Re-reading Tolkien: Timeless
Where I live, there's a particularly lovely time every autumn when the leaves have turned completely and just begun to fall. The world is full of color: golden leaves overhead, golden leaves underfoot. Possibly I'm about to make an embarrassing fannish confession that will exclude me from polite company forever, but in those few days I find myself, without meaning to, imagining that ooooh, this place is Lórien, I'm there!
This moment of fannish transport may seem particularly unlikely, since the "this place" is in my case usually a city park. The air echoes not with the music of sweet Nimrodel, but with the music of Justin Timberlake booming out of some passing SUV. So, okay, I've never been to Lórien, but it's funny how easily Lórien can be evoked, and how much it looks like the most fleeting, perfect moments of autumn.
Autumn? My Inner Fannish Purist carps at this. It is not autumn in Lórien when the Fellowship is there: it's the dead of winter. And Lórien is supposedly at its most beautiful, and most golden, in the spring, when the mallorns' golden flowers are in bloom and their golden leaves have fallen.
For a long time my Inner Purist spoiled my annual Lórien vacations by accusing me of inexactitude, which, when you are trying to have a Vision, completely messes with your otherworldly groove. Now I'm a little more inclined to stifle my Inner Purist and wonder if this comparison to autumn isn't exactly what Tolkien meant to evoke. On the one hand, Lórien is very strange: the leaves stay on all winter, and the place is perpetually golden. On other hand, Lórien is very familiar: the net effect of its strangeness is to produce a place that looks like autumn all the time.
Maybe time is the key word here, and maybe time is the reason why Lórien as Tolkien describes it isn't just beautiful, but uncanny and just a little bit scary. Here is this place where a moment of beauty that is supposed to last for a few days at most has become perpetual. Lórien is weirdly and very visibly suspended from the rhythms of the natural world that usually mark the passage of time. It's the sort of place some incredibly powerful enchantress might create if she were to take the essence of the world's beauty and lull it into a sleep where it cannot age, or die, or change.
Lovely, isn't it? Lovely, and thoroughly unnatural, and among the many changes in Middle Earth that Frodo's journey brings about, perhaps the most heartbreakingly inevitable is the beginning of the end of Lórien. Tolkien keeps us there for three whole chapters, bringing the pacing of the epic to a screeching halt, but this prolonged, hushed pause is a crucial turning point in the story not just of the Ring but of life on Middle Earth in general. In these chapters, Galadriel decides that she must surrender the power that has sustained Lórien in its bubble of timeless beauty, and she finds the courage to do something that Frodo will eventually have to do, or at least try to do.
Presented with the prospect of absolute power, Galadriel chooses another path -- allowing change to happen, particularly change that excludes her wishes and desires. "Middle earth has been saved," Frodo will eventually say, "but not for me." The same is true of Galadriel. Her power to preserve is wondrous, but it's her long, sad, graceful surrender -- complete with its giving of gifts to those who will survive her -- that provides the model of virtuous action that Frodo will eventually follow.
Power and knowledge
To understand the stakes here it will help to think a little more deeply about just what kind of power Galadriel has. We are more or less explicitly told that her power has two components: the power to preserve, and the power to know. Let's take preservation first, since Lórien's unnaturally prolonged beauty is where I started. Preservation is not just about Lórien looking like autumn. Tolkien clearly does not want us to miss the point that time has been suspended in Lórien: this quality of the world keeps coming up. The Company doesn't experience time the way they do in the outside world: their stay in Caras Galadon feels like a few days but actually lasts a month. And they are overwhelmingly conscious that Lórien is a place where the past isn't just remembered, as it is in Rivendell, but alive: Frodo feels as if " he had stepped across a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more." Think about that: the past being alive, almost painfully so, for the past isn't just present but restored somehow to all the wonder of the new: "He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful."
Gulp. Lovely, isn't it? -- but a bit intimidating as well. You don't just go to Lórien, Lórien happens to you. Galadriel's power does not just preserve physical objects but a way of perceiving them: it's a world in which one of the saddest effects of time -- the banality of the familiar -- doesn't exist. Preservation of the past wouldn't be very interesting if the past seemed old and stale, like a dusty forgotten artefact hidden away on a back shelf in a museum. But Galadriel's preservation of the past is fascinating and mystical and tranformative because our sense of time is annihilated completely, and we perceive things in their essences, outside of the flow of change. Perhaps this is what Sam means when he says he feels like he's "inside a song." The world, as seen in Lórien, has the visceral quality of lived experience, the mythic resonance of a legend, and the joy of discovery, all at the same moment.
Lórien is, in other words, a way of knowing things, knowing them completely and absolutely in all the ways that it's possible to know them, ways that our experience of time usually disjoins: the wisdom of long experience, the freshness of the new. And of course knowledge is the way that Galadriel describes her own power: "For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail, but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be." Two aspects of this description interest me: first, Galadriel's knowledge is oddly atemporal -- when Frodo and Sam see visions in her mirror, the visions are all clear and in some sense true, but they're not temporally marked: the Mirror does not distinguish between was and is and might be. Second, her knowledge is divorced from action: the deep, complete understanding she seeks is not instrumental to anything else. She can help people understand, and then . . . and then nothing. That's it.
Passing the test
The two episodes in which Galadriel exercises her power on the Fellowship work just like that: she tests their wills, yes, but the tests come in the form of showing them something about themselves. They're not just tests: they're a means of self-knowledge. When she first meets the Fellowship, she presents each of them with a choice between abandoning the quest and something they greatly desire. As a method of interrogation, this is both weirdly insightful -- Galadriel instantly knows them well enough to know what they desire -- and weirdly informative. It's as if Galadriel is presenting them with one of those hypothetical philosophical conundrums that help you understand your own values (would you save a child or the Mona Lisa from a fire? would you flip a switch to redirect a train from a track where it will run over one person you love to a track where it will run over five murderers instead?) The scenarios themselves are painfully artificial; they can't fit into the world as we normally experience it. They're atemporal: they select possible moments that resonate with us emotionally and pit them against each other, in defiance of probability, perhaps, but in the service of discovering some vital inner truth.
I think the Mirror of Galadriel is best understood as a more thorough version of this kind of pursuit of knowledge; the Mirror provides that knowledge of essences you get when you strip time away. Both Frodo and Sam are presented with temporally disparate moments that encapsulate for them the central ethical dilemma of their existence. Sam's visions fall into two categories: visions of Frodo in peril in Mordor, and visions of the Shire being destroyed. Frodo and the Shire, the poles of Sam's universe. But the news about the Shire should not, Galadriel warns, guide Sam's actions. "You did not wish to go home without your master before you looked in the Mirror, and yet you knew that evil things might well be happening in the Shire," she points out. Her Mirror does not really change Sam's understanding of his dilemma, but gives that understanding all the painful sharpness and clarity of a fully lived and realized experience. And then . . . nothing. Sam must do with this knowledge what he will.
Similarly, Frodo's visions in the Mirror vividly present to him the choices he must make. He sees visions of his three most important mentors: Gandalf, Bilbo, and Aragorn -- but all of them are either difficult to recognize or unavailable or both. Frodo isn't sure whether the white wizard he sees is Gandalf or Saruman, or whether the vision represents the present or the past. Bilbo is fretting in his study, loving but powerless; the vision of Aragorn isn't something Frodo can recognize at the time, but on the reread it's clear that yes, this is Aragorn at the moment when he arrives at the last possible moment to save the day -- but he's not rescuing Frodo, he's rescuing Minas Tirith.
So Frodo's vision is an in important sense showing him the extent of his loneliness: his time of mentoring is past. He must now act alone as he vacillates between the pull of two competing impulses: the Sea and the Eye, both of which appear in the vision as mysterious forces, simultaneously terrifying and weirdly compelling. Again, none of this tells Frodo anything he didn't already have available to him logically, but as with Sam, Galadriel's mirror reduces Frodo's entire story to its essence and creates it for him as visceral experience. Before, Frodo could think about his life: now he knows it.
But turn about is fair play. Frodo's immediate response to this knowledge is enormously encouraging: he is prepared to give up the Ring to Galadriel. When faced with the essence of his dilemma, he shows what he truly is -- the ideal Ringbearer, someone who would be willing to surrender the Ring if he could do so responsibly. And Frodo's action flips Galdriel's power to make things known back upon herself. She is the one now faced with a philosophical conundrum made real; she has long thought of what she would do if faced with this choice, but now the exercise of her power has created a situation in which she has to make the choice for real. Absolute knowledge has brought absolute power within her grasp.
Fortunately Galadriel, like Frodo, discovers her true essence when she is forced to confront herself in this vivid, visceral way. "I pass the test," she says. " I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel." The last phrase particularly intrigues me: on one level, Galadriel is saying she won't become a dark queen, thank you. But on another level she's acknowledging that she just faced a choice between preserving Lórien and preserving what she is. The power of her Elven ring had previously allowed her to have everything: power, if a limited power, and knowledge of the way things truly are. But when Frodo offered her the One Ring, the knowledge she was forced to confront was the knowledge of her own limitations. She can only remain Galadriel if she accepts diminishment as well.
Gifts and the dismantling of the self
And because she chooses to remain Galadriel, we see the work of her power -- Lórien -- change before our eyes. The first two Lórien chapters very elaborately described it as a place where the past was not a memory, but alive. The last Lórien chapter is devoted to turning Lórien into a memory; we get long songs, feasting, and most especially the giving of gifts "in memory of Lothlórien." Gift-giving has a long tradition in epic depictions of great kings and queens, but there's a Galadriel-specific resonance to many of these gifts, which, like Frodo's gifts to Sam at the end of LotR, are not just about munificence but about sacrifice, a dismantling and passing on of the self.
Frodo's gift, the Phial of Galadriel, is most obviously like a bit of portable Galadriel in a bottle: from now on Frodo will carry with him the light of perception that Shelob will be unable to bear. But the other major gifts are like bits of Galadriel as well, ways of remembering her and recreating her appropriate to each of the peoples who will remain in Middle-earth. Gimli, of course, gets the lock of hair he asked for: he will set it in imperishable crystal as an heirloom of his house, transforming a part of Galadriel's body from something elvish to something dwarvish, from an organic, living thing to a made thing. Sam gets a hobbity version of Galadriel: the earth of Lórien that will make the Shire a bit more like Lórien than any other place on earth. I like the touch of the rune on the box; G for Galadriel, which could also, she says, stand for garden in Sam's language. Sam is in some sense getting Galadriel, or the aspect of her that hobbits can best love and understand.
Aragorn's gifts are going to immerse us in some embarrassingly Freudian imagery (as if Sam's seed wasn't enough), which I shall just mention and quickly move on: he gets a sheath for his sword, and he also gets a token that he's going to marry Arwen. Um, sheath, Arwen -- oh well: once again Galadriel is giving away a part of herself, in this case the biological continuity that from now on will be the province of Men.
Her wisdom, her body, her home, the child of the daughter she has lost: Galadriel surrenders them all, and the power of that surrender is the last bit of knowledge she can pass on. "You are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you." That's Frodo's line, but Galadriel was the light in dark places that showed him the way.
This moment of fannish transport may seem particularly unlikely, since the "this place" is in my case usually a city park. The air echoes not with the music of sweet Nimrodel, but with the music of Justin Timberlake booming out of some passing SUV. So, okay, I've never been to Lórien, but it's funny how easily Lórien can be evoked, and how much it looks like the most fleeting, perfect moments of autumn.
Autumn? My Inner Fannish Purist carps at this. It is not autumn in Lórien when the Fellowship is there: it's the dead of winter. And Lórien is supposedly at its most beautiful, and most golden, in the spring, when the mallorns' golden flowers are in bloom and their golden leaves have fallen.
For a long time my Inner Purist spoiled my annual Lórien vacations by accusing me of inexactitude, which, when you are trying to have a Vision, completely messes with your otherworldly groove. Now I'm a little more inclined to stifle my Inner Purist and wonder if this comparison to autumn isn't exactly what Tolkien meant to evoke. On the one hand, Lórien is very strange: the leaves stay on all winter, and the place is perpetually golden. On other hand, Lórien is very familiar: the net effect of its strangeness is to produce a place that looks like autumn all the time.
Maybe time is the key word here, and maybe time is the reason why Lórien as Tolkien describes it isn't just beautiful, but uncanny and just a little bit scary. Here is this place where a moment of beauty that is supposed to last for a few days at most has become perpetual. Lórien is weirdly and very visibly suspended from the rhythms of the natural world that usually mark the passage of time. It's the sort of place some incredibly powerful enchantress might create if she were to take the essence of the world's beauty and lull it into a sleep where it cannot age, or die, or change.
Lovely, isn't it? Lovely, and thoroughly unnatural, and among the many changes in Middle Earth that Frodo's journey brings about, perhaps the most heartbreakingly inevitable is the beginning of the end of Lórien. Tolkien keeps us there for three whole chapters, bringing the pacing of the epic to a screeching halt, but this prolonged, hushed pause is a crucial turning point in the story not just of the Ring but of life on Middle Earth in general. In these chapters, Galadriel decides that she must surrender the power that has sustained Lórien in its bubble of timeless beauty, and she finds the courage to do something that Frodo will eventually have to do, or at least try to do.
Presented with the prospect of absolute power, Galadriel chooses another path -- allowing change to happen, particularly change that excludes her wishes and desires. "Middle earth has been saved," Frodo will eventually say, "but not for me." The same is true of Galadriel. Her power to preserve is wondrous, but it's her long, sad, graceful surrender -- complete with its giving of gifts to those who will survive her -- that provides the model of virtuous action that Frodo will eventually follow.
Power and knowledge
To understand the stakes here it will help to think a little more deeply about just what kind of power Galadriel has. We are more or less explicitly told that her power has two components: the power to preserve, and the power to know. Let's take preservation first, since Lórien's unnaturally prolonged beauty is where I started. Preservation is not just about Lórien looking like autumn. Tolkien clearly does not want us to miss the point that time has been suspended in Lórien: this quality of the world keeps coming up. The Company doesn't experience time the way they do in the outside world: their stay in Caras Galadon feels like a few days but actually lasts a month. And they are overwhelmingly conscious that Lórien is a place where the past isn't just remembered, as it is in Rivendell, but alive: Frodo feels as if " he had stepped across a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more." Think about that: the past being alive, almost painfully so, for the past isn't just present but restored somehow to all the wonder of the new: "He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful."
Gulp. Lovely, isn't it? -- but a bit intimidating as well. You don't just go to Lórien, Lórien happens to you. Galadriel's power does not just preserve physical objects but a way of perceiving them: it's a world in which one of the saddest effects of time -- the banality of the familiar -- doesn't exist. Preservation of the past wouldn't be very interesting if the past seemed old and stale, like a dusty forgotten artefact hidden away on a back shelf in a museum. But Galadriel's preservation of the past is fascinating and mystical and tranformative because our sense of time is annihilated completely, and we perceive things in their essences, outside of the flow of change. Perhaps this is what Sam means when he says he feels like he's "inside a song." The world, as seen in Lórien, has the visceral quality of lived experience, the mythic resonance of a legend, and the joy of discovery, all at the same moment.
Lórien is, in other words, a way of knowing things, knowing them completely and absolutely in all the ways that it's possible to know them, ways that our experience of time usually disjoins: the wisdom of long experience, the freshness of the new. And of course knowledge is the way that Galadriel describes her own power: "For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail, but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be." Two aspects of this description interest me: first, Galadriel's knowledge is oddly atemporal -- when Frodo and Sam see visions in her mirror, the visions are all clear and in some sense true, but they're not temporally marked: the Mirror does not distinguish between was and is and might be. Second, her knowledge is divorced from action: the deep, complete understanding she seeks is not instrumental to anything else. She can help people understand, and then . . . and then nothing. That's it.
Passing the test
The two episodes in which Galadriel exercises her power on the Fellowship work just like that: she tests their wills, yes, but the tests come in the form of showing them something about themselves. They're not just tests: they're a means of self-knowledge. When she first meets the Fellowship, she presents each of them with a choice between abandoning the quest and something they greatly desire. As a method of interrogation, this is both weirdly insightful -- Galadriel instantly knows them well enough to know what they desire -- and weirdly informative. It's as if Galadriel is presenting them with one of those hypothetical philosophical conundrums that help you understand your own values (would you save a child or the Mona Lisa from a fire? would you flip a switch to redirect a train from a track where it will run over one person you love to a track where it will run over five murderers instead?) The scenarios themselves are painfully artificial; they can't fit into the world as we normally experience it. They're atemporal: they select possible moments that resonate with us emotionally and pit them against each other, in defiance of probability, perhaps, but in the service of discovering some vital inner truth.
I think the Mirror of Galadriel is best understood as a more thorough version of this kind of pursuit of knowledge; the Mirror provides that knowledge of essences you get when you strip time away. Both Frodo and Sam are presented with temporally disparate moments that encapsulate for them the central ethical dilemma of their existence. Sam's visions fall into two categories: visions of Frodo in peril in Mordor, and visions of the Shire being destroyed. Frodo and the Shire, the poles of Sam's universe. But the news about the Shire should not, Galadriel warns, guide Sam's actions. "You did not wish to go home without your master before you looked in the Mirror, and yet you knew that evil things might well be happening in the Shire," she points out. Her Mirror does not really change Sam's understanding of his dilemma, but gives that understanding all the painful sharpness and clarity of a fully lived and realized experience. And then . . . nothing. Sam must do with this knowledge what he will.
Similarly, Frodo's visions in the Mirror vividly present to him the choices he must make. He sees visions of his three most important mentors: Gandalf, Bilbo, and Aragorn -- but all of them are either difficult to recognize or unavailable or both. Frodo isn't sure whether the white wizard he sees is Gandalf or Saruman, or whether the vision represents the present or the past. Bilbo is fretting in his study, loving but powerless; the vision of Aragorn isn't something Frodo can recognize at the time, but on the reread it's clear that yes, this is Aragorn at the moment when he arrives at the last possible moment to save the day -- but he's not rescuing Frodo, he's rescuing Minas Tirith.
So Frodo's vision is an in important sense showing him the extent of his loneliness: his time of mentoring is past. He must now act alone as he vacillates between the pull of two competing impulses: the Sea and the Eye, both of which appear in the vision as mysterious forces, simultaneously terrifying and weirdly compelling. Again, none of this tells Frodo anything he didn't already have available to him logically, but as with Sam, Galadriel's mirror reduces Frodo's entire story to its essence and creates it for him as visceral experience. Before, Frodo could think about his life: now he knows it.
But turn about is fair play. Frodo's immediate response to this knowledge is enormously encouraging: he is prepared to give up the Ring to Galadriel. When faced with the essence of his dilemma, he shows what he truly is -- the ideal Ringbearer, someone who would be willing to surrender the Ring if he could do so responsibly. And Frodo's action flips Galdriel's power to make things known back upon herself. She is the one now faced with a philosophical conundrum made real; she has long thought of what she would do if faced with this choice, but now the exercise of her power has created a situation in which she has to make the choice for real. Absolute knowledge has brought absolute power within her grasp.
Fortunately Galadriel, like Frodo, discovers her true essence when she is forced to confront herself in this vivid, visceral way. "I pass the test," she says. " I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel." The last phrase particularly intrigues me: on one level, Galadriel is saying she won't become a dark queen, thank you. But on another level she's acknowledging that she just faced a choice between preserving Lórien and preserving what she is. The power of her Elven ring had previously allowed her to have everything: power, if a limited power, and knowledge of the way things truly are. But when Frodo offered her the One Ring, the knowledge she was forced to confront was the knowledge of her own limitations. She can only remain Galadriel if she accepts diminishment as well.
Gifts and the dismantling of the self
And because she chooses to remain Galadriel, we see the work of her power -- Lórien -- change before our eyes. The first two Lórien chapters very elaborately described it as a place where the past was not a memory, but alive. The last Lórien chapter is devoted to turning Lórien into a memory; we get long songs, feasting, and most especially the giving of gifts "in memory of Lothlórien." Gift-giving has a long tradition in epic depictions of great kings and queens, but there's a Galadriel-specific resonance to many of these gifts, which, like Frodo's gifts to Sam at the end of LotR, are not just about munificence but about sacrifice, a dismantling and passing on of the self.
Frodo's gift, the Phial of Galadriel, is most obviously like a bit of portable Galadriel in a bottle: from now on Frodo will carry with him the light of perception that Shelob will be unable to bear. But the other major gifts are like bits of Galadriel as well, ways of remembering her and recreating her appropriate to each of the peoples who will remain in Middle-earth. Gimli, of course, gets the lock of hair he asked for: he will set it in imperishable crystal as an heirloom of his house, transforming a part of Galadriel's body from something elvish to something dwarvish, from an organic, living thing to a made thing. Sam gets a hobbity version of Galadriel: the earth of Lórien that will make the Shire a bit more like Lórien than any other place on earth. I like the touch of the rune on the box; G for Galadriel, which could also, she says, stand for garden in Sam's language. Sam is in some sense getting Galadriel, or the aspect of her that hobbits can best love and understand.
Aragorn's gifts are going to immerse us in some embarrassingly Freudian imagery (as if Sam's seed wasn't enough), which I shall just mention and quickly move on: he gets a sheath for his sword, and he also gets a token that he's going to marry Arwen. Um, sheath, Arwen -- oh well: once again Galadriel is giving away a part of herself, in this case the biological continuity that from now on will be the province of Men.
Her wisdom, her body, her home, the child of the daughter she has lost: Galadriel surrenders them all, and the power of that surrender is the last bit of knowledge she can pass on. "You are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you." That's Frodo's line, but Galadriel was the light in dark places that showed him the way.