Originally published as:
Gallant, Richard Z. (2020) "Galadriel and Wyrd: Interlace, Exempla and the Passing of Northern Courage in the History of the Eldar," Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 10 : Iss. 2 , Article 5.
Available for free at: scholar.valpo.edu/…
Tungol sceal on heofenum
Beorhte scinan, swa him bebead meotud.
God sceal wið yfele, geogoð sceal wið yldo,
Lif sceal wið deaþe, leoht sceal wið þystrum,
(‘Maxims II’, lines 48b-51b)
Galadriel is no doubt an important character in the Legendarium of J. R. R. Tolkien; not only important but also pivotable. Fëanor pivoted the narrative of the Eldar to one resembling the Germanic heroic epic by invoking a wyrd, through his free choice, against himself and the Noldor who followed him, which leads to their doom. Galadriel, on the other side, as the last of the Noldorin rebels and a penitent, pivots the fatalistic and heroic Elvish narrative to eucatastrophe through own her free will and choice.
The questions this article poses, however, is whether the “Doom of the Noldor” is really final? Is there room for grace and redemption? The poet of the Old English ‘The Wanderer’ poignantly tells us on line 5b, Wyrd bið ful aræd! but is it really so? If free will can invite fate, can free will also break free from it?
An answer may be suggested by examining Fëanor’s choice to possess the Silmarils that invoked the Noldor’s wyrd and Galadriel’s test of her heart, that results in a renunciation of wrongful desire, corrects Fëanor’s wyrd in an instantaneous moment of eucatastrophe. Galadriel’s choice to refuse the One Ring gains greater significance in the context of the events of the First Age. Through spatial imagery, tonality and character action, First Age themes of free will, banishment and exile, doom and providence all interweave together to form a rich tapestry.
1. Ideology of the Fëanorians and Fingolfians: Aspects of Northern Courage and Wyrd
The stories of the First Age are illustrative narratives (exempla) told by intradiegetic (secondary world) Elvish narrators to an intradiegetic audience, in which the theme of Northern courage is expressed by two registers of Elvish norms and values (ideologies ). Exemplum is a traditional classical and medieval device that uses illustrative narrative to confirm a moral point (Davenport 2004, 11). The moral point, the narrative’s sententia, is directly contrasted to the protagonist’ actions (either those to be shunned or those to be emulated). The narrative, therefore “… reenacts the actual, historical embodiment of communal value in a protagonist or an event, and then, in its moral, effects the value’s reemergence with the obligatory force of moral law” (Scanlon 1994, 34).
This discussion posits Galadriel, and the choice she makes in her narrative, as ad bonum exemplum juxtaposed to Fëanor, and his unwise choice in his narrative, as ad malum exemplum reenacts (secondary) historical embodiment of the communal Eldarin moral values and breaks with them allowing for new communal values. That is, the Germanic narrative of Northern courage is rejected allowing for a new communal value of heroism to replace it (Gallant 2020a).
The norms and values (ideologies) of the House of Fëanor and the House of Fingolfin represent the vices and virtues, respectfully, of the Germanic ethos and its tensions in which the communities of the Fëanorians and Fingolfins operate.
The Fëanorian ideology is explicitly expressed in their Oath to regain the Silmarils at any and all costs (MR, "The Annals of Aman", §134, 112). The Fingolfian ideology is explained by Finrod Felagund to the wise Edain-woman Andreth:
‘To overthrow the Shadow, or if that may not be, to keep it from spreading once more over all Middle-earth – to defend the Children of Eru, Andreth, all the Children and not the proud Eldar only!’ (MR, 310-11)
The actions of the dramatis personae find their motivations within the Northern courage framework of these two ideologies: either in possessiveness or stopping the spread of the Shadow and preserving what may be saved.
The theory of Northern courage is the Germanic warrior “ethic of endurance and resistance” (Scull and Hammond 2006, 413), which has an “emphasis on the comitatus, the duty of revenge” and the “function of wyrd” (Benson 1967; Gallant 2020b, 306). The function of wyrd and the Germanic heroic ethos defines the Germanic narrative of the Eldar and ‘the long defeat’. This ethos of Northern courage, as a thematic pattern, unifies the Legendarium through its tone and mood: a “common underlying tone … one of defeat and loss” of a “dominant style appropriate for the elegiac and slightly melancholic lays of Elvish origin…” (Vanderbeke 2012, 14; 4).
The mood of this spirit of the north may be said to be “optimistic only in as far as it asserted the possibility of heroism” (Hatto 1980, 166). The history of the Eldar is not optimistic, indeed they expect and eventual defeat in their struggle against the evil of Morgoth. The Eldarin ethos of endurance and fatalistic resistance often portrays “… the actions of heroes caught in circumstances that conformed more or less to the varied but fundamentally simple recipe for an heroic situation” (BMC, 18). The First Age privileges such recipes of heroic action in its narratives, such as Barahir’s shield wall or Turin’s dragon fight and death. And while the last stand of the comitatus defending its lord is certainly an epitome of this ethos, it is not the only aspect of it.
This discussion focuses on this abstract, thematic mood that is more prevalent in the scenes where Fëanor and Galadriel make their fateful choices and encompasses the situations that Tolkien (BMC, 23) describes as: “… that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die… the shadow of its [the theme’s] despair, if only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret, is still there. The worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt.” Tolkien ensures that his First Age reflects this mood and tenor. It is an abstract mood, a tone, a tenor of “despair of the event, combined with faith in the value of doomed resistance” (ibid.). In the history of the Elves, the event is ‘the long defeat’ that they have spent tens of thousands of years resisting, doomed that they are.
The theme of the long defeat is interlaced throughout the Legendarium. This Germanic-Elvish narrative concludes with ‘The Mirror of Galadriel’ and ‘Farewell to Lórien’. Interlace is “the device of interweaving of a number of different themes … all distinct and yet inseparable (Vinaver 1971, 71; emphasis mine). The device is thought to have originated with Ovid. Denis Feeny (2004, xxi) in his introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, notes that the “haphazard chain of association is entertaining, but it also reinforces the Ovidian theme of the very contingency of connectedness.” For C. S. Lewis, who called the device “polyphonic,” the contingency of connectedness provides a
Depth, or thickness, or density. Because the (improbable) adventure which we are following is liable at any moment to be interrupted by some quite different (improbable) adventure, there steals upon us unawares the conviction that adventures of this sort are going on all around us, that in this vast forest (we are nearly always in a forest) this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time, that it was going on before we arrived and will continue after we have left. (Lewis 1954, 98)
The interweaving of Vinaver’s distinct but inseparable themes, that remind us of other stories in a seemingly haphazard chain of association, gives us a sense of connectedness that there are other stories happening (or happened), which affect the one that we are reading.
Through interlace, Galadriel’s refusal of the One Ring gains deeper significance from the themes of other stories (such as Fëanor’s refusal) interweaving throughout the scene.
2. Fëanor’s Choice: Possessiveness, Wyrd, Doom, Exile and Banishment
**A brief reminder of our discussion in the series so far as it applies to the context of Galadriel’s temptation**
The context of Galadriel’s choice to resist the Ring and its significance for the Eldar’s banishment and redemption begins with Fëanor’s actions that first invoked this wyrd: his unwise choice to refuse the Silmarils to the Vala Yavanna (Gallant 2021, forthcoming). Yavanna had requested Fëanor’s Silmarils after the darkening of the trees
‘The Light of the Trees has passed away, and lives now only in the Silmarils of Fëanor. Foresighted was he! Even for those who are mightiest under Ilúvatar there is some work that they may accomplish once, and once only. The Light of the Trees I brought into being, and within Eä I can do so never again. Yet had I but a little of that light I could recall life to the Trees, ere their roots decay; and our hurt should be healed, and the malice of Melkor be confounded.’ (S, 82)
The refusal was made of Fëanor’s own free will (‘This thing I will not do of free will.’) (S, 83). The motivation for Fëanor’s refusal was his wrongful desire, which consequently invoked wyrd upon the Noldor, or at least initially, upon Fëanor. His Silmarils, although holy and divine, are nonetheless constructed within the confines of Arda with materials also created within Arda . In this sense we may consider the Silmarils “worldly goods” that are gifts from the Creator.
Echoes of the Alfredian Consolatione resound in Fëanor if we pause to consider why the felicities (woruldsælða) reprimand Mind (mōd):
Now you are guiltier than we are, because of your own wrongful desires and also because we are not permitted on account of you to perform our maker’s will. He lent us to you to use according to his directions, not to satisfy the appetite of your wrongful desires. (ADCP, II, prs. 5, xiii, 45)
Fëanor’s wrongful desires, like mōd’s, is a “greedy love” in which he forgets that he is merely their sub-creator and that the actual Creator merely lent them to him to use wisely according to his (Ilúvatar’s) directions. Yet Fëanor “seldom remembered now that the light within them was not his own” (S, 70). Fëanor’s own mōd, or spirit, through its pride and covetousness, draws the Silmarils away from Ilúvatar’s purpose. Fëanor thereby perverts the divine order and prevents the Silmarils from performing their duties (Frakes 1988, 110). When this happens, in the Alfredian framework, wyrd is invoked. Verlyn Flieger (2009, 167) may have been the first to note this passage within the context of doom and freedom of choice when she writes
Free will can apparently invite fate. As noted earlier, doom is derived from Anglo-Saxon dòm. While its primary meaning is: “I. judgement, decree, ordinance, law,” it has also a rare usage listed as IV. “Will, free will, choice, option” (Bosworth-Toller). Thus, Fëanor’s impractical choice to deny Yavanna the Silmarils, and his consequent oath to pursue Morgoth bring on the choice of the Noldor to follow him, which leads to their Doom. Though that doom is spoken in the voice of Mandos, it is the Noldor who in effect doom themselves.
Following Flieger, the argument begins at this point where the Noldor invoked this wyrd themselves. Specifically, Fëanor invoked wyrd by his own wrongful desire over the summum bonum, thereby perverting worldly goods. This wyrd likewise instigated a series of cause-and-effect events (invocation-doom-banishment-exile) with the purpose of “correcting” Fëanor’s choice and returning to the providential divine plan. This “correcting” function of wyrd, and the various heroes’ endurance and resistance to wyrd’s oppressive machinations, is what contributes to the theme of Northern courage.
The Noldor are banished and exiled according to divine law, punished by wyrd. The main host of the Noldor take flight from Valinor as exiles and Galadriel is among them. The banishment, it should be noted, is one of dual exile; one of free choice both before the event and afterwards.
An example of banishment as dual-exile – as a banishment of oppositions – may be found in the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ in which Stanley Greenfield observes: “we are confronted with a dual exile: enforced and desired” (Greenfield 1972, 222). In the Legendarium, the Noldor desire exile to retrieve the Silmarils and shortly thereafter their exile is enforced by “The Doom of Mandos.” Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings attests that: “[A]gainst the will of the Valar Fëanor forsook the Blessed Realm and went into exile to Middle-earth, leading with him a great part of his people…” (RK, Appendix A, 314). Note that Galadriel, according to her story in The Silmarillion, left Valinor not to recover the Silmarils (the Fëanorian motivation) but rather because “she yearned to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will” (S, 89, emphasis mine): a fine detail that gains greater significance in her choice to resist the One Ring.
For Galadriel and the remnant Noldor in the Third Age, the banishment encompasses all of Middle-earth (‘… these lands of exile…’(FR, II, viii, 394)). In their exile, they struggle to preserve what can be preserved and act within the Fingolfian ideology of containing the Shadow and preventing it from engulfing Middle-earth. Slowly, bit by bit, they lose ground in the struggle while resisting heroically. The losing struggle is the basis for recurring theme of the “sad light of fatalism” (Stanley 2000, 94) of the long defeat that is characterized with an ubi sunt emotional symbolism of nostalgia and an omnipresent sense of fate and doom.
It is an atmosphere just below the surface even in Galadriel’s garden and it is particularly salient in the following chapter as the Elves say farewell.
3. Galadriel’s Choice: Themes of High Hope and Redemption
The struggles of the First Age are made implicit through the interlacing of themes and the spatial imagery in Galadriel’s garden. Maud Bodkin in her Archetypical Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination and Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays both provide the basis for examination of thematic spatial imagery. For example, Bodkin’s work on the emotional symbolism of earthly surroundings shows their relationship to the idea of death. The banishment ‘in these lands of exile’ is one in which the Elves are “trapped in earthly, cultural surroundings” (Bjork 2002, 324).
For the Elves, Middle-earth itself is presented as a place of constraint and death. Dwindling ‘to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten’ (FR, II, vii, 380) takes the form of death for the once noble and mighty Noldor.
Even the strongholds of Rivendell and Lothlórien, while pockets of Elvish eternity, are haunted with the mood of death and decay: by doom and the long defeat which will eventually intrude from outside. When Galdor asks Elrond during the Council, ‘… But have they [Imladris, the Havens, Lórien] the strength, have we the strength to withstand the Enemy, the coming of Sauron at the last, when all else is overthrown?’ Elrond replies ‘I have not the strength, neither have they…’ (FR, II, ii, 279).
That Elrond admits he doesn’t have the strength to hold off the coming intrusion and the doom further reflects Tolkien’s mood of the “shadow of despair” and “intense emotion of regret” in which the “worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt.” Galadriel further echoes Elrond,
‘Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.’ (FR, II, vii, 380)
There is an “ambiguous fate: which threatens disaster but may yield to courage and determination” (Gilbert 1992, 1) in Frodo’s quest. Galadriel stresses to Frodo that his courage and determination will decide the fate of the war with Sauron. Nevertheless, for the Elves there is still the atmosphere, mood, and tenor of no escape from the doom of the long defeat — even in Imladris and Lothlórien.
The immediate setting of Galadriel’s garden in Lothlórien emphasizes the context for the interlacing of spatial imagery and abstract themes of mood, coupled with concrete themes of past events in which the consequences of doom and banishment intersect with High Hope.
In Galadriel’s garden we are inundated with imagery which is in opposition to the emotional symbolism of coldness, darkness, death. It is, following Frye, Arcadian imagery of paradise and apocalyptic imagery of eternal stars.
Throughout the chapter (‘The Mirror of Galadriel’), is the eternal Evening Star: “The Evening Star had risen and was shining with white fire above the western woods” (ibid., 361). The context of the Evening Star also derives from the First Age when Elrond’s father, Eärendil, sailed in his ship Vingilot to Valinor with the Silmaril retrieved by Beren. His purpose was to sue for pity and assistance in the war against the Shadow from the Valar. The Valar then granted his request and set Eärendil in the heavens with the Silmaril as the Evening Star. Its purpose was to provide a symbol of “High Hope” to the denizens of Middle-earth. We are told the significance of Eärendil’s Silmaril explicitly in The Silmarillion (1999, 300-301)
Now when Vingilot was set to sail in the seas of heaven, it rose unlooked for, glittering and bright, and the people of Middle-earth beheld it from afar and wondered, and they took it for a sign, and called it Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope. And when this new Star was seen at Evening, Maedros spoke to Maglor his brother, and he said: ‘Surely that is a Silmaril that shines in the West?’
The Evening Star is therefore a symbol of High Hope, a light to dispel the encroaching darkness of Morgoth’s Shadow and herald the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age. Likewise, it is emphasized as a sign of High Hope on the eve of the War of the Ring.
The salient imagery is striking because it is not the focus of our attention which is, firstly, the characters and, secondly, the One Ring, but neither is it fully backgrounded. The Evening Star’s repetition in this scene implies a greater significance; otherwise the text may have simply stated that the Evening Star rose in the sky and left it at that. Instead we are reminded of hope, which is,
… as always, merely implicit; but once the two events [or themes] become simultaneously present in our minds, each acquires an added depth through the other and their interaction brings to the fore, as no other device could have done, the underlying tragic theme. (Vinaver 1971, 85)
The implicit theme of High Hope adds a depth and significance, which is woven into the current narrative and its setting. The intertextuality of Tolkien’s works, from where he may draw upon past events, adds another cyclic layer of which this is a prime example. The juxtaposition of Eärendil’s Silmaril and Sauron’s Eye in Galadriel’s garden provides repetitive heavenly imagery throughout the scene in the garden.
There is a dialectical element in that these oppositions require an implication, or need to contain a germ of, each other. The threat of the Shadow lends significance to the light. The Silmaril of heaven is still salient in the literal and figurative background as Frodo peers into the mirror and perceives The Eye; a trace of darkness in opposition to the Evening Star. The darkness is grounded, appropriately, closer to earth and the “death and decay” atmosphere. It seems to appear from somewhere below, out of the depths of an abyss: a contrast to the Evening Star’s dazzling brilliance.
At this moment Frodo is frightened and overwhelmed; he feels this quest is beyond his capabilities, and he freely and humbly offers Galadriel the One Ring, ‘You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel, … I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me’ (FR, II, vii, 380-81).
While acknowledging that Galadriel from The Silmarillion is a post-LotR development, the fact does not affect this argument and one may look at this scene from a Noldorin point of view. Here is a nobody from an insignificant village holding the fate of Arda literally in his hands and giving that fate freely to a rebel Noldorin princess who witnessed the Day before Days.
**Galadriel is, after all these ages, finally offered what the dark whispers of Melkor (now Morgoth) sparked and Fëanor (despite being her ‘unfriend’) kindled**
It seems, if Galadriel had possessed the Ring, this is exactly what she would have done – fulfil the Melkor-inspired dream. Tolkien (Letters, 332) writes “In any case Elrond or Galadriel would have proceeded in the policy now adopted by Sauron: they would have built up an empire with great and absolutely subservient generals and armies and engines of war, until they could challenge Sauron and destroy him by force.” This would be a wrongful desire to rule a realm in Middle-earth against the divine plan for the Eldar to return into the West.
The result would not be the overthrowing, or halting, the spread of the Shadow (MR, 311) per Fingolfian ideology (Gallant 2020b), but rather simply replacing the agents of that Shadow (the Eldar for Sauron). This is the test of Galadriel’s heart.
Frodo’s act of offering, although seemingly born out of terror rather than generosity, is not lost on Galadriel: she suddenly and clearly laughs, ‘[G]ently are you revenged for my testing your heart’ (FR, II, vii, 381; italics mine). The significance of Frodo’s humbling gesture must deeply sway the aristocratic Noldo from the heroic First Age: after all, “[H]umility is not seen as a manly virtue in Germanic tradition, as can be seen, for example, in Beowulf. Seeking fame on earth is virtuous instead” (Murphy 1995, 83).
Note that Frodo’s act is extremely important precisely because it is not a Germanic act: a Germanic hero would not have doubts that he is up to the task, he would not think that the task is too big for him, nor would he be frightened of Sauron in the mirror (consider, by contrast, Aragorn’s confrontation with Sauron in the palantír).
Although Frodo is the main protagonist in The Lord of the Rings it can’t be helped but noticed that he is acting as a helper agent in the structure of Galadriel’s story. That is, in the narrative of Galadriel’s and the Eldar’s wyrd. Frodo’s offer reveals to Galadriel that she must also succeed with an equally almost impossible task: to willingly choose to sacrifice herself (and her people), everything she has built and preserved, and refuse the One Ring. Nonetheless, this is an odd action on Frodo’s part, and may indicate a purpose behind such a spontaneous, and difficult, chance event. Providence, or ‘Authority’ in Tolkien’s words (Letters, 235), always acts in a manner that is veiled by a reasonable explanation (i.e. Frodo is too frightened to bear the Ring). Yet it always works in situations of critical significance and with only a hint that providence is working through disguise. Tolkien has continuously emphasized this by a motif threaded throughout the work (West 2003, 86): Frodo was meant to have the Ring, he just happened to have pity at the right moment. It works by chance, ‘if chance is what you call it,’ as Gandalf is fond of saying.
Therefore, it is not outside the internal rules of Tolkien’s sub-created Middle-earth for Frodo to also act as a helper-agent, on the behalf of providence (and providence has a habit of picking Hobbits as agents to work through), to help Galadriel choose wisely and reject temptation and a spiritual death. That the ‘mannish-Hobbit’ delivers Galadriel is not alien to Tolkien’s thought either, if we remember Finrod Felagund’s conversation with the Edain wise-woman Andreth
‘I was thinking that by the Second Children we might have been delivered from death for ever as we spoke of death being a division of the united, I thought in my heart of a death that is not so: but the ending together of both. For that is what lies before us, so far as our reason could see: the completion of Arda and its end, and therefore also of us the children of Arda: the end when all the long lives of the Elves shall be wholly in the past.’ (MR, 319, emphasis mine)
Finrod’s vision may be a foreshadowing of what is to come, but not with a noble and high mimetic hero, rather an ordinary and humble low mimetic hero.
Frodo’s spontaneous offer and the imagery of the Evening Star sets up the tension for Galadriel’s test of heart. Immediately prior to the temptation Eärendil is especially salient and embodied in the text from the spatial perspective of Galadriel. The Elves have a word for hope that is an expectation of something good, which is Amdir, literally ‘looking up’ (MR, 320). From a spatial perspective, Galadriel may look up at the Amdir represented by the Silmaril. The Silmaril shines from above as she spreads out her hand towards the east in a gesture of rejection and denial. The reader “can see things virtually from the perspective of the character … inside the text world, and construct a rich context by resolving deistic expressions from that viewpoint” (Stockwell 2002, 47; cf.Tsur 2003, 41-54).
From the perspective of Frodo, the Silmaril blends with a Ring of Power through an “as if” construction:
Its rays glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-Star had come down to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring in awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood” (FR, II, vii, 380 italics mine).
The weaving of Silmaril/Ring imagery on Galadriel’s finger as she stretches her hand toward the east in rejection and denial thematically reinforces the rejection of the wrongful desire / Ring of Power construal. The Silmaril, the sign of “High Hope,” is interlaced in the scene with the encroaching Shadow, doom, and the long defeat.
Yet, in this scene, Galadriel gives us a verbal cue when she says a very curious thing:
[T]he evil that was devised long ago works on in many ways, whether Sauron himself stands or falls’ (FR, II, vii, 381).
The Ring, of course, is symbiotic with Sauron. Sauron cannot exist without the Ring. If the Ring is destroyed and Sauron falls, what is the evil devised long ago that works on regardless of Sauron? The refusal is especially poignant when we consider what is intertextually backgrounded and interwoven into the scene:
the One Ring is a device that would allow Galadriel to actualise Fëanor’s Melkor-inspired words that at one time kindled her heart. Galadriel’s curious statement may invoke that “merely implicit” reminder, consisting of rebellion, the Oath and banishment as well as the Silmarils.
The moment has potentially tragic consequences and it seems to “move up to an Augenblick (or crucial moment) from which point the road to what might have been and the road to what will be can simultaneously be seen” (Frye 2000, 213). Tolkien (FR, II, vii, 381) captures this Augenblick thusly:
‘And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and Lightening! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!’
Much is happening here within a split second — which Cate Blanchett interprets in her pregnant pause between finishing the word ‘despair’ and the passing of the temptation/shadow, which Ms. Blanchett represents with wide and shocked eyes and a sort of a back-stumble. A lot of people did not like this scene, but I found it to be perfect and credit Cate Blanchett for that).
Galadriel is put to the test in that (metaphorical) moment of death and must choose with immediacy whether she becomes the ruler of all Middle-earth (In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen), or she sacrifices everything, including the “abnegation of pride and trust in her own powers” (Fisher 2007, 228) and the loss of all ‘Elvendom’. This adds another layer to the temptation and is doubly dangerous. Seen through the lens of the Legendarium, her sacrifice is tremendous. As with other characters, the semi-sentient One Ring deceitfully inspires visions of ultimate personal power tailored to the person it is trying to influence. If the Ring was able to tempt Sam with a vision of becoming an omnipotent gardener, it must surely sense Galadriel’s ancient desire to rule a kingdom of her own, perhaps to rule Elvendom and more. Therefore, the Ring made the attempt:
In the ‘Mirror of Galadriel’, I 381, it appears that Galadriel conceived of herself as capable of wielding the Ring and supplanting the Dark Lord. If so, so also were the other guardians of the Three, especially Elrond. But this is another matter. It was part of the essential deceit of the Ring to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power. But this the Great had well considered and had rejected, as is seen in Elrond’s words at the Council. Galadriel’s rejection of the temptation was founded upon previous thought and resolve (Letters, 332).
Spatial imagery continues its work during the temptation as Galadriel lifts her arms up, and great light illuminates her while leaving all else dark. Her outburst is one of the emotional symbolisms associated with hell “craving sensuous form for its expression” and engaging in ambiguity and oppositions (‘terrible as the Morning and the Night’, ‘Dreadful as the Storm and Lightening’, ‘stronger’ than earthly ‘foundations’, ‘ love me and despair!’ (cf. Bodkin 1934, 53-54)). This is immediately followed by an emotional release resulting in: ’shrunken’, ‘slender’, ‘gentle voice’, ‘soft and sad’. There is an intense internal struggle as Galadriel’s reaction shows, but her endurance, resistance, and resolve to choose wisely in the end won out (according to Tolkien in his letter above). Of her own free will she chooses sacrifice and is humbled:
Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! She was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.
‘I pass the test,’ she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.’ (FR, II, vii, 381).
This is the moment of eucatastrophe. Her choice, clearly, is “a transition toward reintegration and life-renewal” (Bodkin 1934, 54) but it is also in direct opposition to Fëanor’s choice to deny Yavanna that invoked the wyrd upon the Noldor in the first place. Her decision may still be motivated by the Fingolfian ideology of constraining the Shadow, but Galadriel realizes that the Eldar remaining in Middle-earth is not the summum bonum. It is only their departure that attains the Alfredian ‘corrective action’ of wyrd, bringing the universe (or at least the fate of the Noldor) back into alignment with the divine plan.
Galadriel has spiritually won and the Eldar will all leave Middle-earth and reintegrate with their brethren on the Lonely Isle. There, their lives will be renewed rather than the slow, metaphorical death of Elvish fading in Middle-earth. It is the eucatastrophe of the Eldar.
§Next week Part II§
Works Cited
Ando, Clifford. 2000. Imperial Ideology and the Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Benson, Larry D. 1967. "The Pagan Coloring of Beowulf." In Old English Poetry, edited by Robert P. Creed, 193-213. Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press.
Bjork, Robert E. 2002. "Sundor æt Rune: The Voluntary Exile of the Wanderer." In Old English Literature, edited by R. M. Liuzza, 315-27. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bodkin, Maud. 1934. Archetypical Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination. London: Oxford University Press. Reprint, 1974. 1934.
Chance, Jane. 2004. "'The Lord of the Rings': Tolkien's Epic " In Understanding the Lord of the Rings, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo, 195-232. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Clark Hall, J. R. 2007. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 4th ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1894.
Davenport, Tony. 2004. Medieval Narrative: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dickerson, Matthew. 2003. Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.
Dobbie, Elliott Van Kirk, ed. 1942. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. New York: Columbia University Press.
Flieger, Verlyn. 2009. "The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 6: 151-181.
Frakes, Jerold C. 1988. The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle Ages: The Boethian Tradition. Edited by Albert Zimmermann. Vol. 23 Studien un Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Frye, Northrop. 2000. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reprint, 2000. 1957.
Gallant, Richard Z. 2019. "The Dance of Authority in Arda: Wyrd, Fate and Providence in the Elder Days of Middle-earth." (paper presented at the 16th Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft Konferenz “Power and Authority in Tolkien’s Work”, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, October 11, 2019).
---. 2020a. "Elessar Telcontar Magnus, Rex Pater Gondor, Restitutor Imperii." Journal of Tolkien Research 9 (2). Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol9/iss2/1.
---. 2020b. "The Noldorization of the Edain: The Roman-Germani Paradigm for Tolkien’s Noldor and Edain in Tolkien’s Migration Era." In Tolkien and the Classical World, edited by Hamish Williams, In Cormarë Series 43, 305-327. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers.
---. 2020c. "The ‘Wyrdwrīteras’ of Elvish History: Northern Courage, Historical Bias, and Literary Artifact as Illustrative Narrative." Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoetic Literature38 (2 (#136)): 25-44. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol38/iss2/2.
---. 2021, forthcoming. "The Dance of Authority in Arda: Wyrd, Fate and Providence in the Elder Days of Middle-earth." Hither Shore.
Gilbert, Anthoney J. 1992. "The Ambiguity of Fate and Narrative Form in some Germanic Poetry." The Yearbbok of English Studies 22, no. Medieval Narrative Special Number (1992): 1-16.
Greenfield, Stanley B. 1972. A Critical History of Old English Literature. New York: New York University Press.
Hatto, A.T., ed. 1980. Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry. 2 vols. Vol. 1 The Traditions. London: The Modern Humanities Research Association.
Haug, Walter. 2006. Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: The German tradition, 800-1300, in its European Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Irvine, Susan and Malcom R. Godden, ed. 2012. The Old English Boethius: With Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associated with King Alfred. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Leitch, Vincent B., ed. 2001. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lewis, C. S. 1954. "Edmund Spenser." In Major British Writers, edited by G. B. Harrison, 91-181. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Meletinsky, Eleazar M. 2000. The Poetics of Myth. Translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexander Sadetsky. New York: Routledge.
Murphy, G. Ronald. 1995. The Saxon Saviour: Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Orchard, Andy. 2003. A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Ovid. 2004. Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation. Translated by David Raeburn. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books.
Payne, F. Anne. 1974. "Three Aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf." In Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, edited by Jr. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, 15-35. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Scanlon, Larry. 1994. Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schweicher, Eric. 1992. "Aspects of the Fall in The Silmarillion." In Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen Goodknight, 167-171. Altadena: The Mythopoeic Press.
Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Shippey, Tom. 2002. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Stanley, Eric Gerald 2000. Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past: The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: an Introduction. London: Routledge. Reprint, 2007.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1965a. The Fellowship of the Ring. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
---. 1965b. The Return of the King. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
---. 1965c. The Two Towers. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
---. 1998. Unfinished Tales. edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Harper Collins.
---. 1999. The Silmarillion. edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Harper Collins. Reprint, 1999. 1979.
---. 2002. Morgoth’s Ring. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. 12 vols. Vol. 10. Vol. 3 The History of Middle-earth. London: Harper Collins.
---. 2006a. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 5-48. London: Harper Collins. Original edition, 1983.
---. 2006b. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: Harper Collins. 1981.
Treharne, Elaine, ed. 2006. Old and Middle English c. 890—c. 1400: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell.
Tsur, Reuven. 2003. "Deixis and Abstractions." In Cognitive Poetics in Practice, edited by Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, 41-54. London: Routledge.
Vanderbeke, Dirk and Allen Turner. 2012. "The One or the Many? Authorship, Voice and Corpus." In Sub-creating Middle-earth: Constructions of Authorship and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Judith Klinger, In Cormarë Series 27, 1-20. Jena: Walking Tree Publishers.
Vinaver, Eugène. 1971. The Rise of Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
West, Richard C. 2003. "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings." In A Tolkien Compass, edited by Jared Lobdell, 75-91. Chicago: Open Court.
The Series thus far:
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE