The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 708-715

I once had the privilege of visiting Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Last Supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Most visitors are only allowed to remain for fifteen minutes before they have to leave and so I could not spend the time that I would have liked in its presence. And while I was there I learned that the master would sometimes spend an entire day just looking at what he was creating before making a choice of what he should do next.

As I display this I realise how far short this image falls of the wonder of da Vinci’s masterpiece.

Gimli would have understood him. Or at least I might say that it would have been the Gimli who had been in the presence of Galadriel in Lothlórien. Indeed as Gimli speaks to Legolas of what he has seen in the caves at Helm’s Deep he uses but one simile in his description. He speaks of how light glows through marble “translucent as the living hands of Galadriel.” For Gimli her beauty alone in all his life’s experience is sufficient to liken and enhance the wonder that he has just seen.

Gimli and Legolas have just been through a terrible battle and when Gimli first emerges from the caves in company with Éomer and Gamling and their men their first thoughts are to take pleasure in the fact that they are both still alive making light of this as soldiers often do. Then it is time for rest and Gimli makes no mention of the experience that will eventually give him his life’s work until he and Legolas are on their way in Théoden’s company to parley with Saruman in Isengard. Their journey begins their having to pass through the wood of Huorns who surround them and while Gimli is afraid Legolas is filled with wonder and announces to his friend that when the war is over he wishes to visit the remote dales of Fangorn in which the Huorns live.

At this Gimli speaks at last.

“There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dream-like forms; they spring up from from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come.”

Legolas is deeply moved by Gimli’s words. “I have never heard you speak like this before,” he tells him. And he promises his friend that if they come safely through the perils that lie ahead that he will go with Gimli to see the caves. As long as Gimli is willing to go with him into the depths of Fangorn.

There are those who have pondered the Grail myth that had such a hold upon the medieval European imagination and which seems to be speaking to us once more in this time who discern that there are two distinct experiences of the Holy Grail in the hero’s journey. The first that often comes in the first part of life awakens longing but does not transform. The second comes later in life when the hero has been through much suffering and sorrow and is now ready to see the Grail in a way that transforms them. We do not know what experiences Gimli might have had of truth, beauty and goodness in his early years although surely his capacity to perceive the transcendent beauty of the caves must have been formed in part by such early experiences. But we do know that when he arrived in Lothlórien he had just been through Moria, through Khazad-dûm, that had held such meaning for him as for all dwarves, and had found it to be a place of darkness. It was Galadriel’s welcome that reawakened love within him and which prepared him for the caves. Now he is able to see their beauty and, as Galadriel foretold, not wish to possess and exploit them but to work with them as an artist might work with stone, finding within it the form that always dwelt there.

Is it merely coincidence that Tolkien gave what is possibly the most beautiful speech in The Lord of the Rings to a Dwarf, one of the most problematic of all his sub-creations? I would argue not. At their worst dwarves display some of the meanest characteristics of the human soul, only capable of looking at anything with a view to profit from it. Moria was destroyed because of the awakening of the Balrog through greedy delving after mithril. The Caves of Aglarond will not be treated in this fashion. Gimli and his people will tend them as Leonardo da Vinci tended his masterpiece. Perhaps in this manner they point a way to us to be truly human.