death to capslock

Indestructible – Part II

”May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”

So says Galadriel of her gift to Frodo, upon the Fellowship's departure from Lorien. (No, I haven't forgotten which book series I'm meant to be writing about. Humor me for a moment.) The beautiful and wise elf queen gives each member of the party a token upon parting, something meant to aid them and remember the fading Lorien to them as they continue their quest. Or rather, in their help to Frodo on his quest. His quest to save them all.

She saved the final gift for the Ring-Bearer himself – surely the most important gift of the lot, if any was. For Frodo bore the greatest burden and faced the greatest tests of them all, in a quest that, in her words, stood even then upon the edge of a knife. And recall that, in extremis at the last moment, Frodo failed.

People forget that. That Frodo failed at the last, most important moment. It was only his own earlier mercy – at a moment when it did not seem so very important as it would later prove to be, to a being that did not even fully comprehend it, much less return it – that ultimately saved him and everyone else. (Tolkien really did see far better what to do with this sort of thing than JKR, whatever the flaws of the book and the man.)

Galadriel herself knew first-hand the power and temptation, and so the burden, of the Ring, having only just recently herself passed the test it posed, when Frodo offered it to her freely. She knew, perhaps better than anyone else possibly could, the nature and gravity of the immense peril Frodo would be facing. Both physical peril and moral, spiritual, peril, and grave indeed – and Frodo, for all his courage and goodness of heart, could not see, could have never seen, the task through with only his own strength. (Bless you, dear Samwise Gamgee.) Yet what was the nature of her gift to him?

Nothing more than a phial of clear water, in which the light of a star had been caught while it played in her fountain.

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