The star-glass of Galadriel

“A Elbereth Gilthoniel…” Sam Gamgee’s Pentecostal Song as He Drives Shelob Away From Frodo’s Body.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 952-955

The pages that Tolkien wrote around the terrible scene in Shelob’s Lair weave together light and darkness in a way that is both desperately horrible and exquisitely beautiful. On the one hand we have the insatiable desire of Shelob as she tracks down her prey.

“Most like a spider she was, but huger than the great hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes.” (The Two Towers p. 949)

And then we have Gollum’s treachery luring Frodo and Sam into a trap from which he is sure they cannot escape in order to regain the Ring and then to “pay her back, my precious. Then we’ll pay everyone back.” (The Two Towers p. 947)

But then we have this. 

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
a menel palandiriel
le nallon si di'nguruthos!
A tiro nin, Fanuilos!

O Elbereth Starkindler/ from heaven gazing afar,/ to thee I cry here beneath the shadow of death!/ O look towards me everwhite!

As Shelob gloats over her prey, over Frodo’s body, Sam attacks her with all the ferocity of his love for his master having beaten off Gollum’s attack. But Shelob is mightier, even than all the rage that Sam can muster, and she turns to confront and to kill him. And it is at this most desperate need that Sam looks for some strength in order to stand against her.

And strength comes to him.

It all begins with Sam clutching the phial of Galadriel and with a single word faintly spoken.

“Galadriel”.

Sam is looking for something greater than his own strength and his memory goes back to the Lady of Lothlórien, the maker and giver of the star glass. It is all that he can find within his memory and he calls upon it now. But what comes to him is something far far beyond his memory. Sam sings a song of praise to Elbereth in a language that he does not know. He heard such songs as he dozed in the hall of fire in Rivendell but he had never learnt them. Now they come to him in a Pentecostal moment and in his direst need.

I say Pentecostal not because I think that Sam has suddenly joined a particular religious movement but because, just as the apostles were given the ability to speak in languages that they had never learned on the first Day of Pentecost, so Sam is divinely gifted language that he does not know in his moment of direst need.

When the Elves cried “to thee I cry, here beneath the shadow of death” in the halls of Elrond it was a reflection upon a general spiritual condition and no less meaningful because of that, but when Sam cried out these words he literally stood in the shadow of his own imminent death, and what came to him was the angelic power that the Elves praised and underneath which they lived.

“As if his indomitable spirit had set its potency in motion, the glass blazed suddenly like a white torch in his hand. It flamed like a star that leaping from the firmament sears the dark air with intolerable light.”

And it is this light that defeats Shelob. She has been wounded by Sting, Frodo’s elven blade that Sam is holding, and one of her eyes has been put out, but it is the light that she cannot bear. “No such terror out of heaven had ever burned in Shelob’s face before.”She retreats into her hole and does not return.

Nothing less than light from heaven could have defeated her and this is one of the few moments within The Lord of the Rings in which Tolkien departs from his usual reserve about expressing the Catholic faith that was so dear to him and even here he does so within the confines of the secondary world that he had sub-created. It is angelic power that comes to Sam, the power of Elbereth, the member of the Valar whom the Elves loved the best, the kindler of the stars under which they first awoke in ancient time, and not the power of Mary, “the Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star”, that was so important to Tolkien.

It is divine power, however mediated, that comes to Sam in this darkest of moments and which defeats Shelob. Tolkien never states this explicitly but in the beauty of Sam’s hymn to Elbereth he opens the door just a little to an even greater beauty for those who want to enter by that door

“The Lady’s Gift! The Star-glass! A Light to You in Dark Places, She Said it Was To Be.”

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 939-943

Frodo and Sam are lost within the tunnels of Shelob’s Lair and soon become horribly aware of the monster herself. They hear a sound, “a gurgling, bubbling noise, and a long venomous hiss”. Shelob, a demonic power in the form of a giant spider, is creeping up behind them. They are trapped with no way out.

But at such moments strength of which we are usually unaware can come to us. Sam’s hand goes to the hilt of his sword and as it does so Sam remembers where he found it, in another dark place, in the barrow where a wight dwelt, a servant of the Witch King of Angmar. And as his mind went to that place he thinks of their rescuer on that day, Tom Bombadil, whose merry but commanding song was far stronger than that of the wight. If only Tom was near them now. But Sam’s imagination has been awakened in ways in which even a few moments before he could not have predicted. Tom might not be near them but something else is.

“Far off, as in a little picture drawn by elven-fingers, he saw the Lady Galadriel standing on the grass in Lórien, and gifts were in her hands. And you, Ring-bearer, he heard her say, remote but clear, for you I have prepared this.”

Galadriel, one of the last of the Noldor, and kinswoman of Fëanor, mightiest of all craftsmen and women and maker of the Silmarils in which are held the light of the trees, Telperion and Laurelin. These trees were destroyed by Morgoth with the aid of Ungoliant, sire of Shelob, and all that was left of their light was that contained within the Silmarils. These were stolen by Morgoth and he placed them upon his iron crown. One of these were taken by the mighty hero, Beren, with the aid of Lúthien, and this eventually became the morning star whose light was caught within the glass that Galadriel gave to Frodo, to be “a light when all other lights go out”.

Frodo and Sam have already spoken together of how they are a part of a story that is bigger than they are and Sam mentioned the star-glass that Galadriel gave to Frodo in Lothlórien. But it is one thing to speak of something in a moment of relative calm. It is another to recall it at a time of greatest peril.

It is not Frodo who remembers Galadriel’s gift. It is Sam whose memory and imagination are awakened as he puts his hand to the hilt of his sword and who reminds Frodo of the gift that he possesses. And suddenly, in the briefest of moments, a mighty history and all the power contained within it, comes to the aid of the beleaguered friends. The work of the smith who forged Sam’s blade for the hopeless defence of Arthedain against the Witch King and his forces; and most potently of all, the work of Galadriel who, using the skill of her people and her kinsman, Fëanor, crafts the glass that contains within it the light that he once caught within the Silmarils. And Sam’s faithful friendship, there for Frodo at just the right moment.

And all this is brought to bear against Shelob when all seems darkest. Frodo finds a courage that is given to him when all hope of escape has gone.

“Then Frodo’s heart flamed within him, and without thinking what he did, whether it was folly or despair or courage, he took the Phial in his left hand, and with his right drew his sword. Sting flashed out, and the sharp elven-blade sparkled in the silver light, but at its edges a blue fire flickered. Then holding the star aloft and the bright sword advanced, Frodo, hobbit of the Shire, walked steadily down to meet the eyes.”

Tolkien makes quite sure that in his description of Frodo’s heroic act we all read the words, “hobbit of the Shire”. He is no more than this, but no less either. As we saw in the last reflection on this blog Frodo is a dead man walking. He has already given up his life for the sake of the task he has been given to do and so although it is only a hobbit who advances upon the monster it is also a hero who, as Elrond recognised, had earned the right to stand among the mighty Elf-friends of old, “Hador, and Húrin, and Túrin and Beren himself”. And it is in this laying down of his life that he receives a strength so great that even Shelob has to withdraw. For a time at least.

“Frodo Wouldn’t Have Got Far Without Sam, Would He Dad?” Frodo Thinks About the Place of Sam Gamgee in His Story and About Both of Them in The Great Tale.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 931-935

Frodo and Sam have come a long way since Gandalf unceremoniously pulled Sam by the ear through the study window at Bag End. And they have travelled far since Frodo’s attempt to escape from all his friends across the Anduin to the Emyn Muil after Boromir’s betrayal and his attempt to take the Ring from Frodo by force. At that point in the story Frodo greeted Sam’s heroic effort to catch up with him, risking his life in the waters of the mighty river, with the words:

“Of all the confounded nuisances you are the worst, Sam!”

The road from the breaking of the Fellowship to the place just below the tunnel into Mordor in the pass of Cirith Ungol has only been a few days but during that time the bonds of friendship between Frodo and Sam have begun to grow deep. Frodo takes the opportunity using the gentle game that he and Sam are playing as Sam imagines Frodo as a character in the kind of story that he loved to hear when he was a child to express something of how he has come to feel about him.

“Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why don’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like. it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?'”

This short speech displays much of the struggle that men have to say what they really feel. It is the last sentence that gets closest to this for Frodo. “I wouldn’t have got very far without you, Sam.” But this shy expression of feeling is wrapped up in teasing and in all the careful formality of relationships between classes that typified the early twentieth century world that Frodo and Sam live in and which they carry into the pre-modern heroic world of the central narrative of The Lord of the Rings. And in passing we might note here how seemingly effortless this travel between worlds is. We hardly notice that that all this conversation about heroic literature takes place in a lighthearted conversation between an officer and his batman (a servant to an officer in the British military) on the front line during the Great War of 1914-18. Are we in the trenches of that terrible conflict or are we in the story of Beren and Lúthien from the First Age of Arda? In fact we are in both stories but most importantly of all, the heroic tale recounted in The Silmarilion is legitimately brought into the twentieth century conversation and re-enchants it.

Sam is the first to point this out, speaking of the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

“But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it- and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why sir, I never thought of it before! We’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! Its going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

Some may recall that Bilbo used words very much like this in his despairing cry of, “Don’t adventures ever have an end?” in the hall of fire in Rivendell when he met Frodo there. Both the tragedy and comedy of life come down to each of us from the ancient stories and we must inherit them both. The point is, and Tolkien vividly brings this to life here, is that our lives in modernity are not hermetically sealed against the heroic tales of the past. They still live in us and we in them.