The Mirror of Galadriel

“The Eye: That Horrible Growing Sense of a Hostile Will That Strove With Great Power to Pierce All Shadows of Cloud, and Earth and Flesh and to See You.” The Wisdom and Power of Sauron and The Frailty of Frodo.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 822-826

When I chose to give my blog the title, Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings, it was not immediately clear to me that I would need to reflect on different and even competing kinds of wisdom and that not all of these would be life giving. St Paul understood this sense of competing wisdoms that I was slower to grasp when he wrote to the Corinthian church, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength”. In such a world of competing wisdoms one form might indeed appear to be foolishness to the other.

As Frodo begins to draw nearer to Mordor, having crossed the Dead Marshes with the aid of Gollum, he becomes increasingly aware of a malignant power that he understands as an Eye.

“With every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked.”

Frodo called this sense of malignant power, “the Eye”, and with this we are given a sense of his inner life at this stage of his story. Of course, he first heard that name for the power from Galadriel when he offered the Ring to her in Lothlórien. And both of them shared the same experience; that of striving against a power that wanted to break into their minds and to see them.

This desire to “see” is far more than a mere exercise in surveillance. It is not Frodo and Galadriel’s shopping habits that Sauron wishes to see, or their political opinions. Sauron wants to have their innermost essence, their very reality, laid bare before him. “He gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”

That word, gropes, denotes the lust that lies at the heart of Sauron’s wisdom and a pornographic stripping away of every barrier that lies between his gaze and the object of his desire. Frodo feels this too. “The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a horrible will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the walls were become that still warded it off.”

Sauron wants to “see” and to control. It is this desire that drove his ambition to create the Ring during the Second Age. The Ring is a technology of control. The ability to control not only the actions of others but their very wills and first of all it seeks to know that will. Even from an acquaintance with the Ring that has been very brief Frodo begins to understand this. He shows this understanding to Galadriel when he says to her: “I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?” The very asking of the question displays within Frodo a desire to see as Sauron desires it.

Galadriel understands this too and understands that with this desire must come the power to dominate others and it is this power that Sauron has trained through many ages and it is this that makes him different from his fellow Maia, Gandalf. Sauron and Gandalf belong to the same order of heavenly being created by Ilúvatar and with the same essential powers but Sauron has dedicated his power towards one purpose and that is domination.

And this brings us back to that quotation from St Paul with which I began this reflection. Paul distinguishes human and divine wisdom and power. For us wisdom tends to be related to power, to our desire to achieve mastery over all things, to eliminate risk and uncertainty as far as is possible, essentially to make of the cosmos a machine that is entirely predictable and entirely under our control. I say our but as Gandalf pointed out to Saruman who shares this desire, ultimately only one will can achieve this power and until that moment comes we all live in a reality which is an endless struggle to be that totally knowing,dominating and controlling will. Gandalf, and I would add, St Paul as well, understand a very different kind of wisdom that does not want to dominate in this sense but wishes to see in order to delight in the one that is seen. And in order to achieve this kind of seeing there has first to be a casting away of the desire and the means to achieve domination and this is what Frodo is doing. He is trying to cast away the Ring in such a way that no-one will ever be able to use it again.

The Divine Foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom.

“He is in Great Fear, Not Knowing What Mighty One May Suddenly Appear, Wielding the Ring”. Gandalf Speaks of Sauron’s Worldview.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 646-652

“Will you not open your mind more clearly to me?” Aragorn asks of Gandalf and so begins a situation room briefing from the one who has a better understanding of the big picture in Middle-earth than, perhaps, anyone in the story.

“The Enemy, of course, has long known that the Ring is abroad, and that it is borne by a hobbit. He knows now the number of our company that set out from Rivendell and the kind of each one of us. But he does not yet perceive our purpose clearly.”

Sauron does not perceive the purpose of his enemies at this point of the story, nor will he do so until the very end when Frodo claims the Ring within Mount Doom itself. And at that point we learn that “the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare”. But at this point it is all too late.

But why did the Dark Lord not even consider that it might be possible that his enemies would seek to destroy the Ring? Gandalf answers this question quite simply.

“He is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream.”

It is a vital insight within The Lord of the Rings that goodness can understand evil because goodness has had to face and to overcome all that evil has to offer while evil understands nothing of goodness merely regarding it as a weak form of itself. So it was that when Frodo offered the Ring to Galadriel she replies by saying, “I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer. For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands”.

In order to understand goodness truly we need to think about those years of great desire and the slow formation of a character of adamant that took place during that time. Perhaps there were times within those years when Galadriel was tempted to the very limits of her endurance, perhaps as she watched the slow decay of all things around her and the rise of darkness close by her home with the Balrog in Moria and the Necromancer in Dol Guldur. Saruman could see these things too and he also desired the power that the Ring could give in order to overcome them. But while within the heart of Galadriel the desire for power lived alongside a longing to preserve beauty, goodness and truth, no such struggle took place within the heart of Saruman. He came to see the world merely in terms of strength and weakness and assumed that either Galadriel, Gandalf and Elrond were weak or ineffective or that they were secret competitors, merely hiding their desire behind a cloak of beneficence.

And what was true about Saruman was most certainly true about Sauron. Galadriel put this in these words:

“I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”

This is why Sauron is in great fear. He assumes that as the Ring has indeed been found that it is inevitable that that one of the mighty among his foes will take it and use it against him. He may be puzzled why it would appear that the Ring is in the hands of creatures as insignificant as hobbits but this aspect of the story does not seem to bother him greatly. When before the battle at the Black Gate the so called Mouth of Sauron shows the tokens that seem to denote that Frodo has been captured he does so with the words, “What use you find in them I cannot guess; but to send them as spies into Mordor is beyond even your accustomed folly.” Sauron simply assumes that the hobbits are being used in some way because that is what he would do with them.

Goodness understands evil because it has had to overcome the temptation to possess all that evil seems to be able to offer. True goodness has been formed by this inner struggle. Evil on the other hand understands nothing of this. It has not been formed by struggle. The character of Sauron, Saruman, and Gollum, too, for that matter, is not formed by inner struggle but by their being taken possession of by their desire for mastery.

“It Was Not in Vain That The Young Hobbits Came With Us.” Gandalf Speaks of The Fall and Redemption of Boromir.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 646-648

“Tell me of yourselves,” Gandalf asked of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, and so Aragorn tells the tale of the doings of the Fellowship since Gandalf fell in Moria until their meeting in Fangorn some six weeks later. He tells of their stay in Lothlórien, of the journey down river to Sarn Gebir in the hills of Emyn Muil and then of the sundering of the Fellowship and the death of Boromir.

“You have not said all that you know or guess, Aragorn my friend,” Gandalf replies to Aragorn as he thinks of Boromir. “Poor Boromir! I could not see what happened to him. It was a trial for such a man: a warrior, and a lord of men. Galadriel told me that he was in peril. But he escaped in the end. I am glad. It was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir’s sake.”

“A warrior, and a lord of men,” Gandalf says of Boromir, but not a thinker. And in this regard Boromir is different from his father, Denethor. Boromir set out upon the journey to Rivendell because it seemed a heroic enterprise. A dream came many times to Faramir his brother, as Boromir recounted to the Council of Elrond, and once it came to him. Why Faramir did not speak sooner of the dream we are not told. Perhaps he needed time for reflection. But as soon as Boromir had the dream he went straight with his brother to their father and demanded leave to go to Rivendell. Perhaps it required the man of action to put things in motion.

But why did the heavenly powers send the dream in the first place? Why was it necessary to make the link between Minas Tirith and Rivendell? Perhaps the link was meant to be Faramir who, like Aragorn, had been a pupil of Gandalf and who would have understood the need to destroy the Ring and not to use it in war against Sauron. An understanding that he was later to show when he met with Frodo and Sam in Ithilien. But Faramir made the dream a matter for thought and not for action, for understanding and not for deed, a private matter and not for debate and counsel. It was Boromir who instinctively made the connection between the dream and heroic action. The dream spoke of Imladris, of Rivendell, and so a journey had to be made. And perhaps this was a right reading of the dream and of the heavenly mind that sent it. The Council of Elrond was a providential gathering of the free peoples of Middle-earth. Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits and Humankind were represented there and were represented when the Fellowship was chosen to go with the Ring-bearer on his journey to Mordor.

Boromir never understood the necessity of the journey. “Why do you speak ever of hiding and destroying?” he asked of the Council. “Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need?” Perhaps the use of the adjective, Great, was a clue even then of Boromir’s state of mind. Greatness, power and decisive action were all that he could envisage. To hide and to destroy seemed unmanly, even craven. And although when Elrond and Gandalf sought to make it clear to him that the Ring could not be used against Sauron because it was “altogether evil”, Boromir bowed his head and replied, “So be it” his heart never accepted this answer. As a soldier he accepted the orders as they were given by the Council but his heart was never in them. And after Gandalf’s fall when everything was thrown into disarray and into doubt, and when it seemed that Aragorn did not know what action should be taken, whether to go directly to Mordor or to Minas Tirith, Boromir began to think of taking the Ring so that it could be used in battle to do what the only thing that he thought had any importance, the defeat of Sauron.

I suspect that Boromir was ultimately taken by surprise by his own thoughts. Not the thoughts about the need of his people but the fantasies that he was nourishing about his own greatness. When Gandalf and Galadriel were offered the Ring they were able to resist the temptation at least in part because they had brought it from the shadow places within their hearts into the light of conscious thought. Boromir never did that inner work nor thought that work was even of any importance. And so when his desires burst out into the open at the moment he tried to take the Ring from Frodo they took him by surprise. I think that we can see this by his horrified reaction after Frodo escaped from him. And we see his true spirit in the way in which he gave his life for Merry and Pippin. It was because the young hobbits were there and in need that allowed him to declare to himself what he truly was. A warrior, a lord of men, and a man of truth and nobility.

“Farewell! Maybe Thou Shalt Find Valimar.” Galadriel’s Beautiful Farewell to The Fellowship of the Ring.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 367-369

Farewell! Namárië! This is the last word spoken by Galadriel as the three boats that hold the members of the Fellowship float down the Silverlode to its confluence with the Anduin and so away from the earthly paradise of Lothlórien, into the empty lands beyond and all the adventures that lie before each one of them; adventures that lie before their feet but which they cannot know except as they take each step of the way.

Galadriel’s farewell is a song that she sings to them in “the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the sea”, in Quenya, a language spoken both by the Noldor of whom Galadriel is a Queen and by the Vanyar. It is the language that Gildor and his party speak in the Shire when they meet Frodo, Sam and Pippin at the beginning of their journey and it is a language of which Frodo has little knowledge. But, as T.S Eliot wrote on the subject of language, communication goes deeper than understanding, and in a documentary on Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, the comment is made that it is the music of Eliot’s language that communicates before any understanding of the text. Perhaps it is to this that Tolkien refers when he speaks of “the way of Elvish words” that they remain “graven” in Frodo’s memory.

Throughout the years of her long sojourn that “have passed like swift draughts of the sweet mead in lofty halls beyond the West” Galadriel has spoken with her husband and with her people in Sindarin, the language of the Elves who never made the journey to Valinor, but now she pours out her heart in the language of her own people. For Galadriel has long nurtured a divided heart in which, as we read of her in Unfinished Tales “there dwelt in her the noble and generous spirit of the Vanyar, and a reverence for the Valar that she could not forget.” But there has also lain within her the part that she played in the rebellion of Fëanor and the Noldor, when although she opposed Fëanor in the kinslaying of Alqualondë nevertheless she still went with her people to Middle-earth against the command of the Valar and at the end of the First Age refused the pardon that the Valar extended to all who had been a part of the rebellion of Fëanor but had fought against Morgoth. As Tolkien says of her in Unfinished Tales “she had dreams of far lands and dominions that might be her own to order as she would without tutelage”. It was these dreams that began to take shape in her heart in the form of a thought as to what she might do if ever the Ring of Power might fall within her reach.

It was this thought, born of her ancient dreams, but dreams perhaps and even thoughts that had lain dormant through her long practice of the rejection of evil, a practice aided by Nenya the Ring of Adamant, that suddenly returned to her with almost overwhelming force when Frodo offered her the Ring at the episode of her mirror. But Tolkien tells us, when the moment of testing came “her wisdom was full grown and she rejected it, and passing the last test departed from Middle-earth for ever”.

That was to be her final destiny but at this moment, the moment of her singing her farewell song to the Fellowship, she has no knowledge of the pardon that she will receive and so all that they (and we also) can hear is her heartbreaking lament and her longing.

“Now lost, lost to those from the East is Valimar! Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!”

Was it to Frodo most of all of that company to whom she sang those words? It is Frodo, amongst all of them, that the longing for healing and of peace is strongest, a longing revealed in his dreams in the House of Tom Bombadil and a longing revealed, perhaps also, in the graving of Galadriel’s song upon his memory. These words stay within his heart upon every step of his journey to Mordor and maybe they become, against even his conscious thought, a lode star beyond the “end of all things” in the Cracks of Doom in Orodruin that will carry him, along with the faithful and loving service of Sam, both to that terrible moment and beyond it also. Maybe Frodo will find it.

“Seeing Is Both Good and Perilous”. Frodo Looks Into The Mirror of Galadriel.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp.354-357

“Do you now wish to look, Frodo?” said the Lady Galadriel. “You did not wish to see Elf-magic and were content.”

Last week we saw how Sam did look into the Mirror of Galadriel having “wanted to see a bit of magic like what it tells of in old tales”; thinking, as he did, that all magic was of the variety of a conjuring trick and done either for the purpose of entertainment or to make the world a little more wonderful. What he did experience was nothing of this kind but deeply disturbing as he was forced to witness the destruction of his own home and his father fleeing as a refugee. And now will Frodo look into the Mirror?

What Frodo sees once he has made up his mind to do so is at first the great story of which he has become such a vital part; a hero, as Elrond put it, worthy to sit among “the mighty Elf-friends of old”. He sees the mighty sea that both destroyed the land of Númenor and brought the ships of Elendil, storm tossed to Middle-earth. He sees the mighty fortress of Minas Tirith and then the ship that will carry the King back to his city. And at the last he sees the ship that will carry him away from Middle-earth to the Undying Lands for his healing from the many wounds that he has taken in giving to it a future and a hope.

But it does not end there. Frodo sighs and prepares to turn away from the vision, having understood little, if any, of what he has seen, when he is arrested by something else. He sees at first a darkness, an emptiness, and then he sees an Eye, and soon knows that this Eye is searching for him. “Frodo knew with certainty and horror that among the many things that it sought he himself was one.”

Frodo has seen what Sauron has become. A lidless eye endlessly searching throughout the world for anything that might pose a threat to its own existence. Not that Sauron has been reduced yet to this alone. Gollum will speak of the nine fingers upon his hand which are enough to do terrible things, but this is the main form in which he exists within the earth. He is one who sees, or perhaps we should say, one who seeks, for he is not omniscient. Frodo knows that the Eye cannot see him unless he chooses to put on the Ring.

“Seeing is both good and perilous”. These were Galadriel’s words to Frodo when he asked whether or not he should look into the Mirror and her wisdom could have been either for Frodo or for Sauron. To Frodo because it is often the wisest course of action simply to deal with what is immediately in front of us. To see too far into the future can well render us impotent in the present. Or, as in the case of Sam, may tempt us to leave a pathway that had seemed entirely right in order to solve a problem that we will be perfectly capable of solving later on down the road after we have completed our present task.

And what of Sauron? His ability to see is good in so far as he is able to gather information about the world about him but ultimately what he sees is desperately limited and he is paralysed by the gaps in his knowledge. He cannot penetrate the minds of his enemies and even when he can, as in his use of the Palantír, the Seeing Stones, he still has to deal with the duplicity of Saruman and the essentially noble character of Denethor. And when he sees Aragorn in the Stone of Orthanc, he will misinterpret what he sees so badly as to cause him to leave himself fatally vulnerable to the one thing that he fails to predict. The painstakingly slow journey of the Ring into the very heart of his realm.

So does Frodo see anything of good? Well the answer is that he does. He sees that Sauron cannot see him unless he chooses to reveal himself. He will always have a choice to make and though this choice will become like an intolerable weight about his neck the power to make this choice will open a way for him to Orodruin itself.

The Mirror of Galadriel. Sam Gamgee is Torn in Two Once Again.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 351-354

It was the Gaffer, Sam’s father, who expressed a pious hope that his son would not go getting mixed up in the business of his betters or he would land in trouble too big for him, and the Gaffer was right, Sam is way out of his depth, but then so too are the rest of the Fellowship. If they are to triumph in the end it will not be because of their strength or even their wisdom but because something greater than they are is at work in the story of Middle-earth.

But none of this is able to dampen Sam’s curiosity. He would “dearly love to see some Elf-magic”. He knows that what is going on around him in the enchanted land of Lothlórien is of a different order to the fireworks “that poor Gandalf used to show” and that Sam had just celebrated in verse but it is his childlike desire for the wonderful that is at work within him and it is in part at least to this desire that Galadriel responds, almost as a mother will do at a birthday party for her child.

But Galadriel has other purposes in mind than entertainment when she takes Sam and Frodo to see her mirror. She knows that it is these two, the Ringbearer and the one whose faithful companionship will be crucial if the quest is to be accomplished that she needs to test. Each of the others will have a vital part to play but it is only these two that she seeks out at this moment just before they leave.

It is Sam who must be tested first. What he sees in the mirror is what will later be The Scouring of the Shire.

“There’s that Ted Sandyman a-cutting down trees as he shouldn’t. They didn’t ought to be felled: it’s that avenue beyond the Mill that shades the road to Bywater. I wish I could get at Ted, and I’d fell him!”

And there is worse to come.

“They’ve dug up Bagshot Row, and there’s the poor old gaffer going down the Hill with his bits of things on a barrow. I must go home!”

And this is the point of Galadriel’s testing. Will Sam go with Frodo to the very end, knowing, as he now does, that behind him, in the place that he loves the most in all the world, destruction is, or may be, taking place? Already we have seen Sam face the same test, at the moment at the Gates of Moria when Bill the Pony fled in terror and Sam had to help rescue Frodo from the Watcher in the Waters, and at the moment when it seemed that Galadriel was offering him the chance to fly back to the Shire to a nice little hole with a garden of his own. At each stage Sam has passed the test and stayed true to Frodo but this is the hardest of them all. The destruction of his home and he was not there to defend it.

Galadriel does not make a speech about how he must stay true to the Quest so that the Ring may be destroyed and the whole world, a world that includes the Shire, may be saved. She simply reminds him that he could not go back alone, that he knew already that things might be amiss in the Shire, and that the Mirror is not a reliable guide to the future.

Sam is shattered. At this moment he is in full accord with the Gaffer’s anxiety that it is a dangerous thing to get mixed up in the affairs of his betters. He has no more desire for magic. Cabbages and potatoes are better for him. He might, on reflection, note that we do not have to go looking for trouble in order to find it. Trouble is capable of finding us while we sit in peace by a well tended hearth. This is the cautious Gaffer’s experience, much to the malicious pleasure of Ted Sandyman. But at the last Sam speaks the words that emerge through all the tests he has been through; words that express his deepest truth.

“I’ll go home by the long road with Mr Frodo, or not at all.”