Celeborn

Celeborn belongs to the Elder Kindred, and in the narrative of the War of the Ring he is one of the two lords of Lothlórien, holding that authority jointly with Galadriel rather than beneath her. When the Fellowship is brought before them in the high talan of Caras Galadhon, the two are described as of like height and alike in gravity, robed in white; his hair is long and silver-bright, hers golden. The bearing given him there is that of an Elf whose memory reaches back beyond the reckoning of Men, and who speaks of the elder days of Middle-earth as of things he has seen. His name follows the Sindarin usage set out in the appendix on spelling: the initial consonant is a hard k, never the soft sibilant that English readers instinctively supply, and each of the three vowels is sounded in its own right.

The name is transparent within the Elvish tongues. Its first element is the Sindarin word for silver, the same that stands at the head of Celebrimbor and Celebrant, and its second is the ordinary word for tree; the compound is thus a silver tree, which is also the name borne by the white tree that grew in Tol Eressëa, a scion of the elder trees of Valinor. In the discussions that survive from Tolkien's later years the name is given a further form in Telerin, Teleporno, built from the cognate words for silver and tree in that speech, with Celeborn presented as its regular Sindarin equivalent. The epithet attached to him in the later writings is simply the Wise, and the title by which he is most often designated is Lord of Lórien.

His descent was never fixed. The published tradition makes him a Sinda of Beleriand and a kinsman of Thingol, and one worked-out genealogy gives him as son of Galadhon and grandson of Elmo, Thingol's younger brother, with a brother named Galathil whose daughter was Nimloth of Doriath. A late reconsideration reverses this entirely, setting his birth in Aman among the Teleri of Alqualondë and treating the Telerin form of his name as the original, so that Celeborn of Doriath becomes a later assimilation rather than a fact of birth. Christopher Tolkien printed both without deciding between them, and the two accounts cannot be reconciled: they differ not in detail but in kindred, in continent, and in whether he ever dwelt in Beleriand at all.

The earliest events in which Celeborn appears belong to the published tradition of Beleriand, where he is found in Doriath under the protection of Melian's Girdle. There Galadriel came in the years after the return of the Noldor, and there the two were wedded; the marriage joined a Noldorin princess to a lord of Thingol's people at a time when the two kindreds were bound by law and by suspicion in equal measure. Nothing is recorded of his part in the ruin of Menegroth or in the wars that emptied Beleriand. What the account of the Rings of Power does establish is the consequence: when the Elder Days ended and the pardon of the Valar was opened to the exiles, Celeborn and Galadriel remained east of the Sea, and they are still in Middle-earth when the tale resumes in the Second Age.

For the long middle stretch of his life no single narrative survives. The materials gathered under the history of Galadriel and Celeborn give several courses that cannot be laid end to end: in one they dwell for a time in Lindon under Gil-galad before crossing the Ered Luin eastward; in another they hold a lordship in Eriador; in others they are found in Eregion at the height of its smithcraft, or in a haven on the coast of Belfalas, or already in the wood on the Anduin that would later be called Lórien. The versions agree on little beyond the fact of their long wandering and on Celeborn's settled dislike of Dwarves, which the writer traces to Doriath. In the fullest telling of the fall of Eregion he leads a sortie from Ost-in-Edhil and drives Sauron's vanguard back from the gates, but is too few to hold the city, and is afterwards cut off with the force that Gil-galad had sent east under Elrond. The Tale of Years places that destruction in the year 1697 of the Second Age, and the founding of Imladris in the same year.

The Third Age gives firmer footing, chiefly through his household. In the year 109 his daughter Celebrían was wedded to Elrond, and from that marriage came Elladan and Elrohir in 130 and Arwen in 241, so that the line of Imladris and the line of Lórien were joined. In 2509 Celebrían, travelling to her father's country, was waylaid by Orcs in the pass beneath Caradhras and taken; her sons recovered her, but she had been hurt beyond healing in Middle-earth, and in the following year she went to the Havens and over the Sea. From that date onward the road between Rivendell and Lórien lay under a shadow, and Celeborn's kindred was divided by the same water that his wife had refused to cross.

He enters the narrative of the War of the Ring on the seventeenth of January, 3019, when the Company of the Ring is brought at evening to Caras Galadhon. He counts the travellers, finds them one short of the number reported, and presses for the truth about Gandalf; on learning that they had come through Moria he says that he would have refused them passage into his land had he known it, and that only pity for their weariness restrains him. Galadriel checks him, and he withdraws the reproach openly, addressing Gimli with courtesy thereafter. A month later, on the sixteenth of February, it is Celeborn who governs the practical business of their departure: he sets out the country ahead, the two banks of Anduin, the rapids where the boats must be carried, and the choice that waits at the falls, and he warns them against turning aside into the old forest under the mountains. The boats and the provision for the journey are his gift, the more personal gifts Galadriel's.

While the war was fought in the south, Lórien was attacked three times from Dol Guldur, on the eleventh, the fifteenth and the twenty-second of March, and each assault was thrown back. On the twenty-eighth, six days after the Ring had gone into the Fire, Celeborn led the host of Lórien across the Anduin and took the stronghold, and Galadriel broke down its walls and opened its pits. On the sixth of April he met Thranduil in the middle of the wood, and the two lords divided it: the north as far as the mountains to Thranduil, the south below the Narrows to Celeborn as East Lórien, and the wide middle to the Woodmen and the Beornings. The forest was given a new name, the Wood of Greenleaves, in place of the name it had carried through the age of the shadow.

Within the narrative his office is lordship in the plain sense: he determines who may enter his country and on what terms. In the last years of the Third Age the law of the wood barred strangers, and the marchwardens who take the Company near Nimrodel hold them to it, imposing a blindfold on Gimli as the condition of passage. It is by word sent down from the two lords that the condition is first extended to all and then lifted altogether, so that the whole Company walks free. Authority of that kind is executive and revocable, exercised through speech and judgement rather than through anything else; and nothing in the narrative ascribes to him a working beyond it. No craft, no enchantment and no instrument of power is placed in his hands at any point.

The means by which the wood was preserved was likewise not his. In the account of the Rings of Power the white ring is Galadriel's, and the unfading of Lórien is referred to her keeping of it; Celeborn is nowhere numbered among the keepers of the Three, and no ring or other made thing of consequence is attributed to him. The papers gathered on the pair describe their rule as a guardianship rather than a kingship, the last king of the Galadhrim having been lost long before they took up the ordering of the realm. What those papers do credit to him is narrower and more ordinary: competence as a captain in the field, judgement in counsel, and a long and particular knowledge of the lands between the mountains and the sea.

Where he speaks from his own judgement rather than from record, the narrative leaves room for error. His account of the river road is exact, but the caution he attaches to the forest under the mountains rests on old report, and events do not bear it out: the two hobbits driven into that wood find there the one power that would bring down Isengard. The single general judgement he pronounces is of another order, that the Dark Lord's strength shows itself most clearly in the divisions that hold his enemies apart, and it is offered by way of amends after he has spoken too quickly against a guest. The wisdom for which he is named is thus of a sober and correctable kind. When the power that had preserved Lórien passed over the Sea he had no means of his own with which to hold the land, and he did not attempt to.

Outward, his dealings are few and each is characteristic. An inherited grievance against the Dwarves is raised and set aside within one evening, and the retraction is made openly, which is what turns an accommodation into a friendship; by the parting he speaks to Gimli with a warmth he shows to none of the others. With the king of the Woodland Realm he has no recorded intercourse until the fighting is over, and their meeting produces a partition of responsibility rather than a treaty. His enmity with the Dark Lord is likewise expressed once and in action only, in the crossing of Anduin and the taking of the fortress that had troubled his borders for centuries.

Celeborn entered the legendarium sideways, through the writing of The Lord of the Rings rather than out of the older matter of Beleriand, and the manuscripts show him taking shape only as the chapters in the golden wood were being composed. In those drafts the lord who receives the travellers in the tree-city is at first not Celeborn at all but Galdaran, the name being replaced in the course of revision, while the lady standing beside him bears her familiar name from an early stage. Much else in the episode was still unsettled at that point: the wood, its people and the terms on which the Company is admitted were all worked over more than once before the narrative reached the form that was printed.

What the drafts conspicuously do not supply is a past for him. In these papers he is the lord of a woodland people and nothing further: no youth in Beleriand, no kinship with the king who ruled there, no crossing of the Sea in either direction, and no share in the older legends, which had been carried through many years of writing without him. All of that was added afterwards, when the appendices and the resumed work on the Elder Days obliged the two rulers of the wood to be fitted into a history that had been complete before they were imagined. The question of his kindred that Tolkien was still turning over in his last years is thus the far end of a long process, and the drafts help to explain why no single account of his descent was ever brought to a settled form.

In Peter Jackson's three films Celeborn is played by Marton Csokas, and the part is reduced to a few moments beside Galadriel in the first instalment. He stands with her when the Company is received in Lothlórien and speaks briefly of the one who is missing from their number, but the substance of the book's audience is transferred to Galadriel or dropped: there is no reproach directed at the travellers for having forced the road under the mountains, and therefore no public retraction of it and no reconciliation with the Dwarf, which in the narrative is the chief thing the scene accomplishes for him. The departure from the wood is likewise altered. The gift-giving is absent from the theatrical version and restored only in the extended cut, where Galadriel bestows everything herself, so that the boats, the provisions and the detailed instruction on the river and its rapids—the one stretch of the story in which Celeborn directs rather than accompanies—leave no trace. He is not carried into the later two films, and he is absent altogether from the same director's Hobbit trilogy, where the council of the Wise and the assault on Dol Guldur are staged without him.

Nothing beyond that had been settled through the seasons broadcast to date. The older screen adaptations do not supply the balance. Ralph Bakshi's animated film breaks off after Helm's Deep, and the Rankin/Bass television film of 1980 takes up the closing part of the story without returning to Lothlórien, so that the events in which Celeborn acts on his own account—the crossing of Anduin, the taking of the fortress, the division of the forest afterwards—have never been dramatised for the screen at all.