7. The Pyre of Denethor; 8. The Houses of Healing; 9. The Last Debate; 10. The Black Gate Opens
When the Witch-king of Angmar turns away, Pippin begs Gandalf to save Faramir. They ride back upward. Even these two feel “the wind from the south” and catch a glimpse of the dawn.
Chaos reigns; Denethor has lost his mind. Gandalf takes Faramir. Denethor triumphantly reveals his palantír and laughs madly. A verbal duel ensues. Like Saruman before him, Denethor accuses Gandalf of wanting to rule in his stead. But Denethor will yield neither to him nor to “the ranger from the North”. Gandalf asks him how he wishes things to be, then. Denethor declares that everything shall remain as it has always been – which comes as no surprise to us who have already discussed the archetype of the Sick Old King.
Then he leaps onto the pyre and, unexpectedly, snaps his own staff in two, lies down, presses the palantír to his breast while the flames rise around him. Thus we see him break the masculine symbol and instead cling to the feminine one. As we have seen, the palantír is linked to the Terrible Mother. With Erich Neumann we have also noted that the Tyrannical Father, in his mania to preserve, expresses the regression of the Terrible Mother. He has at last surrendered to her.
8. The Houses of Healing
Merry and Pippin are at last reunited, and the young hobbit leads Merry to the Houses of Healing, for when he stabbed the Witch-king his arm was paralysed. Éowyn and Faramir are already lying there. It is said that the healing arts of Gondor are still great, yet their knowledge is not enough to cure “the black shadow”. Those afflicted by it sink into ever deeper dreams, glide into silence, grow cold as ice, and finally die – which symbolically expresses the journey into the death-realm of the Terrible Mother. Merry and Éowyn are sorely oppressed by the black shadow, while Faramir “burns with fever”.
An old woman named Ioreth weeps over Faramir and says: “Would that there were kings in Gondor, as there were once upon a time, they say! For it is said in old lore: The hands of the king are the hands of a healer. And so the rightful king could ever be known.”
Since the adventure began, this is the first time an older human woman has a speaking part in the story. This coincides with the battle being over and Aragorn having entered Gondor. (He has pitched his tents outside the gates of Minas Tirith. It is not yet the right time for him to pass within them as king, but his presence is intuitively sensed by the wise old woman. At least that is one way of looking at it.)
Earlier we noted that Faramir’s wound is never described. Now, however, we learn that he was struck by “a fell arrow”. When the Terrible Mother wounds physically, it is directly or indirectly with arrows. Frodo’s wound was described as “a poisoned dart”, Boromir was slain by the orcs’ arrows, and Théoden’s horse was killed by an arrow when it reared before the Witch-king. It has previously been mentioned that the bow is a feminine weapon, with its crescent-shaped curve and its ability to injure from afar. In this context a loosed arrow may be likened to a projection – that is, “unconscious libido” or psychic energy.[1] To be struck by an arrow, or by a projection, has a feminine quality; it is experienced as random, unfair, and to a greater or lesser degree as an ambush. A man cannot parry it; it is almost as though magic has been used to harm him. It is the opposite of a man coming straight at you with a war-club, where the situation is clear and distinct options (logos) present themselves: fight, flee, surrender, or parley. An arrow, on the other hand, suddenly strikes from somewhere; the masculine attitude has no defence against it – just as a man often finds it far harder to deal rationally with a conflict involving a woman than one involving another man. It is because of this symbolic understanding of the bow that our heroes, in this mother-dominated tale, are felled by arrows rather than, say, by swords.
Gandalf has summoned Aragorn to the Houses of Healing. “For only in the coming of Aragorn is there any hope left for those who lie sick within.”
Aragorn stands clad in a grey cloak. Remarkably, he says: “Verily, for in the ancient high tongue I am Elessar, the Elfstone, and Envinyatar, the Renewer.” He repeats what we have already established: that as the initiated king he is Elessar, not Aragorn, and that he is precisely the renewer who takes over after the Sick Old King.
He sends Ioreth to fetch an herb called kingsfoil and enlists “the other women” to heat water. At the same time a “herb master,” an older man, appears, whom Gandalf bids also to search for kingsfoil. At Faramir’s bedside Aragorn says that although he was indeed struck by an arrow, it is “the black breath” that has afflicted him most grievously. The tale does not explain how this can be, but it underlines our earlier reasoning about the arrow as a symbol of the Terrible Mother’s, shall we say, psychic attack.
We have described how Aragorn’s initiation along the Paths of the Dead contains themes familiar from shamanistic traditions, and argued that Aragorn is in some sense a shaman. Shamanism is characterised by contact with a spirit-world hidden from others and by the corresponding ability to heal. According to “primitive,” universal conceptions, people fall ill because the soul has left the body (or because someone has been shot by some fell creature’s arrow), and the shaman must call it back.[2] The shaman journeys into the spirit-world, sometimes down into the underworld, and may have to overcome obstacles and resistance in order to bring the soul home to the patient so that he or she may recover.
Aragorn falls on his knees beside Faramir with his hand upon the man’s brow. Again and again he calls Faramir by name, while his voice grows ever fainter, as though he were walking away from the company around him, calling after someone who has lost his way.
Then Bergil arrives with the kingsfoil. Aragorn is grateful but says, “The worst is now over.” He crushes the leaves for Faramir, who opens his eyes and says: “My lord, you called me. What does the king command?”
These words are overheard by Ioreth, who runs off and spreads the rumour of the king’s return. Note that this happens when Aragorn has manifested himself in Minas Tirith as a healer who has contact with the spirit-world, in contrast to the warrior who won the battle.
It is, however, a pity that Ioreth passes from being a wise and helpful woman—who is then supplanted by the male master of healing—to ending her brief appearance in the tale as a mere gossip. The story rather dismisses her, replacing her, as noted, with a man who takes over her role. Although the saga strives toward the union of opposites and to a large extent realises them (among other ways through the double weddings), it remains clear that this universe is still predominantly masculine. That is hardly surprising, given the author’s own cultural context and the mediaeval world the tale depicts. Yet the detail leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste all the same. An elevation of Ioreth to the status of wise old woman at Aragorn’s side would have been more satisfying; but we do not get that far, at least not yet.
Aragorn goes to Éowyn and “wakes her.” Then he “calls Merry back,” exactly like the shamans of old. After these spiritual exertions Aragorn leaves the Houses of Healing. Yet he cannot rest, for a crowd of people meets him and begs him to help their loved ones who have also fallen ill. King Elessar heals one after another. The scene is strongly reminiscent of the deeds of Jesus, and in fact the language of this chapter is strikingly biblical not only in content but in style. We had occasion to compare Aragorn with Christ already in “The Paths of the Dead”; he simply represents (among other things) the saviour archetype, which of course accords with his role as renewer, healer, and so forth.
Aragorn tends the sick far into the night, and when he can do no more he wraps his grey elven-cloak about him and walks anonymously to his tent outside the wall, just as Jesus often withdrew after his labours.
9. The Last Debate
In this and the following chapter we return to questions of war and strategy, and the symbolically charged content temporarily recedes once more. It is here that Legolas and Gimli recount to the hobbits the Paths of the Dead, the Army of the Dead, the Corsairs, and the ships that were mentioned earlier. The word “love” (otherwise rare in the tale) recurs frequently in relation to Aragorn, as if to reinforce everything we have said above.
The captains hold council about what must now be done. They have won the first great battle, but the war is far from over: Mordor still has vast armies in reserve, and above all there is the Ring. Gandalf proposes that they march openly against the Black Gate as a feint, to draw Sauron’s eye upon themselves (and especially upon King Elessar) so that the Ring-bearer may have some chance.
10. The Black Gate Opens
When the host reaches the desolate land before the Black Gate they hear wolves howling, and as battle draws near the Nazgûl wheel overhead “like vultures,” as if to underline that the enemy are emissaries of the Terrible Mother.
After parley in which the Mouth of Sauron triumphantly displays Frodo’s gear, the enemy pours out from every side. They outnumber the armies of the West ten to one. The battle is hopeless. Pippin is wounded and sinks to the ground; his mind falls into darkness. The narrator now begins to speak of “Pippin’s thought,” which becomes an independent, reflective entity, growing ever more distant yet still the protagonist of the scene. It reminds us of Aragorn’s shamanistic healing: the possibility of calling back that independent, reflective entity (here not called the soul but “thought”). This thought hears the cries that the eagles are coming. But this is Bilbo’s tale, it reflects; its own tale is ended, and it slips far away, we are told, and is lost.
Footnotes
[1] Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts 1 (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980), p. 115.
[2] See Eliade, Shamanism, eg. p. 442.