Galadriel

This Galadriel bio is an impressive achievement, and I'm now very much looking forward to the Celeborn bio that will complement and complete it!

What impressed me most about this first part was your pointing out the contrasting behaviour of Melian and Galadriel in that confrontation. You are quite right! But I hadn't sufficiently noticed before.

You are really kind! I am so glad that you liked it. It needs Celeborn to finish it off. All of my notes, which I had been collecting randomly for ages were not divided out! Then I sort arbitrarily decided which parts to save for Celeborn, because Galadriel had so much by comparison.

I enjoyed thinking about Melian and Galadriel. I've always found them a fascinating pair. They have a lot in common, but some significant differences.

Thanks so much for reading and commenting!

Wow, you've managed to bring all (or a lot of) the material about Galadriel in a readable and comprehensible order. That's no small feat! Whenever I've tried to look up the development of Galadriel's character, I've despaired over the many different places where you have to look - and the conflicting accounts, too. For someone who was added to the Legendarium pretty late, Galadriel has certainly generated a heap of material. Kudos to you for bringing it all together! This bio will be immensely useful in the future, sparing me the headache of trying to figure out where to go looking for what. Thank you so much!

I especially liked your elucidations of the saintly and not-so-saintly, typically feminine and decidedly un-feminine aspects of Galadriel's personality, and occasionally squealed in delight at your tongue-in-cheek commentary! I also found it fascinating how you worked out the differences between Melian's more passive/defensive use of "magic" and mind-reading while Galadriel is a lot more proactive. Even if she doesn't dig through people's memory but only watches their mental reaction to a very specific hypothetical scenario, that's still pretty intrusive... (But then, her match-making might be considered somewhat intrusive as well, at least from Elrond's POV). Shows that while she has certainly learned a lot and grown (maybe?) less proud through the ages, there's still quite a bit of that competitive, impetuous Noldorin princess in her, and she's certainly not the long-suffering Virgin Mary that some critics (and Tolkien in some of his letters) see in her. Which makes her all the more interesting, as far as I'm concerned!

One tiny question - IIRC, Merry and Pippin don't receive their daggers in Lothlórien, but much earlier in the wight-barrow from Tom Bombadil? I think this may have been different in the movies, since they cut out jolly old Tom, but I seem to remember that the daggers were of Dúnedain origin, not Elvish.

Not that it matters much! Again, thank you so much for this highly helpful biography, and congratulations on getting it finished!

I am mortified with embarrassment! You are so right about the daggers. I searched for the citation I used again and see that I apparently got lost in my giant one-volume e-book copy of LotR. (One too many gift-giving scenes for me at that point in my rush to the finish line.)

"For each of the hobbits he [Tom! not Galadriel] chose a dagger, long, leaf-shaped, and keen, of marvellous workmanship, damasked with serpent-forms in red and gold. They gleamed as he drew them from their black sheaths, wrought of some strange metal, light and strong, and set with many fiery stones." ["Fog on the Barrow Downs," Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord of the Rings: One Volume (pp. 145-146). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.] It goes on to note that they are Numenorean in origin.

Thanks so much for noticing and letting me know. I will try to get Dawn to make a correction in the text, so some other poor lost soul doesn't use my reference as a good cite. (I did not use the movie for any references; although I did write some parts from memory while trying to fact-check and find a cite for everything I used! Embarrassed all over again! I'll get over myself eventually!)

I hope to finish the Celeborn bio this month or soon thereafter and go over in a briefer and hopefully more straightforward manner the origins of the different versions of the story of Galadriel and Celeborn without repeating myself much.

Thank you for reading it all! I have been wringing my hands over the fact that in nearly two months since we first posted part 1 of this, yours is the first comment I received. I have been wondering if it was much too long. (Although I skipped over a lot! One could write a book about Galadriel.)

Tolkien contradicts himself various times over whether she was sometimes naughty or always very nice! I think if he would have sought to re-write to include always blameless version the re-write would have encompassed too much and he probably would have abandoned it. Someone in the SWG should write a Meta of "Galadriel's Lament" song/poem which I did not cover because I found so many conflicting interpretations of that and I was simply running out of time and space. Long as the bio is--it is certainly not definitive!

I'd read a film vs. book account myself, but not gonna write one!

Thanks for the comment and correction. And thanks for reading it!

 

Thanks again! I appreciate that you stuck through it to the end. (I felt a little guilty about making it so long.) Galadriel is interesting in The Silmarillion, but really IMPORTANT in LotR. Well, personally, she is important to me everywhere. I've always found her the most interesting female character aside from Nerdanel--now I have Tolkien rolling in his grave again! I'm supposed to think it is Luthien!

My goodness, Oshun! What a bio - no wonder it had to be split into two parts. There's so much in here I barely know where to start. (No, actually I do - I love that you included the Eomer-Gimli 'feud'. It's one of my favorite bits in Lord of the Rings.) I'm quite impressed you've managed to structure the bio so well, since there is so much Galadriel material scattered here and there throughout many books. *applauds*

Thanks so much! I have to admit I enjoyed the research and re-reading those parts of LotR with a purpose, but writing it was hard (one of the hardest and certainly the longest). I could have used a little more time, but, hey, I never allow myself that. I am never going to finish one before the last possible moment--that's how I roll! I always thought that Eomer-Gimli stuff was a great addition. I love the way Tolkien did that. It did seem a bit lighthearted and fun. And actually one of the very few references to Arwen in the texts, lovely added characterization of Eomer and reinforcement of Gimli being Gimli.

I am so happy that you liked it and took the time to tell me! I am thrilled at every comment on this one because I was afraid only the most stalwart could make it through something that long. It could have been longer, but I made myself stop. Thanks again!