the arts of peace are superior to the arts of war. We remember the last words that Thorin Oakenshield said to Bilbo as he lay dying after the Battle of the Five Armies. “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold it would be a merrier world.” And yet, as Aragorn says at the Council of Elrond, the northern lands of which the Shire is one would have known little of peace unless they had been defended. “What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?”

So Tolkien never quite resolves the question of how much must a land and its people be prepared to defend themselves against potential threat, and perhaps it can never be fully resolved. So Faramir must be a warrior by necessity even though he longs to practice the arts of peace. And perhaps this is where we must leave the debate for now. Perhaps Faramir gives us a sense of how to live with this tension. He is trained for war and yet longs for peace, He is unyielding in war as he showed in the battle against the Haradrim in which we first met him and yet he is gentle in all his dealings with the hobbits who are now his prisoners. Such a tension requires a hard practice and discipline. The fruit of that discipline is the man who now speaks his heart to Frodo, one of the greatest of all Tolkien’s creations.

Faramir Teaches Us to Ask: “Whom does This Serve?”

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Faramir is a true man. That does not mean that his journey is complete. He has far yet to go and much still to learn and he will be tested to his very limits and beyond them; but the four great masculine archetypes, the king, the warrior, the magician and the lover are all possessed by him in a mature manner and yet he is not possessed by any of them. He lives in a time of war in which the very survival of his people is uncertain, indeed improbable and it is hard to blame his people for honouring the warrior above all else. Faramir is a mighty warrior who leads his men bravely in battle and yet he tells Frodo: “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the men of Numenor.” And even the city is not to be defended at any cost but that we will think about next week.

Faramir has learned to ask the question that only those who have achieved maturity are able to ask. “What is this for? What does this serve?” The immature are dazzled by the brightness and sharpness of the sword, by the flight of the arrow as it speeds toward its mark and, above all, by the glory of a mighty warrior whom they long to emulate. Boromir, great warrior though he was, was one such man. His desire was that in achieving victory for his people he would be the hero of the story. To be the hero is the natural desire of the young man in the first half of life and we can hardly blame Boromir for what is natural. But such a desire can also be dangerous and in Boromir it led to his attempt to take the Ring from Frodo justifying his treachery in his claim that only in using the Ring against Sauron could victory be guaranteed. When a warrior refuses to accept the authority of the true king harm will come of that rebellion. Boromir’s rebellion cost him his life though much good came from the way in which he acknowledged his guilt and sought to right the harm he had done.

Faramir, by contrast, does not seek glory for himself but for the city of Numenor and even that glory is not the power that she will have over others but it is “her memory, her ancientry, her beauty and her present wisdom.” Such maturity does not diminish his might in battle (which is the mistake that the immature make about this kind of wisdom) but it does understand the purpose of might aright. Power is not a good or an evil in and of itself. It can only become a good when those who wield it learn that it does not exist for its own sake but in order to achieve a good that is higher than itself. It is not wrong to seek or achieve success in a career, to build a successful enterprise or to win a beautiful bride. Such desire can only do harm when it becomes an end in itself; when the car is loved for its swiftness and glamour alone, the house for its size, the success of the enterprise for the glory it gives to the one who created it, the beauty of the bride for the envy aroused in other men. When we learn to ask “Whom does this serve?” then we will be mature. We will be whole.