Why Galadriel jumps in The Rings of Power episode 1’s ending, explained

This is the climax The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s first episode is a doozy. Galadriel is tired and wrestles with an unsettling decision throughout the entire episode. The final scene sees her make a crucial choice, in a sea of music and light. It’s beautiful. It’s moving!

Also, just what happened? What was the point of all that light? It seems that this is a bigger task than simply getting off and on a boat.

Sail west with us, reader, and we’ll unpack The Rings of Power’s brush with Middle-earth’s divinity.

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 1.]

Image: Prime Video

If you’ve watched the episode, then you know: Galadriel spends the hour weighing her conviction that the great war isn’t over with Sauron still at large against her desire to return home to the Undying Lands across the sea. Galadriel leaps onto the water just as her troops break into song to celebrate their homecoming. Galadriel gives home one more glance and turns to begin her long, arduous swim back across the entire ocean.

We are just like elves, men.

Rings of Power shows all of this with only light explanation: It’s framed as a journey home, but without exploring much more of Valinor’s significance to elves in general, or to Galadriel and her kinfolk in specific. It may be that the show has more explanation up its sleeve, especially as it looks like Galadriel will be spending a bunch of time with human characters next — they’ll probably have questions about how she wound up in the middle of the ocean.

But if you just can’t wait, let’s unpack everything that’s going on here.

Galadriel, what are you giving up?

Image: Prime Video

J.R.R. was a typical J.R.R. Tolkien was not limited in his use of the Undying Lands as a reference to the mysterious, elven homeland. If you want to talk about the continental landmass, it’s Aman. If you want to talk about the nation of elves and gods there, it’s Valinor. You can also refer to the entire thing as the Undying Lands, or simply the West without the capital W.

Most of the elves in broader Middle-earth have never seen Aman, but they know it is a homeland the gods prepared for them, one they’ll move to eventually once they become weary of living in Middle-earth — and one their spirits will go to for resurrection if they ever die. But for Galadriel and her kin, a tribe called the Noldor, it’s something a little different. The Noldor have all actually been to Valinor and lived centuries among its splendor — Galadriel was even born there, as Rings of PowerIts opening scenes show the characters.

The Noldor fled Valinor in order to take revenge against the dark god who stole the work of their most skilled craftsman at the start of the war between the elves and Morgoth. Although the gods told them to not, they went ahead and got in a boat fight that resulted in their first killing of other elves. As punishment, Noldor was cursed by the gods.

Under that curse, the Doom of Mandos, all the Noldor’s goals would turn to evil, the treasures they sought to retrieve would always slip from their grasp, and their quest would be marred by duplicity and betrayal even from their own kin. Not only were they forbidden from returning to Valinor for ever, but they also became a cursed to become quickly tired of the world around them and long to find a place to call home.

Most of the Noldor died in violent ways by the time Morgoth was defeated. However, Gods granted pardons to any Noldor that stood up against Morgoth. That’s why Galadriel’s soldiers are so strident about setting aside their task and returning from the field. They haven’t come back from the front since the war’s ending, and once they do, they can go home. The Doom of Mandos can help them release centuries of longing.

But there’s an extra, personal significance of returning to Valinor for Galadriel. Galadriel refers to the most horrible aspect of this curse: Noldorin Elfs who left Aman would lose their immortality. The Rings of PowerWhen she states that her people did not have a word for death

What’s the deal?

Image by New Line Cinema

Although elves can live forever, they are not immortal and cannot be destroyed. If an elf is killed in battle, her spirit separates from her physical form and travels to a place in Valinor called the Halls of Mandos, overseen by Middle-earth’s god of the afterlife, a guy named (you guessed it) Mandos. His domain is composed of vast underground caverns that are lined with God-woven tapestries which depict the entire history of mankind.

The majority of elves receive new bodies to allow their spirits to live in and they join the rest of Valinor’s elves. Some elves stay in the Halls for a while because their experiences — like violent trauma — can make them kind of tired of life for a while. The gods have the power to ban people from getting new body parts, just like in Doom of Mandos. They can force them to stay in the Halls of Mandos till the end of their lives as unhappy, disembodied colors.

Tolkien did not know why Galadriel was allowed to remain in Middle-earth following the lifting of the Noldorin ban. Rings of PowerThere is plenty of space to make your own. In these first episodes, it’s that Galadriel wants to finish the job her late brother started and put a stop to Sauron’s machinations. This doesn’t necessarily contradict with Tolkien either; Galadriel did have a brother, Finrod, who was captured by Sauron and died in the dark lord’s dungeons in single, unarmed combat with a werewolf, whom he also killed.

That’s not particularly relevant, but I just really wanted to mention the werewolf fight.

Until the lifting of the Doom of Mandos, Galadriel would have had no reason to hope that Finrod would never live again, not until the end of days when Middle-earth’s supreme god Eru Ilúvatar would destroy the world and restore it to his original perfect intention.

So Galadriel isn’t just giving up on going home and being relieved of divinely-inspired longing, like her kinsmen. She’s also giving up on seeing her brother again, at least for a good long while. It’s no surprise that she takes so long to decide.

Galadriel gives up, but why?

I can’t say for certain. But I did ask Galadriel’s actress, Morfydd Clark, for her take.

Clark said that a simple way of putting it would be that Galadriel doesn’t feel that she deserves to return to the elven promised land, because she has a responsibility to protect Middle-earth from Sauron. That decision can be difficult due to the need for Undying Lands in West that every elf feels at least partially, including characters such as Legolas or Elrond.

“There’s this Welsh word, Hiraeth, that has no English translation,” Clark told me over Zoom. “It’s a yearning and longing for a place that you can never return to, almost a place that you might not even have experienced. Memories of your ancestors and things like that.”

As an example, she cited “Hiraeth,” by Welsh entertainer Max Boyce. The song’s single English verse goes: “Tell me then, you men of learning, why is HiraethWhat is more important than longing? What if darkness wants to conceal me? Hiraeth comes and sleeps beside me?”

But for Clark, Galadriel’s HiraethHer homeland is her balance HiraethHer responsibility. Galadriel fears that “if she goes back to Valinor without finishing what she was meant to do, the HiraethIt will remain there. And that would be the most unbearable thing.”

A longing for more than simple heavenly existence was key to Tolkien’s vision for Galadriel, one of the most singular characters he created for Middle-earth, and Clark’s interpretation of Rings of Power’s improvisation fits the theme quite well. It’s hard to think of anything worse than being denied your destined place in heaven — except for being the only person in heaven who deeply longs to leave.