Serene and telepathic, the fair lady of the wood, the Elf Queen who keeps her innermost thoughts hidden, Galadriel stares at the ring of ultimate power that Frodo offers her.
She has long wanted it, and now here it is, being offered freely by a guileless hobbit, an accidental ringbearer, who wearies of its weight, fears its pull.
In an instant Galadriel sees how the ring would overpower her — even her, with all her forest sorceries. The grove where she is standing takes on an eerie green glow, positive and negative light switch. “In place of a Dark Lord,” she warns the hobbit, “you will have a Queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Dawn. Treacherous as the Sea.” She grows immense before his eyes. “Stronger than the foundations of the earth.” Her voice thunders with a multitude of shrill over-voices:
“All shall love me and despair!”
And then, in one of the most fateful turns in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, she rejects the offer, as she is destined to. “I pass the test,” she gasps in relief. “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”
This would be reason enough to love the Elf Queen. But her wisdom, as well as her depth as a character thanks to the sinister shading suggested by how ready she is for the temptation of ultimate power, is made indelible by the way she is played in the film The Fellowship of the Ring by the wonderful Cate Blanchett, right. (More of Cate a bit later.)
Some readers may argue that Galadriel is not, strictly speaking, a witch.
Gimli, however, the dawrf in the fellowship, who has a war-born racial enmity to all elves, describes her as such when (in the film, though not in the book) he warns his companions. “They say a great sorceress lives in these woods, an elf witch of terrible power. All who look on her fall under her spell” — as, in fact, will Gimli himself when he is moved to love by her tall, spectral beauty and queenly courtesy.
For our purposes this Halloween night, Galadriel is a witch — even though she would not recognize that word. “For this is what you folk would call magic, I believe,” she tells one of the hobbits before she allows him to see visions in a silver bowl of water. “Though I do not understand clearly what they mean; as they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel.”
She is innocent of the uncouth Judeo-Christian Satanism we attribute to the word. The Elf Queen is of the pagan order, a witch in the sense that Glinda of Oz is a witch, though Galadriel is a graver character in a graver tale.
Here are her powers: She is a sylvan sprite of the twilight wood, with telepathic access to, in her words, “things that were, things that are, things that yet may be.” As soon as Frodo steps into her wood, she syncs up with his mind and speaks to it in the stirring of the leaves. “Frodo,” the wood whispers. “Your coming is to us as the footsteps of Doom. You bring great evil here, ringbearer!”
The ring, as a container of absolute power, will corrupt all who wear it (including, as it turns out, Frodo … including, in fact, the ring itself!: By infecting all former ringbearers with a lust to possess it, the rings brings about its own melting dissolution in a pit of fire.)
Galadriel, at some level, senses that she will not be a player in this drama and so passes “the test,” steps aside so the more powerful destiny of the ring can play through.
Galadriel deals, as the classic witch does, in nature magic, dependent on sacred groves, lakes and trees — particularly trees, a charming British touch that winks backward at the moonlit rites of the Druids.
J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings because he wanted to create a British mythology, at one with the Viking sagas and Arcadian myths, but with a distinctively English inflection. In the process, he undid the slanders that an imperial Christianity had worked on the native Saxon paganism. In historic times, when the Druids were denigrated, the worship of the English countryside was reduced from sacred groves to an iconography that placed witches with toadstools, newts and bats. Out of the wizened hags with their hair-sprouting chin-moles, the fabulist Tolkein worked backward to a race of elemental elves and their beautiful tree-dwelling queen, Galadriel.
Galadriel is neither “good” nor “bad,” as nature can be neither good nor bad, but can be either at different times, in different places. Galadriel is simply herself. The author vehemently rejected metaphorical readings of his work, particularly those with a modern slant — though such readings are tantalizing:
Published in 1954 - 55, the trilogy seems a bald stand-in for the Cold War, with its battle between East and West; its ring of power that dooms all who wield it, a perfect fit for the atom bomb.
Tolkein saw this interpretation as an insult to his imagination, as if his creative abilities were grounded in the contemporary. In fact, he was a professor of ancient Anglo-Saxon and a scholar of medieval literature. He so hated industrialism (machinery is repeatedly aligned with dark forces in the Ring trilogy) that he refused to own a car, preferring to ride a bicycle.
Galadriel is his wonderful tribute to a pre-Garden of Eden spirituality, one that is at home in the wilder wood, untended and tangled with branches.
And Cate Blanchett, a favorite Nightcharm actress, plays her with a native intuition, catching all the iridescent, fairy-wing modulations of the character. It is no more than a cameo in a three-picture epic, and yet, in Cate’s incarnation, how quickly we come to love Galadriel … and despair!
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I quite agree– my favourite witch, too.
Lovely article!
Wonderful analysis and homage to character, actress, and author.
You do Galadriel a disservice, however, when you say she is neither good nor bad. Her name means in part “light” and in a work where the author made clear that Light is Good and Darkness is Evil, Galadriel is Good to the core.
While Tolkein wove pagan mysticism into his work, he was also very Christian, a fact that we see in his back-story to the Elves, who are divine beings, the highest of all life-forms on Earth, but the bottom of the totem in that stainless land over the sea from which they come. Part of their deep melancholy owes to the fact that they are essentially strangers in this mortal land, and the Dark Lord uses this to tempt them away from their purity–”why be inferior in Paradise?…Come with me and you can be Gods once again” is his message. They are angels, but angels with a very organic, grounded, pagan flavor, not bound by the iconography of Christian tradition.
Tolkein’s ability to weave mythologies from such disparate sources into a unified, believable tapestry was part of his genius. But the line between Good and Evil was for the most part very clear and bright for Tolkein, and Galadriel and the Elves are very much on the side of Good/Light/Clarity. Terrible and incandescent at times, yes, but never “bad.”
I think Tolkein saw Nature as innately good, rather than neutral, and it is the misuse, corruption, and destruction of nature that makes mankind a morally questionable and even reviled creature. Natural disaters are merely part of an order that man simply cannot comprehend, and we conveniently call such conditions “bad” when they do not suit our purposes or survival. In this sense, nature simply IS, as you state, but as moral, sentient beings, Tolkein’s Elves, unlike Industrial Men, are far from neutral.
This is a very intelligent site. Very interesting and engaging and also entertaining.
If all witches look like Galadriel, then let Hansel and Gretel be eaten and to heck with Dorothy. Her bad cousin must be Snow White’s beautiful stepmom/queen in that disney cartoon.
We love Cate!
Thank you, Daniel. I bow to your superior expertise on Middle Earth. I do see your point that Tolkien was strict about realms of good being separated from realms of bad, but so many of the important characters exist in between, like Gollum, perhaps the most profoundly tragic character in the piece.
I still would argue that Galadriel is not so good that her refusal of the ring is a forgone conclusion. There is a real sense of self-discovery when she refuses the ring she has long coveted. So there must be some shade of gray in that gossamer soul of hers.
Would love to know your thoughts on the film, which I felt improved on certain things in the occasionally turgid books. The full fleshing out of Arwen (Liv Tyler), for instance, and the fact that Jackson could bring off the long-winded Ents (the talking trees) at all was really a tribute to the script’s ingenuity.
I can’t remember Galladriel from the book because Cate Blanchette so completely captures the spirit and the screenwriters her words. Most people don’t realize that the book began because Tolkien studied linguistics and began the task of creating the Elfen language and then to the myths that might have been. So the story we end up seeing has a tremendous foundation. And that I believe is what gives the story its weight and depth.
I just rewatched the Fellowship of the Rings. It is so holding because it is so deep in thought. It is by far my favorite of the trilolgy because it captures so will the essence of the quest.
In truth I think we all bear the “Ring”. It is the illusion of the material world and of our ego self and the task of destroying it.
I don’t think that the inspiration for it was the Cold War. I think most scholars think it was WWII. Hitler was slowly devouring Europe and the British were loathe to acknowledge that it would come to them and remained determined pacifists, having suffered the slaughter of WWI
Well it’s a great movie series. Didn’t really think about the “witch” all that much though.
Great homage! This piece makes me want to watch the film again.
Wow, it’s not every day I get one of my comments acknowledged by the esteemed Editor in Chief of Nightcharm! And yes, I’ve been a card-carrying Tolkein nerd for almost as long as I’ve been able to read, but I’m far from being an expert. I think your analysis of Galadriel is right on, particularly in your insight into the temptation she faced. That scene would not have been as compelling as it was if we KNEW she wouldn’t give in, and her strength is not a foregone conclusion. The deep, grey sadness of her race is there, and we don’t always know in which direction it will take her and her people.
The clear, bright line I mentioned is also there, but the pull each side has over the other is what gives the story so much of its tension–it’s a struggle we can all relate to, and one that quite literally tore Gollum in two. His torturous position right ON the line, straddling it, pulled painfully in both directions at once, is what makes him the most complicated, reluctantly endearing character for so many.
And what can we say about Jackson? His translation is a once-in-a-lifetime event, executed with the kind of love and skill that few film-makers ever achieve. The story of Arwen and Aragorn, which can seem rather remote and lifeless in the books, is brought to real life by the script. Even the most jaded queen can’t help but shed a tear when the lovers are reunited in victory. The Ents of course are a perennial favorite for any fan of the novels. We waited with bated breath to see how these trees would be rendered. And we were not disappointed. This was the area Jackson took the most liberties with as far as timing and overlap of the various storylines goes, but the result was far more direct and suitable for the screen.
The only real gripe I ever had with the film version is the removal of the Scouring of the Shire, a long denouement sequence where the hobbits return to the Shire and find it has been taken over by Saruman (who doesn’t die in the book). Did anyone notice in the extended film version that Merry and Pippin found some of the Shire’s finest pipeweed in Saruman’s stores? How did it get there? BUSINESS as usual, of course, and Saruman found little resistance when he decided to turn the Shire into his personal plantation. This whole chapter speaks of the trials so many soldiers and freed prisoners had to face when returning home after WWII, only to find their beloved homes and families turned upside down, often under the control of new regimes that were not always benevolent. The symbology is especially relevant to gay men who found themselves at the mercy of “liberating” governments who were just as willing (and happy) to see them burn as Hitler was. Alas, I forgave Jackson his trespass when I realised how very long the story already was, and how difficult it was to close cleanly. And we’ll always have the books to turn to for that extra depth.
John, I really want to thank you and David for making this site what it is. The men are great, but Alessandro said it–this IS a very intelligent site, full of humor and insight. And since I don’t have a subscription, I really DO read it for the articles! Your work in the gay media has opened doors and minds, and gay culture in general owes a debt to pioneers like yourself. Keep it coming.