Rings of Power brings Galadriel’s lost Lord of the Rings story to life

“All shall love me and despair.” The line from Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring is the apex of Cate Blanchett’s striking turn as the elven sorceress Galadriel. All hell breaks loose in a flash. “In place of a Dark Lord you would have a queen!” she cries, as the colors of the film seem to invert, her clothes billow around her, and she shakes as if possessed by a force beyond mortal reckoning. But a moment later all is well, leaving millions of movie viewers to wonder, “What the heck was that all about?”

There’s a story behind Galadriel’s triumph over temptation, and her journey to this pivotal moment in Frodo’s journey to Mordor. Morfydd Clark, the 33-year-old Welsh actress who most recently soldiered through the supernatural gauntlet of A24’s horror drama Saint Maud, was eager to explore the rich potential of the character in Amazon Studios’ The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of Power. Before stepping into Galadriel’s shoes for the production, Clark told Polygon earlier this month, she knew Galadriel “as the very serene and wise lady of Lothlórien.” But now?

“The elves of [The Lord of the Rings], they’ve gone through a lot to achieve that serenity and wisdom, it’s been hard-earned. They’ve been very messy throughout many of the ages of Middle-earth,” Clark said, putting it mildly.

“She’s a rich and iconic character, but a flawed one,” showrunner Patrick McCay agreed.

Galadriel, to Frodo is a helper. But in Tolkien’s legendarium, Galadriel had a life of ambition and adventure, in which she spurned the gifts of the gods to seek power, justice, and a realm of her own to rule. To Tolkien, the elf was among the most exemplary figures of his opus — and she may be the only character he ever wrote who nakedly desired power but didn’t turn evil. The story was not completed by him.

But through often contradictory notes and his son’s recollections, some published posthumously in volumes like The SilmarillionDeep in Tolkien’s lore, people who know the women better than anyone else can tell them more. Galadriel is a superlatively intelligent and skilled character, however you interpret it. This version The Silmarillion he didn’t live to write, she was a ruler of elves, a rider in great hosts of war, a survivor of immense hardships, a scion of virtue, and a legendary beauty. Her story was one of the most challenging mythological tales. She defied the gods to live the rest of her life.

‘Dreams of far lands and dominions that might be her own’

Image: Prime Video

Let’s just say that Galadriel was born into paradise. Her home town of Valinor, the capital city of Middle-earth’s far realm of Aman, was crafted by the gods as the elven promised land. She was extraordinary, even though she was a girl who was born in elven Valhalla. She considered Valinor too small to fulfill her dreams years before leaving Valinor.

Christopher Tolkien summarised in Unfinished Tales, based on one of his father’s “partially illegible” notes, Galadriel “did indeed wish to depart from Valinor and to go into the wide world of Middle-earth for the exercise of her talents; for ‘being brilliant in mind and swift in action she had early absorbed all of what she was capable of the teaching which the Valar thought fit to give the Eldar,’ and she felt confined in the tutelage of Aman.”

Tolkien also wrote about Galadriel in an essay that was otherwise about Middle-earth linguistics, saying “Galadriel was the greatest of the Noldor, except Fëanor maybe, though she was wiser than he, and her wisdom increased with the long years.” That is: Galadriel is the greatest of her tribe, which contained many, many heroes of the war against the dark god Morgoth, except perhaps for her kinsman Fëanor, the greatest craftsman and worst elf in history, the guy who started that war in the first place. Anyone who assumed a warrior Galadriel was an invention of modern, “liberal” sensibilities might be surprised, or disappointed, but hopefully well pleased, that Tolkien got there first.

Galadriel was able to escape Valinor by fighting against Morgoth and travel to Middle-earth in search of her dominion. When Fëanor swore vengeance against Morgoth and rallied the Noldor to sail from Aman to destroy him, Galadriel joined him. Tolkien wrote the following (from drafts and notes compiled by his son The Silmarillion) that she was “the only woman of the Noldor to stand that day tall and valiant among the contending princes. […] No oaths she swore, but the words of Fëanor concerning Middle-earth had kindled in her heart, for she yearned to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will.”

Galadriel joined the Noldor with her elder brother Finrod, but they opposed the historic crimes that the rest of the tribe had committed in order to flee Aman. In response, Fëanor gave them a pretty tough time of it, stranding them and their people in the arctic without ships. They survived and made it to Middle-earth’s main continent via a grueling overland march that Tolkien described in superlative terms. “Few of the deeds of the Noldor thereafter surpassed that desperate crossing in hardihood or woe,” he wrote.

In some of his notes, Tolkien showed intention to establish that Galadriel had never been very impressed by Fëanor in the first place, but in all versions of her story, she arrived in Middle-earth with very little desire to rejoin his forces — but also no desire to return to Valinor. Tolkien attributes this to pride, not wanting to plead the gods to forgive him and to revenge in the above philological essay. “She burned with desire to follow Fëanor with her anger to whatever lands he might come, and to thwart him in all ways that she could.”

And so, while Galadriel stood against Morgoth, she also very much distanced herself from what I’m going to call Several Centuries of Awful Fëanorian Drama. Not so fortunate was her brother. He perished in the Dungeons of Sauron while killing his opponent, a werewolf. (The Silmarillion is… rawer than most folks realize). Still, the gods banned Galadriel from returning to Aman along with all the other Noldor who’d followed Fëanor, and when that ban was lifted for all who helped defeat Morgoth, Galadriel declined to return home. From his notes, it seems Tolkien explored several reasons for this over time, including her own pride, her desire to remain with her husband, or that she was handed a specific ban from returning to Aman for reasons unrelated to Fëanor.

In the age after Morgoth’s defeat, where The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of PowerGaladriel wins her dominion. After befriending the dwarves of Khazad-dûm (Moria), she and her followers settled in the forest near its eastern entrance, which became known as Lothlórien. And following Sauron’s betrayal, she was given possession of one of the three Elven Rings for safekeeping, in recognition of her incorruptibility. Her role in the Third Age was crucial. She helped to form the White Council. It united Gandalf and the wisest of elves Saruman. The HobbitShe assisted Sauron’s escape from Mirkwood when he was driven by council members. As Aragorn et al. Minas Tirith, where they fought orc armies The Return of the King, Galadriel’s power drove several waves of Sauron’s forces from Lothlórien, and upon his final defeat she tore the dark fortress of Dol Guldur to the ground with her magic.

But none of those dangers compared to the Fellowship’s visit to her realm. Frodo didn’t know much about Galadriel’s story but was in awe at how enormous her power and wisdom outweighed his own. She had to ask and all she needed was to make Middle-earth her dominion. This proposal is her most dark (and sometimes bewildering!) moment. Depending on which scraps of Tolkien’s notes you look at, this was either the final test she had to pass for her pardon, or the moment she realized that she had finally faced every challenge worthy of her might, and had no reason not to return to Aman.

‘I pass the test, and remain Galadriel’

Image by New Line Cinema

Galadriel fled heaven, tired of being born and wanting power. Tolkien created her as the sole character for Middle-earth that wanted power to fulfill her will. Morfydd Clark said that the most difficult part of the job was gaining unbruised self confidence.

“The elves in particular,” she told Polygon, “are so physically powerful. It is a big part of my identity. […]The truth is, I still feel physically weak no matter how fit or healthy I get. It is difficult to imagine what this would signify, but it means that I have never been able to feel weak or that they can be overcome. This was quite an emotional and long journey. What if I’d never felt any of those things? What comes with that is a fearlessness and a type of arrogance.”

And Clark doesn’t just mean a physical confidence, the kind that makes it to the screen in graceful fight scenes and feats of endurance — although she says that her favorite physical challenge of the production was getting to ride horses for the first time. According to Clark, she was unsure how to portray an older version of an immortal. An elf could be “young” and still centuries upon centuries old — they wouldn’t exactly be more You are naiveThey’re more like their parents than they were in their older years.

The answer Clark found was: “If they were going to be naive, it would be arrogance. That’s how it would manifest. It will all come to an end. [Galadriel] talks about how with gaining wisdom, there’s a loss of innocence. So there’s an innocence to her arrogance, which I don’t think is particularly something that I associate with women in our world.”

In Tolkien’s lore, Galadriel has plenty of reason for innocent arrogance. The writer often underscored that she clocked the secret dark hearts of some of Middle-earth’s greatest betrayers — like Fëanor and Saruman — years before their betrayals. And one of the only things we know about the extremely secretive production of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of Power is that Galadriel’s penchant for being right all along is powering her characterization. Rings of Power begins with Galadriel zealously hunting the scattered remnants of Morgoth’s armies, her brother’s death still in the forefront of her mind. She believes that despite the end of the war, there’s still evil lurking out in the world.

But is Galadriel’s hunch correct? Are centuries of war causing her blindness? Morgoth’s most powerful servant, Sauron, is alive and scheming — most viewers will know that that’s the narrative backbone of the Second Age, and instrumental to Sauron being around for The Lord of the Rings. J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay understood exactly what I meant. Although she may be correct about Sauron and this younger Galadriel is still learning.

“I think she’s incredibly heroic. She’s my hero. I admire her. She’s also making a mistake, left and right [laughs],” said McKay. “And we reckon it’s good to pack a character with that level of fragility and vulnerability and pride.”

“One thing that we like to try to do in storytelling, especially in Middle-earth, is that a lot of times people are collectively right. You have dyads where people are both right and both wrong, and they will sort of share a truth between them,” said Payne. “Both of them are speaking a truth, but they’re speaking one facet of a truth. And by listening to each other, and by working together, they’re going to be able to get to the whole truth. Galadriel is able to be right and imperfect. But she can also be flawed, and continue to have unfinished business. By pursuing her goal alone and ignoring the advice of her peers, friends, and her king, she may make mistakes. We’re interested in exploring both her rightness and the things that she has yet to learn.”

Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video

Clark offered her take. “I think that Galadriel is not in tune with a community, not just her community of the elves, but community in general. Tolkien’s obsession with how no one is an island and any character who is solo is what I admire about him. The Lord of the Rings — there’s a tragedy to it. [Galadriel is]At this stage, she is inflicting it on herself. So she’s not going to be getting things right, because everybody’s part of a web in Middle-earth. And she’s trying to extract yourself from it in a way — she’s behaving unnaturally. And I think that that’s when you’re most likely to make mistakes, is when you’re losing yourself.”

The actress stood firm in her defense. “What [other characters have] got wrong is you can’t ever sit back on your laurels with peace, and you can’t ever think that you’ve achieved it.” She referred to a quote from activist Mariame Kaba, “Hope is a discipline,” by way of explaining. “I think Galadriel senses that everyone’s sitting back and relaxing, and even if Sauron wasn’t coming, you have to protect peace constantly. Hope. They’re not things that survive through being inert.”

When readers and viewers meet Galadriel for the first time, it’s in a story where the burden of practicing hope and protecting peace lies most heavily on the shoulders of others, an era when the wise lady of Lothlórien’s role is to maintain her bright borders against encroaching darkness, not to take the fight to darkness itself. Some people will be able to see the very first images from the collection of. Rings of PowerGaladriel was seen in full armor, with a sword almost as tall as her height, which seemed to be a mistake about her character.

But as Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel put it in the opening scene of The Fellowship of the Ring, “The world is changed […] and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.” The Galadriel of Tolkien’s heart, pieced together by his son and others, was a fair and terrible adventurer, a reader of mortal souls, a prideful and learned leader who considered the gods no more or less fallible than her. Und a woman who understood who she was even under the most terrible circumstances.

“I was playing someone that if they chose a path of evil, the destruction they could cause would be so immense,” Clark mused. “And I think about that a lot. There are numerous female pop artists, like those with massive followings. I’m a bit like, Yeah, and you’re lucky that they’re nice, because they literAlly have an army behind them. And I think there’s something so wonderful about Galadriel that she rejects a type of power that most — well, we know that all the human men of Middle-earth would grab and use to destroy instead of build.”

“Morfydd is the real deal,” McKay told Polygon, with plain confidence. And knowing I’ve only seen the first two episodes, added, “Just wait, she’s just getting started.”

The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of PowerTwo episodes will be available on Amazon Prime on September 1st at 9 PM EDT/ 6 PM PDT. Each week, new episodes are released at noon EDT Fridays and 9 p.m. on Thursdays.