Phial of Galadriel

The object is named for the giver, not for the maker. Galadriel brings it out at the parting from Lórien, a small vessel of crystal that catches the light already in her hand, and explains what it holds: the radiance of Eärendil's star, gathered from where that star stood reflected in the water of her fountain. Her stated purpose for the gift supplies the phrase most often attached to it — that it should give light where no other light is left. Nothing in the account identifies who shaped the crystal itself. The narrative credits Galadriel with the catching of the light and with the giving, and is silent on smith, workshop, or age of manufacture, so that the compound name records ownership and provenance rather than craft. Within Middle-earth the designation is therefore descriptive of an act of bestowal, and it is the form the narration prefers at the object's most consequential appearances.

Alongside the formal name stands a plainer one. Sam's word for it is star-glass, a hobbit coinage of the same order as his other renamings, transparent in its two elements and used in speech rather than in the narrator's voice. The term arises in conversation on the stairs above Minas Morgul, where Sam reasons his way from the shining of the glass back to the star, and from the star back to the jewels of the old tales he had heard sung, so that the name carries a small genealogy of light within it. A third and looser designation, Frodo's phial, follows simple possession after the gift is made. The coexistence of the three is characteristic: the ceremonious name from the Elvish giving, the homely one from the bearer's companion, and the incidental one from ordinary reference.

The older matter that stands behind the name is set out in the posthumously edited legendarium. There the star of Eärendil is a Silmaril, one of the three jewels wrought by Fëanor to hold the light of the Two Trees, bound upon the mariner's brow and carried into the heavens with his ship. Read against that background, the chain of the phial's naming runs from vessel to star to jewel to tree, and the only craftsman named anywhere along it is Fëanor, maker of the Silmaril rather than of the glass. The distinction matters for an object so often spoken of as though it were an Elvish work of the Elder Days: what came out of the deep past was the light, not the phial.

The vessel itself is described with great economy. It is a phial of crystal small enough to be closed in one hand, and it is already luminous when Galadriel holds it out, glittering as she turns it, so that rays of white light break from her fingers. No stopper, chain, setting, or inscription is mentioned, and the narration never treats the contents as a liquid despite the water of the fountain from which the light was gathered; what the phial holds is simply light. Frodo carries it next to his skin under his shirt, and it is drawn out rather than worn openly. Its radiance is white and star-like, closer to a cold clarity than to flame: it casts no heat and leaves no smoke, and at its ordinary strength it serves as a lamp, enough to show the pitted walls and side-openings of the tunnel under the mountains.

Under pressure the light does not remain steady, and the narrative ties its waxing to the bearer's words and will rather than to any handling of the object. In the lair it kindles from a small gleam to an intolerable brilliance as Frodo, in words he did not know he knew, hails Eärendil in the Elvish tongue, and Shelob's clustered eyes fall back before it; when the bearer falters, the brightness slackens with him. Sam's use of it a little later follows the same pattern, and again a cry in the Elvish tongue accompanies the blaze. At the barred archway of the tower the phial held up before the Watchers breaks the silent resistance that had stopped Sam at the threshold, and the same means serves at the departure.

What the text withholds is as marked as what it grants. No mechanism is ever explained, and Galadriel gives no instruction for its use beyond the purpose she states at the giving; the bearers discover what it does by doing it. It is nowhere a weapon in its own right. Shelob is driven back by the light but wounded only by the blade and by her own weight upon it, and the phial neither kills nor cuts nor bars a way. It does nothing to lighten the burden Frodo carries, which grows heavier by exactly the same measure whether the glass shines or is put away, and it neither feeds, heals, nor hides its holder. After the tower the narrative gives it little further work, and on the last stage of the road the hobbits' endurance rests on other things.

The history of the vessel is short; the history of what it holds is long. In the Elder Days the light gathered by Galadriel belonged to a jewel taken out of Angband, cut from Morgoth's iron crown by Beren, whose hand the wolf Carcharoth bit off with the jewel in it at the gates of Angband; only when the wolf was slain in Doriath did the Silmaril come to Beren and Lúthien. From Lúthien it passed to their son Dior in Doriath, and after the ruin of that realm to his daughter Elwing, who bore it to the havens at the mouths of Sirion and thence, when the sons of Fëanor fell upon the refuge, over the sea to her husband. With the Silmaril bound upon his brow Eärendil made the passage to the Uttermost West that no mariner had achieved, and afterwards his ship was set to sail the sky, so that the jewel became the star men saw at morning and evening. That star, and not the phial, is the ancient thing; the crystal enters the record only at the end of the Third Age, when its light was drawn from the star's reflection in Lórien.

The Company reached Caras Galadhon on 17 January 3019 and remained about a month, departing on 16 February. The gift was made at the leave-taking on the riverbank, where each of the nine received something from the Lady's hands: a sheath and a green stone for Aragorn, a bow for Legolas, belts for the two younger hobbits and for Boromir, three hairs of her head for Gimli at his asking, a small box of earth for Sam. Frodo was given last, and what he received was the phial, with her account of the light of Eärendil's star caught in the water of her fountain, and a word about the darkness ahead. Nothing in the account suggests it had been prepared for him in advance; the light had been caught in the water of her fountain, and the vessel was brought out at the parting. From that day the object was the Ring-bearer's, and its recorded history is coextensive with the last leg of his journey.

For three weeks it was carried without being used: down Anduin, over the Emyn Muil, through the Dead Marshes and the desolation before the Black Gate, south into Ithilien and back north again to the stair above Minas Morgul. It came into use in the tunnel below the pass on 12 March, when Gollum's guidance ended in Shelob's lair, and it served both as a lamp in the dark and, at the crisis, as the means by which the spider was driven off her prey. On the following day Frodo was taken by the orcs of the tower, and the phial passed by default to Sam, who had picked it up along with Sting when he believed his master dead. Sam carried it into Mordor unaccompanied, and on 14 March used it at the barred gate of Cirith Ungol before finding Frodo alive in the topmost chamber. It served a second time at the same gate on the way out, and in the tower Sam kept sword and glass at Frodo's own wish, giving back only the Ring.

After the descent from the pass the record grows thin. The two hobbits crossed the plain of Gorgoroth in the last weeks of March under a sky lit by the fires of the Mountain, and the narrative does not report the glass being brought out again; the burden of the road is carried by other means, and the light that had answered in the tunnel has no part in the ascent. Nor does the account say what became of it afterwards. It is not among the things named at Cormallen or at Minas Tirith, and when Frodo rode to the Havens in September 3021 the text records the gifts he left behind him without settling the question. Unlike the Ring, it was neither destroyed nor surrendered; unlike Sting or the mail-coat, it was not handed on with any statement of succession. The object simply falls out of the story once the errand it was given for is finished, and the last thing certainly known of it is that the Ring-bearer had it back.

Within the shape of the narrative the phial is the one thing carried out of Lothlórien that keeps working after Lothlórien is out of reach. The stay in the Golden Wood is a pause in which the Company is healed and provisioned, and everything else given there is practical: gear, food, rope, cloaks. The glass is of another order, since what it holds cannot be spent or worn out, and its use lies entirely ahead of it in country where the memory of such a place would otherwise have no purchase. It is the thread by which the second half of Frodo's road is tied to the first, and the narration reserves it for the deepest point of that road, so that the encounter with Galadriel is felt again in the tunnel under the mountains long after the reader has been carried away from her.

Against the Ring it stands in deliberate opposition, and the two are carried by the same hobbit at the same time. One is claimed, the other is given; one hides its bearer and draws the Enemy's attention, the other shows him and drives back what hunts him; one grows heavier the nearer it comes to its home, the other answers a name cried aloud and asks nothing. The phial is also the measure of how far help is allowed to go in this part of the story. It shifts no weight and shortens no mile, and the crisis it resolves in the lair is only the outer danger, leaving the inward one exactly as it was. Aid, in this telling, clears a path and no more.

The glass is also the occasion of the story's clearest statement about itself. On the stair above the haunted city Sam turns the shining thing over in his mind and works out that he and his master have not stumbled into a new adventure at all but are still inside an old one, the same long tale that had reached him as song in the Shire, and that those inside a tale never know which way it runs. That the object is the vehicle of this recognition, and that it is Sam who begins the thought, with Frodo carrying it further, is the point at which the servant becomes a bearer in his own right; a day later he is carrying the light himself.

Peter Jackson's three films keep the gift and stage it as a scene between Cate Blanchett's Galadriel and Elijah Wood's Frodo at the leave-taking from Lothlórien, with the object established there and carried forward as a visible piece of the Ring-bearer's equipment. The departures from the book concern chiefly when the phial is used and by whom. The films hold back the encounter with Shelob from the end of the second instalment to the third, so that the episode in the tunnel falls in the 2003 release rather than the 2002 one; the second film ends elsewhere, and the light has no work to do in it. More consequential is the rewriting of the approach to the pass, in which Gollum turns Frodo against Sam and Sam is sent back down the stair, so that Frodo goes under the mountain alone and raises the glass against the spider without a companion at hand. Sam, returning, fights Shelob with the blade rather than with the light, and the sequence at the barred gate of the tower, where the book gives the phial a second and quite different task against the Watchers, has no counterpart on screen.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, being both the longest and the closest of the older versions, retains the whole chain of episodes that the films compress: Marian Diamond's Galadriel makes the gift, Ian Holm's Frodo carries it, and Bill Nighy's Sam takes it up when he believes his master dead and uses it in his own right at Cirith Ungol. The medium changes the emphasis rather than the events, since a listener is told about the light by the narration and by the speakers instead of seeing it, which throws the weight onto the words spoken as it kindles. Ralph Bakshi's animated film has no occasion for the object at all: it breaks off after Helm's Deep, and every appearance that matters lies in the part of the story the film never reached.