A Close Reading of LotR – Episode 7 – Mirrors and Islands
Nov. 27th, 2025 01:54 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
reader_of_else_feed
The penultimate episode of our close reading brings us out of Moria, and into Lothlórien, with Chapter VI – Lothlórien and Chapter VII – The Mirror of Galadriel, with a sharp contrast against the preceding Dwarf TimeTM, with Tolkien going two-footed into elves elves elves.
These two chapters are full of some really quite beautiful, evocative descriptive prose, and also not really a whole lot of goings on, when compared with the previous section. Starting with a brief detour for Gimli and Frodo to look into the Mirrormere outside Moria, the events of the chapter are just the journey into Lothlórien, some chats with elves, hiding from some orcs, meeting the Lord and Lady of the wood, and then looking into Galadriel’s mirror. But what it may lack in Happenings, this section more than makes up for in things to think about. Especially if you want to be sad about elves1.
I, it turns out, do want to be sad about elves. Call me a basic bitch all you want, but elves are just cool! They look good, they lean all the way into their ridiculous aesthetic, they get to mope about lamenting their immortality and dispensing wisdom, drop banger poems and, if we’re lucky, turn up to save the day on their jingle jangle horse2. And, beating the same drum again as I have all book, they’re kind of fairies. And I fucking love fairies in literature. So two chapters of pretty elven tree houses and Portentous Bangers are kind of my happy place.
It’s nice that we got All Dwarf All the Time and then immediately got our elfy chaser. Nice little bit of balance. But Tolkien does a lot of mirroring between those sections, beyond the obvious (though the Mirrormere and the Mirror of Galadriel are right there as a pair). There are a lot of small, paired moments throughout, where Legolas’ romanticism and love for his people and this, the heart of their culture in Middle Earth, echoes Gimli’s sadness at the remnant’s of a once-great dwarven stronghold. Both of them come from a people diminished by time, for whom the great deeds of the past hang heavy over the present. There’s a ramping up, though, from Moria to Lothlórien – Gandalf hints that the time for the dwarves to reclaim their mines was not yet, but every single moment of speech with the elves in these chapters make clear just how inevitable their decline is.
But it is equally clear that Tolkien just… really loves his elves. There’s so much dwelling in these two chapters, so much lingering description of place and nature and the magic of a location that has been deeply infused with elven magic and just the very feeling of it3.
Which unfortunately brings me to my first less-than-ideal moment in these two chapters: the interweaving between people and places. On the surface, it feels easy to embrace Tolkien’s love of connecting his particular peoples with the lands they have been shaped by and shaped in turn. But there’s a specific phrase used in The Mirror of Galadriel:
“Now these folk aren’t wanderers or homeless, and seem a bit nearer to the likes of us: they seem to belong here, more even than Hobbits do in the Shire.”
I find it hard to read this and not read a little into that sense of “belonging” in opposition to those who are wanderers. For all that Tolkien has a relatively complex view of displaced peoples, and definitely not a universally negative one, he also very clearly does value and hold up as some of the most emotively charged pieces of the narrative those who are so thoroughly settled in their homeland that their relationship develops something magical. And it just… does not sit quite as happily for me.
That being said, that magical relationship gets a little lost in the sea of quite a lot of other magical and fey-adjacent content, as happens when you have the concentrated force of sheer elven bullshit going on on the page. When turned up to eleven, the elves really do let show their fairy roots – what is Lothlórien but the fairy lands? The river sings in the voice of a lady long lost, the denizens move silently amid the trees, and the laws of nature are suspended, the seasons upended. Time passes strangely and without measure for the fellowship. The trees remain in leaf through the winter, and a carpet of grass and flowers remains despite being in the full dark of the year. Where, in the rest of the book, the elves seem to be in tune with nature, enhancing it and being enhanced by it, here instead their relationship with it stretches it beyond its natural bounds into something deeply strange. No wonder Boromir is discomfited by being in the woods, even if the rest of the company aren’t.
And this is intensified yet more by the portrayal of Lothlórien – quite explicitly on the page – as an island amid the darkness and power of the enemy (and, less explicitly but I think still fairly obviously, that island in time, a land where the power of the elves has not diminished as it has in the rest of Middle Earth). Now where have we had a description like that before? Yep, it’s Rivendell; Elrond likewise casts it as an island in the darkness of the enemy’s power. Which brings us another of those echoes that seem to be everywhere in these two chapters – Rivendell, the most elvenly elven place we have encountered so far in the story, is being held up in conversation with Lothlórien and being shown as the pale shadow of this, the fiery heart of elvendom.
And again, Tolkien is pretty clear putting this on the page. Throughout the story, elven things have been described with moonlight and starlight, soft, gentle, and welcoming descriptions, pretty, aloof and distantly chill. Even when they are powerful, they feel safe. But those descriptions are upended in the woods, and this is a land described in gold and in sunlight. The leaves, the hair of the lady Galadriel, the warmth and the brightness, they all exceed the gentle descriptors we’ve had up until this point. Is this just an intensifier of those, proving that they are pale shadows of what they once were? I think not. Or not just. I think the key comes back to those aesthetics of good and evil I’ve talked about before, where the cold, pale, white lights sit wholly on the side of goodness. Because the crescendo of these two chapters is the testing of Galadriel, as Frodo freely offers her the One Ring, and she grapples with her desire to wield it, and the knowledge that no matter what good she may start and may intend with it, that good would ultimately be turned to evil. By switching up his aesthetics of goodness here, and centring that switch on Galadriel herself, Tolkien is foreshadowing and intensifying her potential to wield this great and terrible power and to be a force to reckon with upon Middle Earth. She is not, herself, evil. And so her aesthetics remain tied to white, to light and to much of those trappings of good we’ve seen so far. But some of it and her realm turns a little, just a little, to the others side of his duality, reflecting her capacity to do the same.
And Galadriel herself is a great centre of another duality – that of the nature of elves themselves. Throughout the story, they have shown the capacity to be both the merry fey of myth, and beings of great power and import (though mostly each elf as portrayed sticks to one or the other). Galadriel then gives us both. She is the fey queen, the mistress of a land outside time, the embodiment of its sunlight and beauty, one who likes to test travellers in her realm. But she is also the wielder of Nenya, the ring of Adamant, and we get a glimpse – one she tells us she is showing us directly – that the power she wields is something fiercer and harder4. As she says to Frodo:
“But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy.”
But just as her chapter ends on her own lessening – physically seeming smaller, as well as her declaration that she will diminish and go into the west – the whole chapter has been here to tell us that the elves as a whole are doing likewise. Have been doing likewise – the “long defeat”, as she calls it.
It’s hard to distance myself as a reader from my knowledge of these stories in a context that includes the films, and also in a context where I just know what’s coming, but I wish I could remember what reading this was like for the first time, and how I would have felt on grasping this idea of the extended but inevitable doom of elf-kind. It’s too laden down with other things for me now, and beyond reach, but I wonder perhaps that I might have come to it differently without a soundtrack and a knowledge of the ending.
In any case, with all these elves and elfy places, we are wholeheartedly back to one of my favourite Tolkien modes – descriptions of place and nature. It’s just a good fucking time, especially when so intense as it is here. And here again, as with both Caradhras and, way back early on, Old Man Willow, he’s dipping into ensouling that place, giving it a sense of… if not quite personhood then at least will. Lothlórien quiets when the orcs move through it, and responds to the presence of those it welcomes. It is deeply imbued with power, and with the stories of the elves who have lived there. There’s a sense of almost apotheosis of place, where something about it becomes so intense that it begins to enact back on the world that shapes it. I can’t quite form that into any kind of meaning, but it’s something I very much enjoy reading, and there’s just something kind of appealing in the idea of a land that can take on a character of its own after a while (even if that character is just “mountain mad at you”).
Unfortunately, there’s another thing that comes to the fore in these two chapters (though it has been laced throughout the book so far) and that is the comedy stylings of Master Samwise Gamgee. They’ve always been there as sort of… tonal punctuation (and I have commented positively previously about how Tolkien uses tonal variation to good effect). But here… I don’t know if I’ve got a little worn out on them through the course of the book, or if there were just a few too many in one place, or if the whole class aspect of who is the joker/butt of the joke is getting a little tired, but I was somewhat impatient with his lines at several points here. I should probably add that the films have never left me particularly sympathetic to Sam5, so I’m coming in with some bias, but I tried to keep an open mind while reading because I knew that over-simplicity of character is something the films do suffer from. And equally, I know – I can see very clearly – that a lot of what’s gone into Sam is a bunch of class feelings and background assumptions baked into Tolkien and the time he lived and wrote. But the character that is the output of all of that… I just don’t like him very much. And 366 pages in, I think I can say I did my best to try to be a bit more generous with him but it’s not really bearing fruit.
The moment we dwelled on in discussion was Sam’s own vision of the Shire in the mirror, before Frodo looks. Where Frodo’s visions are more abstract, metaphorical and wide-reaching, Sam’s are very grounded in the material realities of the Shire, and accordingly are very clear and literal in how they come across. He’s seeing events that may be happening at the time he looks, or are in the close future6, but this is foreshadowing on Tolkien’s part of story we have yet to see. And that’s fine, I get that part. But I think the differentiation between him and Frodo here is interesting and telling. Tolkien is highlighting that Sam’s concerns turn inward and homeward, and concern events on a personally-applicable level – the felling of a tree, the building of a factory, the ousting of the Gaffer. His concerns are small. Frodo, meanwhile, gets the wide view.
We talked a little about why this might be. Ed offered that, perhaps any of the non-Frodo hobbits might have been portrayed likewise, and that it is Frodo’s distinction of being the ring-bearer that is being made plain here. Or that Tolkien is highlighting how tied Sam is to home, and that his test forces him to grapple with this thing he holds very dear being under threat, but chooses nonetheless to remain with Frodo, in spite of what he has been shown. But I can’t help but linger on the fact that to illustrate this distinction, this focus back and in, away from the grand narrative, it was Sam specifically that Tolkien chose. Why not Merry, whom Elrond threatened to send home in a sack? Why not linger on that connection? Is it class shit again? I am inclined towards this reading of it, because, if in doubt, I am always inclined towards class readings. Tolkien then gives us the respective reactions of the two characters to their visions, with Sam somewhat overcome and Frodo responding stoically and… c’mon, surely you can see a class reading in that too?
Anyway, between that and the jokes, I do find I struggle with the portrayal of Sam, and consequently with my enjoyment of time spent with him as a character. The Return of the King will, I expect, be a struggle in this regard7.
And yet again in contrast to all this, these are some chapters where Tolkien gives us some of the most metal lines we’ve had in the whole book so far. My particular favourite is, of course, a portentous Galadriel banger, which runs thus:
“The love of the elves for their land and their works is deeper than the deeps of the Sea, and their regret is undying and cannot ever wholly be assuaged.8“
Just… fuuuuck. He knows how to drop lines when he needs to.
This is, then, a pair of chapters full of contrasts and dualities, between elves and dwarves, elves and other elves, good and evil, Frodo and Sam, and plenty else besides. It is a section that gives absolutely gorgeous descriptive prose, and the deep love Tolkien has for living places, and very clearly has for the elves and their sorrows as he has drawn them. But the intertwining of people and place, and indeed a lot about the elves themselves reveals a deep conservatism about the work, embodied in the elves as the last vestiges of a glorious past that dips below the horizon, falling ever further beyond reach of the lesser beings of the present. He sells his vision of them as inherently romantic and sad, and he sells it hard, and it is so, so easy to buy into that (god knows I find myself doing it) by the power of his writing. But I cannot ever quite forget (nor should I) what it all implies when put together and thought through to its end point. Especially when taken in conversation with the characters he gives us and how he chooses to portray them, this section has that biggest duality of all, twinning the best and most compelling of what he can do with language, description and the crafting of atmosphere – there’s a reason so much of Galadriel’s scenes are lifted wholesale into the films – with some of the worst that underlies it, when thought through.
Up next… the closing chapters of the book! Heading out of Lothlórien, to the river and the breaking of the fellowship. As it’ll be our last session, we’re planning to have some hobbity snacks to eat with the session, hopefully with some home baked bread, and then we’ll be done with Tolkien close reading until at the very least after Christmas.
- If you don’t want to be sad about elves, why are you even reading Tolkien, bro?
︎ - Not today though. I think we’ve seen the last of Glorfindel and I’m kinda sad about it. Haldir, who is here, is MA BOI in the films, but book-Haldir lacks the panache of his horse-riding kindred. ︎
- And flets. He got a lot of use out of that word in a very short time. ︎
- Being slightly fanciful, the thing I wrote in my notes was “adamant wrapped in silk”. ︎
- I have a long-held “Sam would have voted for Brexit” take that I do not recant. ︎
- I’m sure chronology for this exists, I can’t be bothered to look it up. ︎
- Certainly that was the one I struggled with when first reading the trilogy before the films came out, and I have hazy memories of being about 2/3 in and just glazing over as I turned the pages. I would like to hope I’ve grown a little past that but we’ll have to see. ︎
- I haven’t even gone into my half formed thoughts about how absolutely Catholic this section is, and all this stuff about guilt and grief. There is only so much time in the world. ︎