THE REDEMPTION OF GALADRIEL 81 Renewed Obedience and Return Despite its origins, Galadriel’s presence in Middle-earth is wholesome. As one of ancient lineage, guardian of Lothlórien, and bearer of one of the Three Rings of Power given to the Elves, she is a preserver of goodness and beauty in the troubled world, a strong tower against encroaching darkness. At the time of The Lord of the Rings, Morgoth’s disciple, Sauron, threatens to bring all under his dominion, prompting the free peoples to attempt to destroy the foundation of his power, the One Ring, now carried by the unlikeliest of heroes, a hobbit from the Shire. Galadriel will now face her greatest test as Frodo, overwhelmed by her grace and wisdom, offers her the Ring. “I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer,” she says. “For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands, and behold! it was brought within my grasp.” Here was the weapon with which she could blot evil from the earth! She appears to succumb for a moment to “the essential deceit of the Ring to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power,” but in reality, Tolkien wrote, her “rejection of the temptation was founded upon previous thought and resolve” She knows that victory does not lie upon that path; she will wait upon power and wisdom greater than her own. She abandons her pride: “‘I pass the test,’ she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.’” Tolkien writes that she “was pardoned because of her resistance to the final and overwhelming temptation to take the Ring for herself.” The last we see of her is when she boards a ship at the Grey Havens to return to the Blessed Lands, her long exile at an end. The Moral Applicability of Galadriel Few of Tolkien’s authorial sentiments are as well-known as his pronouncements against allegory. Indeed, he repeatedly expressed his dislike for formal allegory in part because his work was so often read as such by early reviewers who were tempted to see Sauron as Hitler or Stalin and the Ring as a lament of the advent of atomic weaponry. But these declarations do
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