Elfstone

The object carries two names that say the same thing in different tongues. In the Common Speech it is the Elfstone; in Quenya it is Elessar. Galadriel used both when she gave the gem to Aragorn at the parting from Lórien, telling him to take with it the name that had been foretold for him, Elessar, the Elfstone of the house of Elendil. The naming is inseparable from the giving: the stone is not merely a keepsake but the thing from which a title is drawn, and the phrase binds it to Elendil's line rather than to the Elves who once held it. Where the narrative has no need of the formal name, it speaks only of the green stone, and the silver brooch that holds it, shaped as an eagle with wings outspread, is nowhere given a name of its own.

Thereafter the name passes from the gem to its bearer and is used by others. In the message Galadriel sent by Gandalf, Aragorn is addressed as Elessar and asked where his kindred have gone; and when the Grey Company came to him out of the North, the words that accompanied Arwen's gift of the standard took leave of him as the Elfstone. In both cases the speaker is one of the two women through whose hands the stone had come. It is under this name, rather than as Aragorn son of Arathorn, that he is crowned in Gondor.

Nothing in the published narrative says who made the stone. A short text printed among the appendices to the History of Galadriel and Celeborn supplies an earlier history, and does so in more than one form. In one account the gem was the work of Enerdhil, a jewel-smith of Gondolin, and had the property that things seen through it appeared unmarred; it came to Idril and from her to Eärendil, and left Middle-earth with him. Another account places a stone of the same kind in the hands of Celebrimbor in Eregion, made there for Galadriel. The editorial comment attached to the text notes that the unpublished papers yield little further, so the two accounts stand side by side without being reconciled.

What the published narrative offers is a description and very little beyond it. The gem is large and of a clear green, set in a brooch of silver worked into the likeness of an eagle with its wings spread wide; when Galadriel lifted it up it caught the light brightly, the comparison drawn being to sunlight falling through new leaves in spring. Aragorn fastened it at his breast, and those standing by looked at him with a changed eye, marking a height and a kingliness in him they had not noticed before, as though the weariness of long labour had been set down. The passage places that change in the perception of the onlookers and in the moment of naming; it does not say that the stone worked upon him, and it grants the gem no stated property at all.

The same reticence holds for the rest of the book. The stone is worn, and it supplies a name by which others address its bearer, but it is never employed. It is instructive to set it beside the other gift made at the same parting: Galadriel told Frodo plainly what his phial would do and when he should have recourse to it, whereas the green stone comes with a name and a foretelling rather than an instruction for use. Later, when Aragorn tends the hurt in Minas Tirith, the healing proceeds by athelas, by his hands, and by the old lore that knows the hands of a king; the gem on his breast plays no part in it and is not mentioned. No episode in the narrative turns on the stone, and nothing is lost or gained by its presence except recognition.

A virtue is ascribed to the stone only in the later editorial matter, and there it is stated twice over. Besides the clarified sight already noted, it was said of the gem made in Gondolin that things withered or burned appeared through it whole again, as they had been in their first growth, and that the hands of the one who bore it brought healing to what they touched. The account of the second stone, made in Eregion, holds it to be of the same kind but reckons its working the lesser, the world itself having grown older in the interval. None of this reaches the published story, where the stone remains an emblem and a name; the reader who takes the healing virtue as established is taking it from a text Tolkien did not print.

Within the published narrative the object's earlier course is compressed into a single sentence spoken at the moment of giving: Galadriel had given the stone to her daughter Celebrían, and Celebrían in turn to her own daughter, so that it had lain in Arwen's keeping before it came to Aragorn. No year is attached to either step, and the text nowhere explains how the gem returned from Rivendell to Galadriel's hand, an omission that leaves the descent a genealogy rather than a chronology. The one dated event that touches the middle stage belongs to Celebrían herself, waylaid in the mountains in the year 2509 of the Third Age and departing over Sea in the year following; the Tale of Years does not connect her going with the stone, and no later hand has filled the gap. What the record does fix precisely is the transfer to Aragorn, made on the day the Company left Lórien, the sixteenth of February in 3019.

Outside the published book that interval is filled in twice, and the two fillings imply quite different journeys for the object. In the account that begins in Gondolin, the stone made there passes out of Middle-earth with Eärendil and does not come back, so that the gem held in Lothlórien in the Third Age must be a later work of the same kind, wrought in Eregion during the Second Age and reaching Galadriel from the hand of its maker rather than by inheritance. The alternative dispenses with the second making altogether: the first stone returns eastward over the Sea, brought to Galadriel by a messenger, with word that it should come in the end to one who would carry its name. Neither version is anchored to a year, and both converge on the same position — the stone in Galadriel's keeping, waiting on a bearer — from which the descent through Celebrían can proceed. The editorial matter attached to the text remarks that the surviving papers yield little further and declines to choose between them.

After the parting the brooch is on Aragorn's breast for the remainder of the story, and as a thing the narrative has almost nothing more to say of it. The events of that spring can be set down without the object entering into them: the Grey Company overtook him in the early hours of the sixth of March; he took the Paths of the Dead and came up Anduin to the battle before Minas Tirith on the fifteenth; the host set out for the Black Gate on the eighteenth and stood before it on the twenty-fifth. Through all of this the gem is not handled, shown, or put to any use, and what travels through the chronicle is the name rather than the stone. On the first of May 3019 he was crowned in Gondor, and with the crowning the name ceased to be a private foretelling and became the style of a reign, so that the chronicles record the king as Elessar Telcontar.

Of the object's end there is no account at all. Aragorn held the kingship for more than a century and died in the hundred and twentieth year of the Fourth Age, and the notice of his last day names what he set aside: the crown and the sceptre, which he gave into the hands of his son after he had laid himself down. The brooch is not among them. Nothing states that the stone was buried with him, kept in Gondor, returned to the Elves, or lost, and the reticence is of a piece with the way it is treated throughout — an emblem attached to a person, which the record follows only so long as it follows him. The name, by contrast, outlives both the bearer and the gem, since the age reckoned from his time carries it, and it is under that name that later annals speak of the reign.

The gift belongs to a set. At the parting from Lórien Galadriel gives something to each member of the Company, and every other gift answers a practical need: rope and cord, a bow, a girdle, a box of earth for a gardener, a light for the darkest place. Aragorn alone receives a thing that does nothing and confers a word instead. The placement matters to the shape of his story, since the scene stands at the point where he ceases to be the guide of a walking party and begins to be a claimant; the Company is about to divide, and from Lórien onward his road bends toward Gondor rather than toward Mordor. The gem is the narrative's way of announcing that turn without any declaration from the man himself.

Its later work in the book is to be read by other people. Aragorn takes pains not to press his claim while the war is undecided, keeping his banner furled and camping outside the walls rather than entering Minas Tirith as its lord. It is the folk of the City who supply the title, naming him from the green stone they saw him wearing, so that the word foretold long before was settled on him by the people of a City whose lordship he would not yet claim. The device allows the recognition of kingship to arrive from below, as something observed, rather than as a right asserted.

What the stone stands for is the joining of two claims that in Aragorn's case cannot be separated. Elrond had set it that his daughter would not wed any man less than the king of both realms, so the crown and the marriage answer to a single condition; and the gem reaching Aragorn from Galadriel's keeping, in Arwen's stead is at once a betrothal token and a promise of the throne that must be won before it can be honoured. There is a fitness, too, in the succession of names. The boy raised in Rivendell was called Estel, hope, and the stone carries that same sense forward into a style a kingdom can use.

In the drafts the name came before the object. While the Ranger was still called Trotter, and his history was being turned from that of a hobbit into that of a Man, Tolkien set down Elfstone among the names proposed for him, at one stage intending it to displace Trotter altogether rather than to stand beside another name. Only afterwards did a green gem appear at the parting from Lórien — unforeseen, as Tolkien's own note says — and only then did the name acquire its meaning. In the earlier writing of that scene the gift Galadriel makes to him is the sheath for his sword, and the brooch, the stone within it, and the sentence of naming belong to a later layer of composition. The finished chapter therefore reverses the order in which its elements were invented: what the published narrative presents as a name drawn from a thing given began as a name in search of a thing to explain it.

In the drafts of the Gondor chapters the English form carries the weight that the Quenya form carries in print. Elfstone is the name by which the man is spoken of and hailed through much of that writing, and the distribution of the two forms between the Common Speech and Quenya was settled later than the names themselves. The messages Galadriel sends north — in one synopsis addressed to Elrond, in the book carried by the Grey Company — were composed more than once, in differing shapes and lengths, before the versions that stand in the published book were arrived at, so that the address by which she names him passed through several forms of wording. The commentary that accompanies these texts sets the successive versions side by side without treating any of the discarded wording as authoritative.

The green stone has no independent life on screen. In Peter Jackson's trilogy the parting from Lórien is much shortened: the theatrical cut of the first film keeps the cloaks and their leaf-brooches but drops the individual gifts, and although the extended version restores a gift-giving sequence, with Galadriel played by Cate Blanchett, Aragorn is given no gem there and takes no name from one. The token that binds him to Arwen in these films is instead a pendant she gives him at Rivendell, and it recurs at intervals through all three parts as the sign of the choice she has made; the role the brooch fills in the book, as a pledge from Arwen's keeping carried through the war, is transferred to that object. The message that reaches Aragorn from the North is also reassigned: rather than a company of Rangers bearing a standard and a farewell that names him Elfstone, it is Elrond who comes to Dunharrow with the reforged sword. Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn is accordingly crowned without any gem having supplied his style.

The older adaptations leave no room for it either, though for different reasons. Ralph Bakshi's animated film moves through Lothlórien briefly and breaks off after Helm's Deep, so the whole of the material in which the stone would matter lies outside it; John Hurt voices Aragorn there. The Rankin/Bass television film of the last part of the story opens with the Fellowship long dispersed and compresses the Gondor chapters severely, and no such token figures in it. The BBC Radio dramatisation, in twenty-six parts, is the most complete of the older versions and the one usually held to follow the book most nearly, with Robert Stephens as Aragorn; but a small brooch is the kind of detail a sound medium can only report, and the name rather than the object is what carries there. Nothing in the later films drawn from the appendices touches it, their material lying centuries earlier.