Not a huge amount to say about his chapter, mostly because it’s the climax of stuff I’ve already talked about. I don’t really feel like I have much more to add.
There are any number of places in LotR where fear and despair is a powerful force, and any number of times where it is brought about by lies built upon a seed of truth. This is kind of the climax of that as a theme. Even as the PalantÃr was beyond Saruman’s craft, it is beyond Sauron’s as well, and he does not have the ability to use the stones to show anything false. But he did have the ability, though the Ithil-Stone, to shift where Denethor looked, and to influence how he interpreted what he saw.
I’m not going to call Denethor a good man, not like Faramir, but he is an immensely cunning and strong-willed one. He’s a match for Aragorn, in many ways - when Aragorn was a young man, he came to Gondor in disguise and served Denethor’s father Ecthelion. Young Denethor was his rival, and in many ways his equal (and it is implied he deduced who he was, though naturally he kept that information to himself). And even he was driven not only to suicidal despair, but to the point that he is willing to murder his son and burn the pair of them alive to do it.
I love Beregond. He made a hard choice, and did a very hard thing, and is prepared to accept the consequences for his actions.
Next chapter is the Houses of Healing, which I’ve been looking forward to writing about from the day I started this readalong. Find out why!