3. The Muster of Rohan; 4. The Siege of Gondor
Since neither Frodo, Gandalf or Aragorn participates in the events of this chapter, there is very little symbolic significance. We may note that Théoden’s army meets Éowyn at Dunharrow, an ancient fortress to which the people have fled under her leadership.
During supper, Merry asks about Aragorn and the Paths of the Dead, but no one—neither Théoden, Éomer or Éowyn—understands why he chose to take this hopeless road. No one knows of the Stone of Erech or the “peril in the south.” “Woe that so valiant a man should trifle with death in this dire hour!” Éomer exclaims. The reason for Aragorn’s reticence is probably that his initiation is an intensely private matter, a secret pure and simple.
Théoden intends to leave both Éowyn and Merry behind here—neither of them is suited to battle, he believes. But when the host later rides toward Gondor, Éowyn and Merry ride with it in secret. Both refuse to be left in a place where their respective callings would remain unfulfilled.
4. The Siege of Gondor
Gandalf wakes Merry early with the light of a candle, for the Steward summons him. They pass through “the cold corridor” to the throne room, where Denethor sits and stares like “an old patient spider” in “a grey gloom,” as though he has not moved since they last left him.
We must, of course, pause at this image, for we have seen that the author often likens people and other creatures—even plants—to spiders and serpents. To put it mildly, it is not self-evident that the tale should compare the Steward of Minas Tirith to a patient old spider. At their first meeting, Merry thought he resembled Gandalf, rather. But now Denethor sits like a spider, patiently awaiting Merry. What prompts this unexpected and ominous simile? We know that serpent and spider have without exception been hints of, or representatives for, the Terrible Mother. We may recall that Saruman was likened to a serpent when he grew angry on the balcony of Orthanc. But can the Tyrannical Father represent the Terrible Mother? Yes, in fact he can. He is, as Erich Neumann puts it,
“The destructive instrument of the matriarchate, as its henchman; he is authority, as the maternal uncle; he is the negative force of self-destruction and the will to regression.”[1]
What Saruman and Denethor (unlike Théoden) have in common is the palantír. There are three palantíri in the tale: one in Orthanc, one in Minas Tirith, and one in Barad-dûr. (Aragorn now possesses the Orthanc-stone, as we know.) We have previously noted that the stone is used, in the broader sense, to establish a relationship with Sauron, and we have seen that Sauron is usually described with the attributes of the Terrible Mother—fear and exposure, darkness, black magic, paralysis, and devouring.
Stepping, as an exception, beyond the tale but without leaving Tolkien’s mythology, it is noteworthy that during the struggle for the Silmarils in the First Age, Sauron assumed the shapes of wolf, serpent, and vampire (and only these).[2] When he returned to this world, he did so as the "Necromancer in Dol Guldur." This name denotes an evil sorcerer who uses the dead for his own ends in the mountain of black magic.
Thus we see that while Sauron possesses masculine attributes by virtue of his history (and the expectations of the current culture), he is enveloped in darkness, enchantments, wraiths, binding, the underworld, devouring, wolves, serpents, blood-sucking, and poison with attendant paralysis and death. The Lord of Darkness is not, as we shall return to, "in fact" the Lady of Darkness; yet it is clear that Sauron is to a high degree an expression of the archetype of the Terrible Mother.
Given these circumstances, we may conclude that Denethor and Saruman, in their respective towers and essentially defenseless, confront the Terrible Mother directly—not once but repeatedly—through their black spheres of, let's say, witchcraft. It drives them mad. But not merely witless; rather, as the darkness grows, they uphold and intensify their increasingly distorted tyrannically masculine ideals, yet ever more as instruments of the Terrible Mother. It is She who stands behind, while they themselves experience the counterpart as a great Lord in an invincible realm. The Sauron-archetype is expressly ambivalent—in fact undifferentiated, as we shall return to—and is experienced in accordance with the psyche of the beholder. Just as we discussed Old Man Willow in the Old Forest, though here on another level, we might in this context hold a discussion of how the symbol itself contains its opposite; but the differentiating consciousness—which cannot encompass the opposites as one—experiences only one or the other in accordance with the particular capacities of its psyche and to some extent (unconscious) expectations.
Due to the symbol’s ambivalence, we never actually see Sauron in the tale, yet like the characters we read about, we assume he is a man—at the very least a decidedly masculine figure—despite the fact that he operates throughout with the attributes of the Terrible Mother.
But this is also logically consistent. We recall, of course, that the tale begins with the boys who live in holes in the earth, in a fertile land where the Good Mother provides them with everything they desire—be it peace and joy, two breakfasts every day, parties, or treasures beneath the hill. If the adventure begins with the breaking of the symbiosis with this omnipotent Mother, what counter-reaction can we expect, and who becomes the ultimate enemy? The opposite of the Good Mother, naturally. A shrill cry, a crawling wraith, a devouring tree—terror, poisoning, and paralysis. The Terrible Mother’s eyes and tentacles are everywhere, constantly seeking to drag the rebel back into the collective, undifferentiated hole, there to bind him in the darkness. What was originally a blessed symbiosis flips into a devouring symbiosis once conscious individuality is kindled. We have seen, after all, how poor Frodo, during his journey or individuation process, is torn between these maternal opposites: ring-wraiths/elves, devouring trees/Goldberry, monsters of the underworld/Galadriel’s tree, the compulsion of the Ring/Galadriel’s light, and so forth.
The palantíri are three black spheres. As a symbol in general, the sphere is “the whole,” “the infinite,” and “the one,”[3] and thus shares to a high degree the symbolic content of the One Ring with its eternal circle. Yet the sphere as totality implies—and sometimes explicitly so—the original hermaphrodite, “androgyny” before the differentiation of consciousness.[4] This symbolic understanding of the globe or sphere supports our discussion above concerning Sauron as the undifferentiated and thus hermaphroditic, which, together with the palantír’s symbolic content to some extent synonymous with the Ring, leads us to the next thought we wish to share in this context.
The palantíri belong, as we have seen, to Sauron. Not literally according to the tale, but according to their function and effect within its framework. Putting on the Ring means becoming like a spirit in the Terrible Mother’s realm of death (which is everywhere, since it concerns a situation that arises, not a place one is taken to). Looking into the palantír, on the other hand, places one in direct contact with the archetype in Sauron’s guise. We recall that it nearly crushed Pippin, but thanks to his special hobbit qualities and Gandalf’s support he survived this trauma. Greater men, such as Saruman and Denethor, manage to endure the confrontation but are in the long run swallowed up. (The influx from the unconscious becomes too great.) In time the men acquire traits of serpent and spider while being filled with the archetypal energy, convinced that the power belongs to themselves—that is, the inflation we discussed in connection with Saruman.
Returning to the narrative, the purpose of the patient spider in summoning Pippin at this early hour seems to be to appoint him as his esquire. Pippin receives armour and clothing in black and white, with ominous raven-wings on the black helm. This appointment could have taken place at any time and was hardly, from a rational perspective, particularly urgent. One may assume that the author’s intuition wished to present the spider image now, rather than primarily to make Pippin an esquire at this precise moment.
Later, when Pippin is out on the battlements with his new friend Beregond, the shrill, terrible cry rings out that strikes people to the ground. Five bird-like shapes pursue fleeing riders on the Pelennor plain beyond the walls. One of them is Faramir. We note that the Ringwraiths usually appear in a group of five (otherwise three or nine, numbers that recur throughout the tale), for example on Weathertop. We believe that the number five in this context represents the five fingers of the hand.[5] We may imagine Sauron as the hand and the five Ringwraiths as his grasping claws; which leads us to Saruman’s hand and the discussion we held in the commentary on “The Road to Isengard”—in brief, it concerns power and control. We may also recall Sauron’s finger, like a serpent, seeking Frodo when he sat on Amon Hen; thus there exists a hand-finger-serpent symbolism around Sauron to which the five Ringwraiths can allude.
But five also possesses another symbolism, according to Jung: namely chaos, the massa confusa, the primordial state before separation occurs and forms the four ordering fields or points of orientation.[6] Sauron, as we know, represents chaos—the primordial chaos, to which we shall return—as well as power over and the striving to neutralise the ordering principle, which to a high degree is represented by Aragorn.
The white rider Gandalf arrives with his light to the rescue, and the Ringwraiths retreat. Gandalf, Faramir, and Merry return to Denethor’s throne-room. A grim conversation ensues. Faramir dutifully reports news from Ithilien. Denethor grows angry that Faramir pretends to be so compliant toward his father and Steward when it is clear that Gandalf has long “owned [his] heart.” He even calls Faramir “a wizard’s pupil.” It is interesting that Frodo, unexpectedly in Ithilien, remarked that Faramir reminded him of Gandalf. We may assume that, by virtue of Faramir’s psychological versatility—which distinguishes him from Denethor and Boromir—he represents a wisdom that unites him with Gandalf to a higher degree than with father and brother. This makes Denethor feel betrayed by his own son, now his heir.
Denethor speaks of the Ring without using the actual word. He says that Boromir would have brought it to him, “a mighty gift,” whereas Faramir let “the thing” pass him by. After this embittered exchange, Faramir rides out again, in accordance with his father’s expectations. He returns gravely wounded, unconscious, and dying. Denethor is shaken by this and ascends the tower to turn to the palantír. It becomes a kind of double flight—the paternal inflation and the maternal regression, respectively. Then he descends, ashen-faced, and seats himself at his son’s sickbed.
Meanwhile, the siege of Minas Tirith becomes a reality. The Ringwraiths circle the city while war-engines are rolled forward. They hurl in the severed heads of fallen men, symbolizing the extinction of consciousness; only death and animal instinct remains. For yet another weapon was at the Lord of Darkness’s disposal, we are told: “fear and despair.” We have seen many times, and noted on a couple of occasions, how the Ringwraiths do not fight but use their paralysing black breath and terror. At the same time, Denethor sits in something of a private hell after his repeated visits to the palantír—or, to put it differently, to the Terrible Mother—while his soldiers more or less crawl in the dust beneath the shadows and cries of the Ringwraiths.
Pippin stands at the door where Faramir lies and Denethor sits mourning. Something has broken in the Steward. Pippin sees “tears on the face that had never before been wetted.” This is a significant remark. We have spoken at length about the Sick Old King archetype, who has become one-sided and petrified in his past masculinity (Denethor has apparently never wept), where the tyrannical preservation of historical order overshadows everything; in time he has become like the “ash-grey” statues that not only towered so bombastically on either side of the Anduin but also stood as “monoliths” in the throne-room. Tears represent solutio, dissolution, which in this context is potentially positive. In dreams and fairy-tales, tears often symbolise reconciliation and renewal; weeping entails a lowering of consciousness, an abaissement du niveau mental, which, together with its dissolving effect, allows the healing contents of the unconscious to flow in. As an example of the imagery, tears ran down Mary Magdalene’s cheeks when she saw that Jesus’ tomb was empty, whereupon she saw the angels and the risen Christ; whereas the disciples who looked into the empty tomb without tears saw neither angels nor the Lord. (John 20:1–17.) Returning to our imagery, weeping softens the rigidifying structure of consciousness and thereby enables renewal. Denethor feels remorse, guilt, grief, and despair at his son, whose dying is a consequence of his own unforgiving nature.
So far, weeping and tears are rare in the tale. Apart from the Fellowship’s grief when they left Moria and Gandalf behind, it is only Sam who from time to time wipes away his tears. He, by contrast, is readily moved to tears, which underlines his earthy and genuine personality—the gardener who waters and lets things grow. While the other men in the tale display a grim persona in accordance with prevailing convention, Sam does not care about that. He grows sad and weeps, wipes his tears, and carries on.
But there is one exception among the grim men: Boromir, the manliest of them all. When he has tried to take the Ring from Frodo and rushes about cursing him as the hobbit flees, he stumbles on a stone and falls. Lying on the ground he realises what he has done and bursts into tears, like Denethor filled with guilt. Then he rises, wipes his tears, and calls after Frodo, something like: “Forgive me, I am no longer mad.” According to our symbolic understanding of the tale, Boromir is indeed redeemed. He recognises his guilt—and we spoke of the necessity of guilt for consciousness in the commentary on “Shelob’s Lair”—and harbours it. He confesses his sin to Aragorn, dying beneath the tree. He is already there a different Boromir from the one he was until the breaking of the Fellowship, possibly thanks to guilt-awareness and tears, as well as insight into his own shadow.
Denethor’s tears could redeem him as well. Yet such things do not happen automatically; change depends, not least, on the individual’s “morality,” as we have discussed earlier.[7] Moreover, an unhappy—if not suffocating—circumstance applies to Denethor that recalls Gollum’s. We remember that the exiled and despised Gollum was close to being redeemed by Frodo’s acceptance and trust, but it became clear that it was as if cursed as long as they remained in or near the domain of the Terrible Mother. He cannot break the pattern while she exerts influence over him, if only through constant reminders of her presence. Denethor, for his part, has the palantír, to which he turns for a kind of masochistic comfort. Though it eats him from within, he cannot refrain from seating himself before the black globe in the tower. We have previously likened the palantír to the Ring. Just as a person may use the Ring occasionally without lasting harm, it will eventually devour him if he returns to it time and again—if he relies upon it. Denethor is not redeemed; he goes mad. Unlike Boromir, he does not know the source of his guilt and suffering, the origin of his tears—his suffering is, in Jung’s terms, meaningless, neurotic; whereas Boromir’s suffering and tears are redemptive.[8]
Since we have now spoken of the Terrible Mother’s indirect and deeply destructive influence on the men, one further detail deserves mention. The attentive reader of The Return of the King notes that while Faramir arrives gravely wounded in Minas Tirith, loses consciousness, and now lies dying in life-threatening fever, we are not told the nature of his injuries; no blood is mentioned, for example. But this is consistent if he is suffering from the wounds of the Terrible Mother. We may recall that the tale avoided describing the wound inflicted on Frodo by the Ringwraith on Weathertop—it was not, if we look at the text itself, a penetrating stab followed by a bleeding wound that put Frodo out of action; rather, “it was as though an arrow of poisoned ice” had wounded him. When Aragorn tries to heal Frodo, he speaks not of “the wound” but of “the poison” and “the evil.” In the same way, the paralysed Faramir does not lie with blood-soaked bandages but “with poison in his veins.” He has, like Frodo, fallen ill and been paralysed by the Terrible Mother, while the fever draws him down to her underworld.
Denethor abandons command of the defence and hands authority over to Gandalf (which is surprising given his attitude toward the wizard). Gandalf does what he chiefly does in the tale, in his capacity as daemon: he races about inspiring the soldiers. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that Denethor has lost all sense and reason. He intends to have himself and Faramir burned on a pyre, as “heathen kings” used to do. Why must Faramir be burned with him? It is hard to speculate on a madman’s motives, but one that fits our reading is that Faramir represents potential renewal. Denethor wants to take it with him to the grave. He will not allow anything new to grow; the tree must, so to speak, be dead—simply because it has always been so.
The pyre is prepared with wood and oil around the stone table on which Faramir is laid. Denethor lies down beside him. The scene is, with respect, somewhat pathetic. Regrettably, the judgement fits the psychological situation as perfectly as it is painful. It is not a belittlement of the proud Steward. We have all surely been “pathetic” in some sense while a complex’s delusions have made us temporarily “mad,” if not as dramatically as in Denethor’s case.
In any event, Faramir is still alive (something Denethor either fails to grasp or does not care about). Pippin naturally becomes desperate and runs to fetch Gandalf, in the hope that he might save Faramir. The hobbit reaches the lowest ring, whose buildings are already ablaze. Gandalf is sitting on Shadowfax in the open area just inside the massive city gate.
Outside the wall, the enemy draws near. Great war-engines “crawl” forward. The largest is a gigantic battering-ram, “Grond.” As if to emphasise who the true adversary is, Grond is shaped like “a devouring wolf,” forged in the underworld. “Grond crawled on,” the tale repeats.
Alongside this monster bearing the attributes of the Terrible Mother rides the Witch-king, that is, the one who rules over black magic. When the devouring wolf reaches the gate, all falls still. Then the battering-ram swings. Each time it strikes the gate, the Witch-king utters an incantation—words of power in a forgotten tongue "to rend both heart and stone." On the third blow, the gate shatters.The Witch-king rides slowly in, spreading despair and hopelessness. All flee—except Gandalf. “Go back to the abyss prepared for you!” the wizard cries. “Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your master.” Further attributes of the Terrible Mother are thus reiterated in this dramatic scene.
The Witch-king throws back his hood. He is no more than a shadow with a crown and two burning eyes. He calls Gandalf a fool and raises his sword; along the blade flames dance.
Yet no duel ensues between the two sword-bearing riders, and it is in fact rather difficult to imagine how such a combat would play out. We had a similar situation in another of the tale’s climaxes, when Gandalf awaited the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. The Balrog too was a shadow with fire. Gandalf shattered its sword, but the Balrog also had a whip that ensnared the wizard. The adversary proved to be a strangling serpent in the cold waters of the underworld. With a symbolic understanding of the tale’s images—how is this encounter between the white wizard and the Witch-king to end? The situation feels deadlocked, indeed impossible. The opposites are fixed upon each other; an intolerable stalemate prevails. A “third” is needed but cannot be summoned—a situation Jung called tertium non datur:[9] ”a third is not given.”
When such states arise within us, Jung says, we must simply endure them. Consciousness is incapable of resolving the situation and must harbour it. (We have spoken of similar dynamics earlier, in relation to conflict.) This endurance allows the unconscious—or the aforementioned transcendent function—to cast forth an unforeseen solution. So it happens here as well:
A cock crows, so the Witch-king turn around and ride out again.
While it is worthwhile to read that sentence again, because it has symbolic value, it is not quite right according to the story. This is how it actually unfolds: A cock crows. Then horn-blasts are heard across the Pelennor fields. The Riders of Rohan have come! The Witch-king turns to face this new foe instead.
Yet all the same, what breaks the deadlock is the cock’s crow. It is unexpected and intriguing. The cock that crows at dawn naturally represents morning, sunrise, the arrival of light; it is thus an unmistakable solar symbol that drives away the powers of darkness—just as the cock in our tale makes the Witch-king turn back.
But while this is one way to understand the development through a symbolic lens, according to the narrative it is the horns of the Rohirrim that make Witch-king leave Gandalf and Minas Tirith. Following the rule that one thing leads to the other—a good rule of thumb in dream interpretation, for instance—we may on the other hand say that the horns of the Rohirrim sound across the field because the cock crowed. This would accord with Gullinkambi in Norse mythology. Gullinkambi was a cock in the top of the world-tree Yggdrasil. The name means “golden comb” and of course alludes to solar symbolism. According to Völuspá (stanza 43), Gullinkambi crows to awaken the host when the enemy approaches:
Then to the gods | crowed Gollinkambi,He wakes the heroes | in Othin's hall;
What occurs, then, is that in the encounter between the White Rider and the Black Rider—both wielding swords and sorcery—a deadlock arises; a fixation of the symbols that cancel each other out like two motionless poles. The conflict is dissolved by “the unknown third,” the crowing cock, which leads to the arrival of the host at sunrise, and the Black Rider turns away. This is the beginning of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, just as Gullinkambi’s crowing marked the onset of the decisive battle on the plain of Vigrid in Norse mythology, followed by Heimdall’s horn blasts.
Footnotes
[1] Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, p. 186.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), ”Quenta Silmarillion: Of Beren and Lúthien,” in The Silmarillion. Page reference missing.
[3] J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2002).
[4] Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1996).
[5] See C. G. Jung, Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1941, ed. John Peck, Lorenz Jung, and Maria Meyer-Grass, trans. Ernst Falzeder and Tony Woolfson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 208.
[6] Ibid., 210.
[7] First mentioned in the commentary on “The Council of Elrond.”
[8] See, for instance Jung, ”Analytical Psychology and Education”, CW 17, par. 154.
[9] See Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, par. 116, and Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 705.