The phial of Galadriel

“Maybe It Was the Ring That Called to The Wraith-lord, and For a Moment He Was Troubled.” A Contest of Powers Within the Morgul Vale.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 730-734.

Travelling through Scotland and having forgotten my usual edition of The Two Towers I am grateful to my sister in law, Elinor Farquharson and her husband, Geoffrey, of Edinburgh, for the loan of their single volume edition of The Lord of the Rings.

The short time that the companions spend at the Cross-roads is one of poignant tension between hope and despair, between light and darkness, and Tolkien immediately draws our attention to this at the beginning of the chapter entitled, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, as Frodo turns his back reluctantly on the West and his face towards the East and to darkness. Gollum leads Frodo and Sam towards the tower of Minas Morgul and up the first steps of a path that crawls upwards “into the blackness above”.

Frodo is exhausted, feeling the great burden of the Ring for the first time since he entered Ithilien, but perhaps there is another power at work. “Weariness and more than weariness oppressed him; it seemed as if a heavy spell was laid on his mind and body.”

All the way through this passage we are aware of many powers at work, sometimes it would seem in contest with one another. The Lord of Minas Morgul, the Witch King of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgûl, is a master of dark magic and he has wreathed the very air about his fastness with spells that rob any who might dare to venture towards it of the will and strength to continue their journey. Tolkien is not explicit about this but when he says that “it seemed as if a heavy spell was laid on his mind and body” there are dark powers at work here.

Perhaps if this were an ordinary day in the foul history of Minas Morgul it would not have been long before Frodo and Sam were discovered. But this is no ordinary day. It is the day upon which Sauron, filled with fear that one of his foes has taken possession of the Ring, sends forth an army to take possession of Minas Tirith, the greatest fortress of his enemies.

“So great an army had never issued from that vale since the days of Isildur’s might.”

And this great army and all the carefully choreographed terror that goes before it and which surrounds it achieves precisely an end for which it was never intended. So great is the energy of the powers both of Minas Morgul and of Barad-dûr that is poured into the departure of the army, an energy whose intention is to terrify the army of Gondor and to rob it of what courage remains to it, that for a brief moment the powers of the Morgul fortress are unaware of what is taking place beneath their very noses. The Ring of Power is passing the armies of Mordor borne by one whose intention it is to destroy it if he can.

And the Ring-bearer is almost caught. The Nazgûl Lord, the king who almost stabbed Frodo to the heart in the dell below Weathertop, pauses for a moment. “He was troubled, sensing some other power within his valley.”

He begins to reach out towards that power just as he did below Weathertop but unlike on that occasion when Frodo felt compelled to put on the Ring this time he is able to resist. He has a strength now that he did not possess before. Eventually this strength will tempt him to take possession of the Ring but now he knows that he does not yet have the power “to face the Morgul-king- not yet”.

That “not-yet” tells us that one day soon he will try to use the Ring, to become its lord, but now it works in Frodo’s favour.

And there is one more power at work. Frodo becomes aware that his hand is moving, unbidden, at least by him, towards the Ring, but as it does so it finds the star-glass of Galadriel, in which the light of the Silmaril, borne by Eärendil into the undying lands and set as a star in the heavens by Elbereth herself. His hand folds about it and the Witch King ceases from his search and moves on.

At this moment the power of the star glass is enough but what if the Witch King had given his entire attention to his search for the power that briefly he is aware is present in his valley? Would Frodo, even aided by the glass, even aided by the Ring, have had the strength to resist? But this test never takes place. It is an exquisite irony that so much has been put into the choreography of the departure of the army of Minas Morgul that the Witch King is distracted, just enough, from finding the very thing that has the power to destroy his lord.

“I Think The Rope Came by Itself- When I Called.” The Rope From Lórien Makes Us Think of Unexpected Lights in Dark Places.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 789-798

There comes a point in Frodo and Sam’s efforts to descend the steep eastern slopes of the Emyn Muil when they scramble down a gully to a point where Frodo thinks they might be able to escape the hills altogether. He is just making his way down to a ledge some way below when a cry sounds in the sky above them. It is a Nazgûl and so terrible is the sound out in the wild that Frodo puts his hands to his ears and finds himself sliding down the face of the hills to another ledge below the one that he had originally intended to reach.

For a moment Frodo is blinded and terribly shaken and Sam does not know how he will reach him. He begins to brave the descent that Frodo has just made rather precipitously when Frodo stops him.

“Wait! You can’t do anything without a rope.”

And suddenly Sam remembers the coil of rope that he has carried all the way from Lothlórien; a gift of the Elves of that land.

“Never travel far without a rope!” said the Elf who had given it to Sam. “And one that is long and strong and light. Such as these. They may be a help in many needs”

The rope that Sam has carried in his pack is about 30 ells in length or about 110 feet, quite long enough to get them both down to the ground below. Although the rope seems to be so slender that it could not possibly bear their weight it turns out to be very strong. It also turns out to have other qualities. When Sam lowers it to enable Frodo to scramble back up to the point at which he fell the rope shimmers in the dark in such a way as to dispel his temporary blindness. And the rope has a further quality. When Frodo and Sam finally reach the bottom of their descent and realise that they cannot bring the rope with them Sam mournfully gives it a farewell tug. To his surprise and chagrin it falls into his hands. Frodo breaks into mocking laughter remarking on the quality of Sam’s knot.

“I may not be much good at climbing, Mr. Frodo,” he said in injured tones, “but I do know about rope and about knots. It’s in the family, as you might say.”

They check the rope to see if it had frayed but found it completely whole. Sam has complete faith both in the Elven rope and also in his own skill with knots and at the last he declares, “Have it your own way, Mr. Frodo… but I think the rope came of itself- when I called.”

And Sam is right. That is exactly what happened. And with this Sam is beginning to learn a relationship to things that is a form of wisdom, a wisdom that the Elves of Lothlórien have developed over many years. To the Elves all things that we tend to treat as mere tools, mere objects, have a kind of consciousness. We see this with lembas, the waybread that at this point in the story is the only food that Frodo and Sam have. We remember that when Merry and Pippin escaped from the orcs they noted that lembas “does put heart into you. A more wholesome sort of feeling, too, than the heat of that orc draught.” And later in the story we will see what the Phial of Galadriel can do in the darkest place.

At first Sam is inclined to call this quality a kind of magic, Elven magic. But he is learning that he also has the ability to evoke a kind of aliveness in things just as the Elves do and just as great craftsmen and women do. This evocation is a deep form of attentiveness. The patience to wait until the inner life of a thing reveals itself. Eventually Sam will use this attentiveness through Galadriel’s gift to him, the little box of dust that he will use to heal the Shire after Saruman’s scouring of it. Through that dust and Sam’s particular use of it the babies born in the year after will be especially beautiful and the beer especially good.

All of these things are expressions of the way in which dark places can be transformed. Ordinary things like rope, food and dust are found to have a real presence but we must pay them sufficient attention in order to find that presence and to allow it to transform our lives.

“May It Be a Light to You in Dark Places, When All Other Lights Go Out.” Galadriel Gives a Phial of Light to Frodo.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp.365-367

After Galadriel has given a gift of three of her golden hairs to Gimli there remains one last gift to be given, to Frodo, the Ring-bearer who is not last in her thoughts. She gives to him “a small crystal phial” that glitters as she moves it and “rays of white light” spring from her hand.

“In this phial,” she said, “is caught the light of Eärendil’s star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”

Frodo remembers the verses that Bilbo chanted about Eärendil in the Hall of Fire in Rivendell, the verses that seemed to Frodo “to fit somehow” into something about which he was dreaming, about “an endless river of swelling gold and silver” flowing over him. This is Frodo’s immersion into the history of light of which he is a vital part and of which Galadriel’s phial is now a living symbol. 

A ship then new they built for him 
of mithril and of elven-glass
with shining prow; no shaven oar
nor sail she bore on silver mast:
the Silmaril as lantern light
and banner bright with living flame 
to gleam thereon by Elbereth 
herself was set, who thither came 
and wings immortal made for him,
and laid on him immortal doom,
to sail the shoreless skies and come 
behind the Sun and light of Moon.

Galadriel herself has been intimately involved in this history from the beginning. It is the story of how Fëanor made three exquisite jewels in which was captured the light of the two trees in Valinor, of Telperion and of Laurelin. Eventually the trees are destroyed by Morgoth with the aid of Ungoliant, the terrible spider-like monster and ancestor of Shelob, who Frodo and Sam will encounter in the tunnels of Cirith Ungol and who Sam will vanquish with the aid of Galadriel’s phial after Frodo is poisoned. After the theft of the Silmarils Fëanor will pursue Morgoth, defying the Valar who forbid him to leave Valinor. Along with his people, the Noldor, he steals ships from the Teleri, slaying them when they try to resist him, and so begins the tragic history of Middle-earth that reaches a climax in The Lord of the Rings.

There is a sense in which the whole of this history is contained in Galadriel’s phial, both in its beauty and its sorrow. The light of the Silmaril that is captured in the phial is a sign of hope to which all the peoples of Middle-earth can look each morning and evening in the star that shines brightly above them. Eärendil brought hope to Middle-earth when it lay prostrate before the power of Morgoth and his star continues to do so today. In the terrible lair of Shelob, in a place where all other lights have gone out, Frodo cries out, “Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!” “Hail Eärendil, brightest of stars!” And at this moment when all hope is gone the light of the Silmaril blazes forth and the memory of the fall of Morgoth is rekindled.

But I mentioned sorrow too. For the story of the Silmarils is a story of trust betrayed. I mentioned the kinslaying of Alqulondë when the Noldor stole the ships of the Teleri but I could mention many other sorrows too. In fact one of the great themes of the story of the First Age as recounted in The Silmarillion is the telling of the sorrows of Middle-earth to the Valar. After the death of Beren Lúthien follows him to the underworld and sings to Mandos the most beautiful song in the world, a weaving together of the griefs of the Two Kindreds of Elves and Humankind that reduces the Lord of Death to tears of pity. Indeed we could add to this story that of Eärendil himself whose journey to Valinor is itself a plea to the Valar to take pity upon these kindreds.

Galadriel has been a part of both the sorrow and the beauty. She was a part of the rebellion of Fëanor and the Noldor, albeit reluctantly, but in her rejection of the Ring when it was offered to her by Frodo she displays her adamantine character and so wins a victory over evil that is vital for the success of the task of the Ring-bearer. Her gift to him is a symbol of that victory.