What Was Wrong with Denethor? Tolkien, Girl Next Gondor, Me, Erik Jensen

What Denethor Missed: Northern Courage and Theoden's Legacy
GirlNextGondor, 29 Sept 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqRC65DUTvk

Dialogue

Hans-Georg Lundahl

14:26 "kind of his job"

Not really.

A politician, especially a head of state has to place his country over all other countries in the list of his responsabilities.

But he does not have to place his country over all other concerns, like universal codes of morality or decency to other countries as long as they are decent to his.

In other words, it is not the job of politicians to place the good of their country above morals, sth which Pope Pius XI had mentioned in Mit brennender Sorge (an encyclical very critical of the new régime in Germany, even before the war of 1939).

Erik Jensen

It's an interesting distinction you bring up. It reminds me that Denethor is /Steward/, not King. A king, ruling with divine right, is the final arbiter. Such a person, perhaps, could choose to sacrifice their country and stay within their authority. The Steward of Gondor, on the other hand, has the task of managing the country until the king returns. Deciding to sacrifice it would be even more extreme for the steward than for the king, and more likely to be going too far.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@EriktheRed2023 "A king, ruling with divine right, is the final arbiter."

No. God is the final arbiter.

A King, a President, or a Steward of Gondor all have the same obligations to a code which is not produced by politicians of any kind (even of divine right) and which supersedes their responsabilities.

Erik Jensen

@hglundahl All-right, the final human arbiter, then. And the subjects in that system are supposed to take the king's will as the will of God. That's the whole point of ruling with divine right. So when the steward's job is 'to keep some kingdom still' (as Gandalf puts it), that is the remit - to keep it.

How do you put in italics, by the way? I've only found *bold*, but that doesn't sit well with me.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Last first @EriktheRed2023 .

_ italics _ (if you skip the spaces into the italicised part and maintain spaces outside).

"All-right, the final human arbiter, then."

Tradition?

Impersonal tradition?

As Catholics we also have the papacy, but even before that, there was such a thing as tradition.

"And the subjects in that system are supposed to take the king's will as the will of God. That's the whole point of ruling with divine right."

Depends on what type of "divine right" - besides, a strong "divine right" theory was not the monarchic theory during the Middle Ages. A very strong divine right theory is actually a Lutheran / Anglican thing, based on a misreading of Romans 13 (which as a Catholic Tolkien didn't share).

The most one can say for "divine right" is, if a king accessed regularly, and not in an usurpatorial manner, and wielded his power regularly and not in a tyrannic manner (i e not asking someone innocent of crime to henceforward bear with lots more than they had born with before), it's God's will that this man rule.

It does not mean it automatically becomes God's will whatever this man decides. Remember Saul? God wanted him to be king. At a certain point, God no longer warranted his decisions. In this case, over his disobeying a prophet.

If a Swedish king had obeyed St. Bridget and made a crusade against the Tatar rulers of Novgorod, perhaps the Tatars would have been elsewhere than at the Black Sea, where they then spread the plague to Europe? And no, not necessarily spreading it to Swedes first either, the plague corpses were available on their Southern warpath.

But apart from prophets, there is tradition. We can know for sure, and could have known even without a papal decree on one of the issues, that Sweden went wrong in the 20th C. over:

• changing the spelling or other grammar twice (1906 and 1950)
• putting more and more children into foster families and "orphanages" (even when they weren't orphans)
• putting more and more adults into psychiatry
• asking more and more years of school compulsion with less and less freedom for homeschooling and
• 1930's to 1970's sterilising people for the "good of the race" (the one item with a papal decision going against it).*

We can know that simply because it was going against tradition. Not just that of Sweden, but of lots of Christian countries in general.

* Note

Casti connubii
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@EriktheRed2023 Have a look:

[link to this post]
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2023/10/what-was-wrong-with-denethor-tolkien.html

Erik Jensen

@hglundahl Thank you! Both for the italics trick and the long answer. I'm going to have to look quite a few things up to make sense of it all, but it's great to have a starting point.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@EriktheRed2023 - you are welcome!

And thank you for not minding the dialogue was published on my blog!

14:39 Tolkien never said Denethor's flaw was valuing Gondor "over the rest of the world."

That would mean "over other countries" ...

It was valuing Gondor and his own politics over a universal and Gondor-independent (though very Gondor compatible) code (among other things, of ethics, but also presumably belief in Eru).

A bit like Hitler's or even Albert Forster's flaw in Sept 1939 wasn't valuing Germans over Poles.

It was valuing that evaluation over common decency. A thing which also covers Poles. Back when I was ten, I saw Poland's claims on Danzig as expansionist, but I hadn't taken into account how Albert Forster and his two predecessors were already treating Poles residing in the area.