[davem]

Apologies in advance for this long post - I won't requires notes from anyone to be excused from reading it!

’Here is the gift of Celeborn & Galadriel to the leader of your Company,’ she said to Aragorn, & she gave him a sheath that had been made to fit his sword.... The blade that is drawn from this sheath shall not be stained or broken even in defeat.’ she said

Then Sir Arthur looked on the sword, & liked it passing well. Whether liketh you better, said Merlin, the sword or the scabbard? Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur. Ye are more unwise, said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the swords, for whiles ye have the scabbard upon you, ye shall never lose no blood, be ye never so sore wounded; therefore keep well the scabbard always with you. (Sir Thomas Malory, ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’.)

While in the Arthurian story the Lady of the Lake gives the King both sword & scabbard, & Galadriel gives the scabbard alone, & while the power of the scabbard is different in each case, I think we can see some similarities. In each case the scabbard is a powerful magical implement, & in each case it is given by a powerful otherworld ‘goddess’ figure associated with the element of water. Symbolically the sword is a ‘male’ object, the scabbard is ‘female’, so in both examples we see the protective power of the female. But how different are the two scabbards in what they actually do? Excalibur’s scabbard will protect Arthur from death - no matter how badly wounded he may be. Excalibur is the weapon of the King, the divinely appointed ruler of the Land - it symbolises his power & his authority to rule - authority given to him by the otherworldly powers. While Arthur carries the scabbard he will not be defeated, &, we may suppose, like the sword, it is to be handed on to his heirs, who will have similar luck, due to the blessing of the otherworldly powers.

Similarly, Anduril is not simply Aragorn’s sword - it is an heirloom of his house, forged from the shards of his ancestor’s sword. So, it too symbolises Aragorn’s power & authority, & the gift of the scabbard carries the blessing of the Elves’, the otherworldly ‘powers’ within Middle-earth. It is gifted by their ‘Queen’, & received by the King on a visit to the Otherworld, just as with Arthur. We know the Company have been in the otherworld, in the world of dreams, not simply by the atmosphere of the place, by the ‘magic’ they experience there, but also by clear statements made, first & most clearly, by Celeborn, who greets Aragorn with the words:

’Welcome Aragorn son of Arathorn!’ he said. ‘It is eight & thirty years of the world outside since you came to this land

(which clearly implies a different kind of time existing outside Lorien)

&, secondly & more subtly, by the author, who tells us:

..no sound or dream disturbed their slumber.

while in Lorien.

Why not? Because they are already dreaming - their whole experience in the golden Wood is a kind of extended ‘waking’ dream. This ‘dream’ begins with Frodo falling asleep in the Mallorn tree on the borders of Lorien:

At last lulled by the wind in the boughs above , & the sweet murmur of the falls of Nimrodel below, Frodo fell asleep with the song of Legolas running in his mind.

& ends with him ‘falling asleep’ once more, prior to his ‘awakening’ in the ‘real’ world, at the end of the chapter:

Frodo sat & listened to the faint lap & gurgle of the river fretting among the tree-roots & driftwood near the shore, until his head nodded & he fell into an uneasy sleep.

Frodo (& the others) fall ‘asleep’ in ‘our’ world & wake up in the otherworld at the beginning of their dream, & fall ‘asleep’ in the otherworld & awaken in ‘our’ world at the end of it, bearing gifts from its inhabitants.

Tolkien originally intended to emphasise this dreamlike aspect of Lorien by having no time pass while the company were there. CT comments (The Treason of Isengard p285-6) :

When Haldir reappeared to act as their guide from Caras Galadon...he said...’There are strange things happening away back there. We do not know what is the meaning of them.’ This was subsequently struck out on the fair copy, bu tthen marked stet; this was in turn struck out & Haldir’s words do not appear in the following text of the chapter in FR. It is very hard to see why my father removed them, & why he hesitated back & forth before finally doing so. Apparently as a comment on this, he pencilled a note on the manuscript: ‘This won’t do - if Lorien is timeless then nothing will have happened since they entered.’ I can only take this to mean that within Lorien the Company existed in a different Time - with mornings & evenings & passing days - while in the world outside Lorien no time passed: they had left that ‘external’ Time, & would return to it at the same moment as they left it.

Tolkien himself notes in reference to the chronology of the story:’Does time cease at Lorien or go faster? So that it might be spring or nearly so.’In an early draft Frodo comments:

The power of the Lady was upon it. So for us there time might have passed, while the world hastened. Or in a little while we could savour much, while the world tarried. The latter was her will.’

So it seems Tolkien was toying with the idea that it was not some ‘innate’ power or aspect of the Otherworld that caused the slowing or ceasing of time but the will of Galadriel herself - Time moves differently (if it moves at all) because she commands it to. This opens up many new areas of speculation - why, for instance, did Tolkien reject the idea - would it have proved too complex or confsing for readers, or would it have made Galadriel too powerful, too dictatorial - too ‘unnatural’? (Flieger’s ‘A Question of Time’ is the best resource for anyone wanting to pursue these ideas further.)

We also get another account of Elven ‘magic’, as Galadriel tells how she ‘created’ Lorien - she ‘sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, & leaves of gold there grew. She then sang of the wind, & the wind struck up & blew through those same leaves. Yet it seems her power of song is fading - her ‘crown’ is now nothing but ‘fading elanor’ - dying flowers, reminding us of ‘Frodo’s Dreme’:

Of river-leaves and the rush-sheaves
I made me a mantle of jewel-green,
a tall wand to hold, and a flag of gold;
my eyes shone like the star-sheen.
With flowers crowned I stood on a mound,
and shrill as a call at cock-crow
proudly I cried: 'Why do you hide?
Why do none speak, wherever I go?
Here now I stand, king of this land,
with gladdon-sword and reed-mace.

We also see her doubt of her own fate expressed here - she has already told Frodo that she will ‘diminish, & go into the West, & remain Galadriel’, but here she seems doubtful - if she ‘sings’ of a ship to bear her into the West will it really come? Maybe she won’t diminish & ‘go into the West’ - maybe she’ll just ‘diminish’. But after all is she as ‘perilous’ as we’ve been led to believe?

Frodo took the phial, & for a moment as it shone between them, he saw her standing again like a queen, great & beautiful, but no longer terrible...

She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present & yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left behind by the flowing streams of Time....

He bowed, but found no words to say.

Her gifts to Frodo & Sam reflect powerfully their differing visions in the Mirror - Frodo’s is the phial - the light of Earendil, the Silmaril, set amid the waters of her fountain - a mystical gift for one on a mystical journey, a light to illumine his coming ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. Sam’s gift is earth from her orchard to heal the wounds of his beloved Shire; ‘All foretelling may be vain’ as she tells Gimli, yet she can still see into the future, & knows what will be needed.

‘Namarie’, Galadriel’s Lament, is the other poem - Tolkien’s own melody for it is apparently based on Gregorian chant (& he sings it very well). A couple of interesting points are made by Tolkien in ‘The Road Goes Ever On’. First there is the mention of miruvor:

Yeni ve linte yuldar avanier
mi oromardi lisse-miruvoreva
Andune pella Vardo tellumar
nu luini, yassen tintillar i eleni
omaryo aire-tari-lirinen

recalls the cordial of Imladris & Tolkien’s account of it is:

miruvore. According to the Eldar, a word derived from the language of the Valar; the name that they gave to the drink poured out at their festivals. Its making & the meaning of its name were not known for certain, but the Eldar believed it to be made from the honey of the undying flowers in the gardens of Yavanna, though it was clear & translucent.

But is this the same as the miruvor which Elrond gives to Gandalf? If it is it must have come from Valinor, carried by the exiled Noldor, & have been priceless. In itself that would show how seriously Elrond viewed the Quest, & why Gandalf was so sparing with it.

Second, the reference to Varda having ‘uplifted her hands like clouds, & all paths are drowned deep in shadow’. Tolkien explains:

After the destruction of the Two Trees, & the flight from Valinor of the revolting Eldar, Varda lifted up her hands, in obedience to the decree of Manwe, & summoned up the dark shadows which engulfed the shores & the mountains & last of all the fana (figure) of Varda, with her hands turned eastward in rejection, standing white upon Oiolosse.

So, it is Varda, Elbereth Herself, who is symbolically rejecting the return of the Noldor, & in this case specifically denying Galadriel’s return into the West.

Finally, to Gimli’s gift - three golden hairs from her head for an heirloom & a pledge of goodwill between the Mountain & the Wood. Living ‘gold’ - as perfect a symbol of the union of Elven & Dwarven natures as can be imagined - & once set in imperishable crystal it will outlast both races, forever a pledge of good will between those who will soon (relatively speaking) be no more:

For so it seemed to them: Lorien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey & leafless world.

(Before I end this I want to quote a passage from a post of Squatter’s:

Is this the conversation of two characters without depth? It takes little imagination to see in Legolas' words the pity of the Elves' relations with other races. The mortals move on and leave, but the Elves are trapped within the world, unchanging and unable to follow. The most beautiful of their creations are destroyed, and they live to see most triumph turn back to disaster. Legolas speaks with the voice of experience. He has had many years to learn that we cannot hold on to the world; but Gimli is feeling for the first time the pain that the Elves feel at the passing away of beautiful things: a pain that they live with daily, and must overcome in bringing about the fall of Sauron. Even for one whose memory is like waking life, memory is not enough, and it is telling that Legolas never claims that it is. What he says is that an unstained memory is a great gift, and he has already implied that memory is what everything must eventually become. Who among the Fellowship is so well-placed as he to know this? This is a conversation about very profound thoughts, and if the characters are talking about them, they must also be thinking them. They might be talking about Lórien on the surface, but on a deeper level they are talking about the very relationship between experience and memory. This seems to indicate as well as anything that there is more to Gimli than a solid Dwarven miner and more to Legolas than the woodland prince. It may not come out often, but it is there; and we need to know that it is there if we are to feel for those characters at all.

The full post can be read here:
http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showpos...&postcount=127 )