Galadriel

Galadriel belongs to the Noldor, the second of the three kindreds of the Eldar, and to the royal house of that people. The Lord of the Rings itself gives only glimpses of her descent: the annals of Appendix B name her as the sister of Finrod Felagund, King of Nargothrond, and count her among those of the Noldor who stayed east of the Sea after the wars of the Elder Days. Within the narrative she is spoken of chiefly by titles — the Lady of Lórien, the Lady of the Galadhrim, the Lady of the Golden Wood. Her name follows the rules set out in Appendix E: the g is hard, and the stress falls on the second syllable.

The posthumously published writings fill out this lineage. Galadriel was born in Aman in the age of the Two Trees, the daughter of Finarfin, third son of Finwë, and of Eärwen of Alqualondë, daughter of Olwë, lord of the Teleri. Through her father's mother, Indis, she also had Vanyarin ancestry, so that the blood of all three Elven kindreds met in her; her hair, deep gold shot with silver, was held to recall the mingled light of the Trees themselves. Through Eärwen she was moreover close kin to Olwë's brother Elwë, called Thingol in Middle-earth, a connection that later opened Doriath to her.

"Galadriel" is not her original name. Her father-name was Artanis, "noble woman", while her mother, with the insight customary in mother-names, called her Nerwen, "man-maiden", on account of her unusual height and strength of body and will. The name by which she is remembered began as Alatáriel, an epessë in the Telerin tongue given to her by Celeborn, meaning a maiden crowned with a radiant garland — an image of her hair. She chose its Sindarin form, Galadriel, as her name in Middle-earth. Tolkien noted that the name has no connection with Sindarin galadh, "tree", though outsiders who knew her as the Lady of the tree-dwelling Galadhrim sometimes altered it accordingly.

Galadriel's recorded history begins with the ruin of Valinor. When Morgoth and Ungoliant destroyed the Two Trees and Fëanor summoned the Noldor to pursue the enemy into Middle-earth, she stood among the leaders of the rebellion — according to the Quenta Silmarillion, the only woman of the Noldor to take her place among the contending princes that day. She swore none of Fëanor's oaths, yet his words kindled in her a longing for wide lands of her own to order as she would. Estranged from Fëanor's house, she journeyed with the following of Fingolfin, and with that host endured the crossing of the grinding ice of the Helcaraxë after Fëanor's people had burned the ships at Losgar. Like all who persisted in the march, she fell under the Doom of Mandos, which closed the West to the exiles.

In Beleriand she found a welcome in the guarded kingdom of Doriath that was denied to most of the exiles. There she dwelt long in the company of Melian the Maia, from whom she gained much wisdom and knowledge of Middle-earth; to Melian she spoke freely of the Trees and the Silmarils, but was silent concerning the kinslaying at Alqualondë, so that the queen only guessed at a shadow lying on the Noldor. In Doriath, too, grew her love for Celeborn, and for his sake she did not accompany her brother Finrod to his new realm of Nargothrond. She endured through the wars and ruins of the First Age, and when the host of the Valar overthrew Morgoth in the War of Wrath she did not take ship into the West: the Tale of Years counts her among those of the Noldor who remained east of the Sea.

Of her long Second Age the surviving accounts are fragmentary and do not fully agree, for Tolkien left the narratives gathered in Unfinished Tales in several conflicting forms. The Tale of Years records that she and Celeborn dwelt for a time in Lindon south of the Lune, while the later traditions associate them variously with Eregion, with the dwarf-mansions of Khazad-dûm, and with the wood of Lórinand east of the Misty Mountains. The accounts converge on the matter of the Rings of Power: when Sauron, who in fair disguise had ensnared the smiths of Eregion, forged the One Ring and his purpose stood revealed, Celebrimbor entrusted Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, to Galadriel. Through the long years in which Sauron held the Ruling Ring she kept it hidden and unused, for the Three could not safely be wielded while the One remained in his hand.

In the Third Age she emerges as one of the chief opponents of Sauron's slow return. By her own account in The Fellowship of the Ring it was she who first moved for the summoning of the White Council, which was formed in the year 2463, and she had wished Gandalf rather than Saruman to preside over it. When the Balrog's awakening drove the Dwarves from Moria in 1980 and 1981, and Amroth, king of the wood, was lost at sea, Galadriel and Celeborn in time assumed the guardianship of his people. Under her power, sustained in secret by Nenya, the land became Lothlórien as the Fellowship found it: a preserved remnant of the Elder Days, into which no evil could pass unless it were brought within.

Within The Lord of the Rings Galadriel stands as one of the principal powers set against Sauron, yet the nature of that power is carefully circumscribed. It works through Nenya, and the Three Rings, as Elrond explains at his council, were never made as weapons or instruments of dominion: their virtue lies in understanding, making, and healing, and in holding back decay. Lórien's arrested autumn is therefore an act of preservation, not of conquest, and it rests on a foundation she cannot control — the fate of the One. She herself acknowledges that the destruction of the Ruling Ring would cause the power of the Three to fail, so that in aiding the Quest she consents to the undoing of everything her ring has maintained.

Her personal faculties are likewise shown with their limits attached. She tells Frodo that she can perceive much of the Dark Lord's mind, at least where it concerns the Elves, while her own thought remains closed to him — a contest of concealment, not of open strength. Her Mirror, for all its reach across time, is an untrustworthy guide: some of what it shows may never come to pass, acting on its visions can bring them about, and she pointedly declines to advise Frodo on what he sees. Nor does her protection extend beyond her borders; a note in the Tale of Years observes that while no assault could have overcome the power dwelling in Lórien unless Sauron had come there in person, that power defended the land itself and no more.

The posthumous writings widen this picture. The account of the Rings of Power appended to The Silmarillion reckons her among the greatest of the Eldar left in Middle-earth, and Unfinished Tales adds that from her youth she possessed an unusual insight into the minds of others, tempered by a willingness to judge them with mercy. The same texts make her one of Sauron's earliest and most persistent adversaries in the Second Age: in Eregion she saw through the fair-seeming emissary who courted the Noldorin smiths, and he in turn regarded her as his chief obstacle among the Elves. Yet these accounts also insist on an inner limit — the old desire for a realm of her own, which made the offer of the One Ring a genuine temptation rather than an idle one.

Her friendship with Gimli displays the same discernment turned across an ancient grievance. Having won the Dwarf's heart at their first meeting, she gained a devotion so complete that he afterwards challenged Éomer of Rohan over words he judged less than courteous toward her. At the Fellowship's parting, invited to name a gift, Gimli ventured to ask for a single hair of her head and received three, an exchange without precedent between their peoples. Toward Gandalf she acted as preserver as much as colleague: it was she who sent Gwaihir the Windlord to seek him after his fall, and in her land the returned wizard was healed and clothed anew; through him she then sent words of counsel to the hunters of the Orcs.

The posthumous writings set a telling refusal beside this generosity. A late account given in Unfinished Tales relates that in Valinor Fëanor, marvelling at her hair, three times begged her for a single tress and was three times denied, for she perceived in him a darkness she would not serve; between those two there was no friendship ever after. Her attachments thus trace a consistent pattern of judgment — trust withheld from the proud kinsman and freely granted to the humble stranger — the same weighing of hearts that had governed her guarded candour with Melian and, at the last, her refusal of the One Ring.

Galadriel has no place in the pre-war Silmarillion tradition: none of the texts written before The Lord of the Rings knows of a daughter in Finwë's house who went into exile. She entered the legendarium through the drafting of the Lothlórien chapters, recorded in The Treason of Isengard. In a preliminary outline the ruler of the Golden Wood was a king, called Galdaran, and the mirror of visions that Frodo would look into was conceived as Galdaran's; only as the chapters took written form did the Lady emerge beside and then above the Lord, receiving the name Galadriel, and her stature grew steadily through the successive drafts of the Company's sojourn and departure.

Her First Age history is thus a retrospective construction, worked into the older texts after the trilogy was complete. In the revised Quenta Silmarillion and the Annals of Aman of the early 1950s she was inserted into the genealogy of the Noldor as the daughter of Finwë's third son — then still named Finrod, while Felagund bore the name Inglor; only later did Tolkien shift these names to the familiar Finarfin and Finrod Felagund. The late essay known as The Shibboleth of Fëanor carried her development furthest in another direction: there she opposes Fëanor from the beginning, fights at Alqualondë in defence of her mother's kindred against his followers, and endures the crossing of the Ice, while her motives for leaving Aman are weighed in terms that Tolkien continued to alter and never brought to a final, consistent form.

Galadriel has appeared in most major adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. In Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 she was voiced by Annette Crosbie, and in the BBC radio dramatisation of 1981 by Marian Diamond. The distribution of her gifts to the Fellowship, part of the theatrical narrative in the book, was included only in the extended edition of the first film.

Blanchett returned as Galadriel in Jackson's Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), although the character does not appear in the 1937 novel. The films insert her into a meeting of the White Council at Rivendell and, in the final instalment, into an invented rescue of Gandalf from Dol Guldur, where she confronts and expels Sauron.