In honour of Nick Hubble’s essay being on the BSFA shortlist, we present it here for free for ease of reading for BSFA voters… and for everyone else who might be interested!
The Fourth Age under the dominion of men isn’t going too well, is it? Did the free peoples of Middle-earth really combine to overthrow Sauron so that the world would be delivered on a plate to the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk? I think not. But how might things have worked out differently? One alternative not discussed at the Council of Elrond is that Galadriel might take the ring. While Elrond does say, ‘If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor using his own arts, he would set himself on Sauron’s throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear’,[1] Galadriel is not a ‘he’. Moreover, she is not even from the same type of story as Gandalf, Aragorn and Faramir, male characters who demonstrate their goodness by refusing to take the ring when they have the opportunity. For Galadriel is clearly a figuration of the Fairy Queen in the same way that Lórien, the enchanted realm she rules in which time passes in a different manner to outside its borders, is a figuration of fairy land or Faery, as it is sometimes known.[2]
Tolkien’s obsession with Faery can be traced from his first published work, the poem ‘Goblin Feet’ (1915), to virtually his last, Smith of Wootton Major (1967), in which the titular character dances with an elven maiden in Faery and only towards the end of his life comes to realise that she was the Fairy Queen. He knew the medieval poem Sir Orfeo, described by Maureen Duffy as ‘the first unequivocal description of fairyland’.[3] The key features of that description – the Fairy King and the hunt and ride – inform the depiction of the wood elves’ kingdom in The Hobbit.[4] Duffy argues that the persistence of such fairy tales in English culture is because they provided an imaginative alternative to the Christianity which became dominant over the course of the Middle Ages. In particular, they expressed the unconscious desire for greater sexual freedom that had been experienced historically in connection to the considerable female agency found in earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic pagan cultures.[5] The ‘beautiful, idealized and forbidden mother-figure’ of the Fairy Queen,[6] who provides for her human lover’s food and clothing before abandoning him on the cold hillside to pine away for the unattainable, went on to become a staple of English literature from Spenser to Keats. While not appropriate for The Hobbit, her inclusion in The Lord of the Rings marks the point when it is clear that the story is moving into more adult territory than its precursor.
Although Galadriel does not accept the ring when Frodo offers it to her, her refusal takes a rather different form to that of the male characters in the novel. She is not afraid to admit that she has long desired it and momentarily we see what she might become with it: ‘She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful’.[7] Immediately afterwards, though, she appears once more a slender elf-woman and reflects that she has passed the test and will therefore diminish and return to the West. But are these appearances and reflections what they seem? Is she really diminished? Only a few pages later, as the fellowship depart from Lórien, Galadriel reveals herself again to Frodo as ‘a queen, great and beautiful, but no longer terrible’.[8] Exactly what ‘test’ she might have passed is one of the most enigmatic riddles in Tolkien’s work.
As Christopher Tolkien notes in his editorial introduction to ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’ in Unfinished Tales: ‘There is no part of the history of Middle-earth more full of problems than the story of Galadriel and Celeborn.’[9] However, the root cause of this problem is not just that Galadriel and Celeborn were invented during the course of writing The Lord of the Rings and had no prior existence in the wider body of work that would eventually be published as The Silmarillion, but also that Galadriel, as Faery Queen, sits outside Tolkien’s binary moral framework. He therefore had considerable difficulty with inserting her seamlessly into The Lord of the Rings, let alone with retrofitting her into the existing tales of his wider legendarium. Unsurprisingly, he was still attempting to fix Galadriel’s story in the last months of his life.[10]
The first reference to Lórien in The Lord of the Rings comes when Elrond’s scouts return to Rivendell before the departure of the fellowship. We are told that ‘the sons of Elrond, Elladen and Elrohir, were the last to return; they had made a great journey, passing down the Silverlode into a strange country’.[11] However, this makes little sense because Galadriel is the grandmother of Elladen and Elrohir, to whom Lórien would be well known and not at all a ‘strange country’. In other words, this sentence is one of the surviving traces – rather like the fox in the Shire who wonders to himself what is going on[12] – of Tolkien’s earliest drafts from the late 1930s. If we turn to the first versions of the chapters set in Lórien, we find that Aragorn has no knowledge of Galadriel or even if elves still live in the woods at all.[13] When, after the first meeting of the fellowship with Galadriel, Boromir expresses his doubts of this elvish lady and her purposes, Aragorn does not offer the stern rebuke of the published version but merely replies, ‘Well, whatever you may think of the Lady, she was a friend of Gandalf, it seems’.[14]
When Frodo offers her the ring in this first draft, Galadriel’s ‘sudden clear laugh’ is ‘of pure merriment,’[15] which recalls the playful attitude of another ‘friend of Gandalf’, Tom Bombadil. In many ways, her initial role in the novel appears to be equivalent to that of Bombadil – the two have a similar line count even in the published version – with both characters embodying aspects of English folk lore encountered by the hobbits on their quest. This sense of Galadriel as the Fairy Queen is further reinforced when Faramir learns from Frodo and Sam that his brother Boromir had passed through Lórien and met Galadriel, ‘the Lady that dies not’. He reflects: ‘If men have dealings with the Mistress of Magic who dwells in the Golden Wood, then they may look for strange things to follow. For it is perilous for mortal men to walk out of the world of this Sun, and few of old came thence unchanged, ’tis said’.[16]
The idea of Lórien as Faery is strengthened by the relatively late addition during the writing of The Lord of the Rings of the relationship between mortal Aragorn and elven Arwen (in the early drafts, Aragorn was to marry Éowyn of Rohan[17]). As related in Appendix A,[18] Aragorn is raised as a son by Elrond following the death of his father, but he doesn’t meet Elrond’s daughter Arwen until he is fully grown because she has been living with her grandmother Galadriel in Lórien. When she returns to Rivendell, Aragorn falls in love with her. However, as Elrond explains to him, a doom is laid on Arwen and her brothers that they shall only stay immortal elves while their father remains in Middle-earth. If Elrond leaves for the West, his children need to choose between accompanying him or remaining in Middle-earth as mortals. On hearing this, Aragorn leaves Rivendell and spends thirty years fighting against the forces of Sauron. At last, coming to the borders of Lórien, he is admitted into that ‘hidden land’ by Galadriel, who clothes him in silver and white, with a gem on his brow so that he looks like an Elf-lord from the Isles of the West. In this state, he once again meets Arwen, who now falls in love with him. Together, they wander the enchanted glades of Lórien until on Midsummer’s Eve, barefoot among the elanor and niphredil on the hill of Cerin Amroth, they plight their troth. When Frodo comes upon him at the foot of Cerin Amroth during the fellowship’s stay in Lórien, Aragorn, holding a single golden bloom of elanor, is lost in the ‘fair memory’ of those days: ‘Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth’, he says before leaving the hill and coming there ‘never again as a living man’.[19] The sense we have that he will never regain access to this enchanted world again is typical of this type of fairy tale, but Tolkien compounds the sense of loss with a tragic twist. For it is the now-mortal Arwen who, following Aragorn’s eventual death many years later, finds herself wandering in search of the enchanted memory of Lórien from which she is forever locked out, before laying herself down weeping to die on the cold hillside of Cerin Amroth amidst the fallen mallorn-leaves. It is a hard story. Indeed, Tolkien eventually toned it down by revising the appendices for the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, so that Arwen appears less nakedly distraught. Nevertheless, her fate reinforces the extent to which the ‘Return of the King’ enacted by the novel represents the overcoming not just of Sauron but also of the world of Faery. Rather than the marriage of Arwen and Aragorn marking an alliance between Faery and the world of mortal men, it serves mainly to subsume the symbolic power of Arwen’s matrilinear descent from Galadriel within the patrilinear genealogy of Aragorn’s (and his sons’ and their sons’) lineage, which stretches back unbroken to the earliest rulers of elves and men.[20]
We can trace the matrilinear line of descent from Arwen to Galadriel similarly far back through one of Tolkien’s attempts to account for Galadriel’s history, in which he described her as ‘a handmaid of Melian the immortal in the realm of Doriath’ in the First Age.[21] Melian, like Gandalf and Sauron, was one of the semi-divine Maia and originally dwelt in the first Lórien, a beautiful garden of visions and dreams within the heart of Valinor, where she was renowned for her love of birds and skill in songs of enchantment.[22] When elves first awakened in Middle-earth, Melian left Valinor with her birds to fill the silence before dawn with their singing. Here, her singing attracted Elwë Thingol, who would later be the king of the Sindar, the Grey Elves. Losing all other purpose, he followed the sound of her voice until he came upon her in a woodland glade open to the stars, took her hand and ‘straightaway a spell was laid upon him’ so that he stood still with her while many years passed and the elves he was with passed over the seas to Valinor.[23] Together, Melian and Thingol established and ruled over the kingdom of Doriath, which like Faery was kept hidden and defended by her powers of enchantment. Later, Galadriel lived with them, becoming very close to Melian ‘and of her learned great lore and wisdom concerning Middle-earth’.[24] The implication of the phrase in Tolkien’s drafts that there ‘was much love between them’[25] is that their relationship became akin to that of mother and daughter with Galadriel going on to assume the role of Melian’s successor in Middle-earth and to found Lórien as a replacement for Doriath.
Despite the relationship between them in the texts, however, Melian and Galadriel are clearly both incarnations of the Fairy Queen and therefore occupy the same role in Tolkien’s symbolic thinking. The very first stories of what would become The Silmarillion, written by Tolkien while convalescing towards the end of the First World War, feature the mortal man Beren entering Doriath (Faery) and falling in love with Lúthien, the daughter of Melian (the Fairy Queen) and Thingol. An angry Thingol tells Beren that he can only marry Lúthien if he can steal one of the Silmarils from Morgoth’s crown. After many adventures, Beren and Lúthien do succeed in stealing the Silmaril, although in the aftermath they both lose their lives. However, the Valar intervene and award them a second lifetime to live together, which they do far from the sight of elves and men, but the price is that Lúthien, like Arwen millennia after her, must endure a mortal death and leave the world forever. The structural symmetry between the fairy stories of Beren and Lúthien (and Melian) and Aragorn and Arwen (and Galadriel) strongly implies that it is only possible for an immortal elf woman to live with a mortal man by rejecting Faery and the rule of the Fairy Queen and choosing to live by the rules of men.
Galadriel was not just the Third Age equivalent of Melian, but also one of the leaders of the Noldor, the High Elves, who in the First Age rebelled against the Valar by declaring war on Morgoth for his theft of the Silmarils. It is implied by the song she sings when the fellowship leaves Lórien,[26] and was later explicitly stated by Tolkien in his notes to The Road Goes Ever On, that ‘after the overthrow of Morgoth at the end of the First Age a ban was set on her return [to Valinor], and she had replied proudly that she had no wish to do so’.[27] After trying out various combinations, and finally deciding on Galadriel being the sister rather than daughter of Finrod, he allows her to imply that she met Celeborn in the woods that would become Lórien: ‘for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat’.[28] In this manner, Tolkien was able to provide a partial explanation for the relative lack of involvement of Galadriel in the events recounted in The Silmarillion, which would eventually be published several years after his death. For once her role in the revolt against the Valar has been established as due to her desire ‘to see the wide unguarded lands [of Middle-earth] and to rule there a realm of her own’,[29] little else is mentioned of her at all in that book, other than what is discussed above, before she disappears from the story altogether.
Douglas Charles Kane has shown that the way that The Silmarillion was edited from its constituent drafts by Christopher Tolkien diminishes the role of Galadriel as well as omitting other significant female characters. For example, Galadriel is only described as the most beautiful of all the house of Finwë and not also as the most valiant.[30] From other drafts, however, we know that Galadriel was ‘man-high’ being six feet four inches in height and that she was ‘the greatest of the Noldor, except Fëanor maybe’.[31] Furthermore, The Silmarillionalters the significance of Galadriel’s stay in Doriath by suggesting she first met Celeborn there, telling us ‘and there was great love between them’, when in the source material the ‘them’ refers to Galadriel and Melian.[32] Most significantly, Kane points out that the published version of The Silmarillion omits several texts that Tolkien was hoping to include as appendices, including two that were subsequently published in Unfinished Tales: ‘Concerning Galadriel and Celeborn’, an account of their lives in the Second Age, and ‘Aldarion and Erendis’, a long even-handed story of the uneasy relationship of a king and queen of Númenor that reveals much of Tolkien’s rather binary conception of the difference between men and women.[33]
Even more revealing of this binary is ‘Atrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth’, which concerns Galadriel’s brothers Finrod and Aegnor, and the love of the mortal woman Andreth for the latter.[34] This is unique because all the other examples of human-elf relationships in Tolkien involve a mortal man and an immortal elf woman.[35] However, the fact that Andreth’s love remains unrequited suggests that Tolkien’s belief was that such relationships can only work when the elf chooses to live in the mortal world and by extension that all relationships between men and women can only work on male terms. Finrod tries to persuade an ageing Andreth that the fact that Aegnor did not act on his love for her many years before – ‘he withdrew and did not grasp what lay to his hand’[36] – was entirely for her sake. This way she will be relieved of the shame of growing old alongside him, for such marriages can only be for high purposes, brief and hard at the end: ‘the least cruel fate that could befall would be that death would soon end it’.[37] A memory that is fair and unfinished is better than one that goes on to a grievous end, Finrod explains, and this way Aegnor will ever remember her ‘in the sun of morning’.[38] ‘And what shall I remember?’ is Andreth’s immediate bitter response. Although Tolkien, consciously at least, surely intends his readers to accept Finrod’s argument, the emotional impact of the story is generated by Andreth’s distress.
Here, as with the story of Arwen, Tolkien’s ambivalent attitudes are on display as he demonstrates his awareness that a patriarchal ordering of the world does emotional and symbolic violence to women but nonetheless advocates that women should accept their lot within this system or otherwise be unhappy. This doesn’t prevent him from regularly raising the possibility of relationships that transcend such limitations because they begin in versions of Faery. Nevertheless, his commitment to maintain patrilinear hierarchy outweighs his transgressive desires and leads him to represent the ‘long defeat’ of the Fairy Queen and Faery as inevitable, even as he fetishises the consequent sense of loss. Regardless of whether Galadriel herself would be best served to take the ring from Frodo, I’m tempted to argue that Tolkien might have been able to work through his own conflicting desires better if he had written her as so doing. However, the scene already teeters precariously on the edge of male sexual fantasy. John Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg simply made the latent content manifest when they depicted Galadriel as sexually seducing Frodo in their screenplay, written 1969-70, for a projected film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.[39]
After spending several months researching, thinking and writing about this question, I’ve finally concluded that Galadriel actually ‘passes the test’ by not allowing herself to get caught up in the false binary choice between refusing or accepting the ring. She doesn’t have to choose between being the ‘White Lady’ or the ‘Dark Queen’ because she is already both of those and all points between. She doesn’t have to take the ring to deploy its power. She orchestrates the defeat of Sauron from beginning to end; from first convening the White Council to providing Frodo and Sam with the means – from rope, lembas and elven cloaks to the phial that shines with the light of Eärendil’s star – of completing their quest. Most importantly, though, through her ‘magical’ encounter with Frodo and Sam, which is more of a mutual exchange of power than a seduction scene, she transforms them in ways that Gandalf and Aragorn could not. The immature Sam blushes when Galadriel first looks into his eyes,[40] but later during the most desperate moments in the pass of Cirith Ungol, he is able to transform himself into an elvish warrior after invoking her name.[41] Unlike the discarded human lover of fairy lore, left to pine on the cold hillside, Sam remains infused with the power of Galadriel and Faery.
As Tolkien realised to his own surprise and later came to regret, it is this Sam who becomes the hero of The Lord of the Rings.[42] Not only does he complete the hero’s journey by returning home but, when he gets there, he scatters and plants the earth and seeds from Lórien that Galadriel has given him and so effects a magical transformation of the Shire. Within its borders, Sam completes the final stages of his own transformation into a sexual being by marrying Rosie and fathering a daughter named, significantly, after the golden flower of Lórien, Elanor. The implicit promise of a future beyond endless father-son genealogies is held open by the novel’s ending, when he sits with Elanor on his lap.[43]
Even though Galadriel is ‘robed all in glimmering white’ as she, too, returns home at the end of The Lord of the Rings,[44] her smile reminds us that her values are not simply those of the great and the good she has been travelling with. The Fairy Queen remains undefeated. She has passed the ‘test’ she set herself to simultaneously defeat Sauron and placate the Valar, while using her own power to both change the world and hold open the possibilities of Faery even within an age of men. She didn’t have to take the ring because she had the power anyway and she was prepared to use it. There’s a lesson there for our own times.
Nick Hubble (they/them) is a writer, editor, reviewer, critic and researcher, who is based in Aberystwyth, Cymru. Nick's work has appeared in Tribune, Jacobin, LA Review of Books, Strange Horizons, ParSec and Vector. They were a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020-21 and 2021-22.
Notes
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of The Ring, second edition, London: Allen & Unwin, 1966 [1954], p.281.
[2] Tolkien used this spelling in his beautiful late story Smith of Wootton Major.
[3] Maureen Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery, St Albans: Granada, 1974, p.59.
[4] See Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth, London: Harper Collins, 1992, pp.57-9.
[5] See The Erotic World of Faery, pp.15-24.
[6] The Erotic World of Faery, p.93.
[7] Fellowship of the Ring, p.381.
[8] Fellowship of the Ring, p.393.
[9] J.R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1982, p.228.
[10] Unfinished Tales, p.231.
[11] Fellowship of the Ring, p.287.
[12] See Fellowship of the Ring, p.81.
[13] See J.R.R. Tolkien, The Treason of Isengard, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Harper Collins, 2015, p. 222.
[14] Treason of Isengard, p.258.
[15] Treason of Isengard, p.260.
[16] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, second edition, London: Allen & Unwin, 1966 [1954], p.275.
[17] See Treason of Isengard, p.448.
[18] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, second edition, London: Allen & Unwin, 1966 [1955], pp.337-44.
[19] Fellowship of the Ring, p.367.
[20] To be precise, the marriage of Aragorn and Arwen reunites the lines of the brothers Elrond and Elros. Arwen is the daughter of Elrond. Aragorn son of Arathorn is the direct father-to-son descendent of Elendil and through Elendil the direct father-to-son descent of Elros. Genealogical tables on pp.347-9 of The Silmarillion set out the Noldorin, Sindarin and mortal lines of descent of Elrond and Elros. In this respect, the entire Tolkien legendarium revolves around one bloodline.
[21] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle Earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Harper Collins, 2015, p.185.
[22] See J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Allen & Unwin, 1977, 30-2, 63.
[23] Silmarillion, p. 63-4.
[24] Silmarillion, p. 131.
[25] J.R.R. Tolkien, The War of the Jewels, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Harper Collins, 2015, p.35.
[26] See Fellowship of the Ring, p.389.
[27] J.R.R. Tolkien and Donald Swan, The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle, London: Harper Collins, 2002 [1968], p.68.
[28] Fellowship of the Ring, p.372.
[29] Silmarillion, p. 96.
[30] See Douglas Charles Kane, Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion, Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011, p.74; Silmarillion, p.69; J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Harper Collins, 2015, p.177.
[31] Unfinished Tales, pp.229, 286.
[32] See Arda Reconstructed pp.143-4; Silmarillion, p.131; War of the Jewels, p.35.
[33] See Arda Reconstructed, p.250.
[34] See Morgoth’s Ring, pp.303-66. On one of the wrappers of the drafts of this text, Tolkien wrote: ‘“Should be last item in an index” (i.e. to The Silmarillion)’, p.329.
[35] The other human-elf relationships are: Beren and Lúthien; Tuor and Idril; Eärendil and Elwing (although both are of mixed human-elf heritage, the first is always referred to as a mortal man and the latter as an elf in The Silmarillion); Imrazôr the Númenórean and Mithrellas (from whom the Lords of Dol Amroth are descended, see Unfinished Tales, p. 248); Aragorn and Arwen.
[36] Morgoth’s Ring, p.324.
[37] Morgoth’s Ring, p.324.
[38] Morgoth’s Ring, p.325.
[39] See Nick Groom, Twenty-First-Century Tolkien, London: Atlantic Books, 2023, pp.198-208. Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), which was also scripted with Pallenberg, gives some idea of what their version of The Lord of the Rings might have looked like.
[40] See Fellowship of the Ring, p.372.
[41] See Two Towers, pp.338-9.
[42] See Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien, eds, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, London: Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp.105, 329. See also Nick Hubble, ‘“The Choices of Master Samwise”: The Literary History of the 1950s’ in Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble, eds, The 1950s, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 22-5.
[43] See Return of the King, p.311. Tolkien also drafted a closing epilogue that was subsequently not included in the published version of the novel. This featured a conversation between Sam and a teenage Elanor in which he assures her that there will still be great things for her to see and do, and that she too may will face important choices. See J.R.R. Tolkien, Sauron Defeated, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Harper Collins, 2015, pp. 121-33.
[44] Return of the King, p.308.