Bonus Episode 03 - The Last Mile

Right, the final volume, and Tolkien does the same trick he did in the middle one, the war first, and then the two hobbits.

The war is at a city called Minas Tirith, seven walls built into a side of a mountain, and the last real defence of the free peoples.

It's besieged by an army so large that the book stops trying to count it.

And the man in charge of that city isn't a king.

He's a steward and a caretaker holding the throne for an heir who hasn't turned up in a thousand years.

And his name is Denethor.

Denethor isn't a fool and he isn't a coward.

He's formidable, proud, an intelligent ruler who's been running a losing war for decades.

And he has one advantage nobody else has, a seeing stone called a palantir.

He can look into it and watch Sauron's armies moving.

And he has every right to do that.

The stone is his.

It's a legitimate tool and he's strong enough to use it without being taken over by it.

But Sauron works out that Denethor is watching and the stone does not start lying to him.

That's the whole danger of it.

Sauron cannot break his will, so he does something quieter.

Denethor goes on seeing real fleets, real armies, real reinforcements marching towards him.

Every bit of it's true and never wants the whole picture.

So a clever man looking directly at accurate information arrives with total certainty at a completely false conclusion, which is that there's no hope at all.

I don't think I need to draw the parallel here.

Everybody listening to this has a device in their pocket that does exactly that.

Denethor's problem wasn't that he was lied to.

Nobody lied to him.

His problem was that somebody else chose what he saw.

And he never once asked why those particular things kept arriving.