Queer Readings: Galadriel Part 1

Queer Lodgings: A Tolkien Podcast
Episode 2 – Queer Readings: Galadriel, Part 1

[ Intro Music with birdsong plays ]

Leah: Hi everyone! Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer-led podcast about everything Tolkien. I’m Leah and I’m here with my co-hosts Alicia and Grace.

Alicia: Hello!

Grace: Hi!

Leah: Thank you so much for joining us. Go ahead and pull up a drum-shaped section of log, let Beorn and his animals pour you a big bowl of mead, and settle in as we dive into our first episode in our ongoing series we’re calling “queer readings.” We’ll try to come up with something a little more imaginative as we go on, I think.

In this episode, we’re diving in deep to one of the most complex characters that Tolkien could never quite make up his mind about: Galadriel, Lady of Lothlórien, the golden lady of the wood. We’re going to explore how the mightiest and fairest elf in the Third Age can be read as a queer-identified character: As trans, bi-gender, genderfluid, bisexual or pansexual, and someone who has sapphic and other queer relationships–and that’s just for starters. We’ll also begin to explore how she both conforms and subverts traditional gender roles as a non-cis-hetero person. And don’t worry, we have plenty more to discuss beyond her identity orientation and relationships, but that will all come in future episodes.

[ Shouty Baby meows ]

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: Hello Kitty.

Leah: Meow!

Grace: Okay, we’re going to try seeing if Shouty would like to explore the rest of the house.

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: The timing was so good.

Leah: It was good, as this nice, like, punctuation.

Alicia: If we hear thunks in the background, we’ll know what it is.

[ Laughter continues ]

Grace: So. As we start out considering queer readings, which is something that, as Leah says, we’re going to engage in for a lot of characters and circumstances over many of our episodes… It’s worth touching on a little bit of what we mean when we say “queer.” It’s a term that’s been applied to LGBTQIA+ people for at least the last hundred and twenty-five years. It’s been used joyously and as a slur. It’s been cast upon us in judgment, and it’s been reclaimed. We could do an entire episode to delve into the complexities of its meaning and history and there would still be more to consider. But because it’s a term that has historical meaning and utility in academic and activism spaces, “queer” hold space for so LGBTQIA+ identities and identities that fall under the umbrella of gender and sexual minorities.

It’s a term that resonates with each of us hosts in terms of our own identities for different individual reasons. As with all terms that describe identity, though, it may not be what everyone in our communities chooses to use for themselves. Identity is personal and valid. So, while we intentionally use “queer” here on the podcast because of how broad and complex it is, we encourage everyone in our linked communities to embrace the specific terminology that gives them power, and joy, and freedom for themselves, and allow others the room to do the same.

And so, to the purpose of understanding, Leah has one of our favorite definitions of “queer” to share.

Leah: Queer: “queer not as being about who you are having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live”, bell hooks.

Grace: One of the places that we look to in considering queer readings is to examine how interpersonal relationships can give us insight into queer experiences and themes–especially around the topic of love, which can have a lot of different facets: sexual and/or romantic attractions and actions, queerplatonic bonds, the queer experience of constructing families of choice.

And the delight of reading through a queer lens is that we can hold a lot of truths concurrently, and see validity in all of them. Reading a character as queer in one way doesn’t preclude a different type of queer reading, or indeed any particular lens. They exist alongside each other.

So with that in mind, we thought we’d highlight some of the important relationships in Galadriel’s story starting with Celeborn. So, Celeborn is the most obvious relationship to talk about in terms of evidence of Galadriel’s orientation. He’s the male elf she marries and journeys with through all of the ages of Middle-earth after all. They’re clearly a straight couple, right? Yeah, except if space is held for queer readings of Galadriel as bisexual (someone who has the capacity for attractions to people of other genders as well as her own), pansexual (a framing of queer identity that leans on the prefix “pan” to affirm attractions across all genders) or as Sapphic (which is a term that comes from recognition of the Greek poet Sappho and refers to relationships and attractions between women), or if one holds a reading of Galadriel’s identity being in any way trans, then she is queer, and her relationships would be queer even if a partner isn’t.

So, here Galadriel’s relationship with Celeborn has importance within queer readings, even if we don’t consider queer readings for Celeborn. But… maybe we should!

Leah: Yeah, maybe we should!

[ Chuckling ]

Grace: Those readings exist, after all. Though there’s not a lot of significant scholarship or fandom attention for Celeborn in comparison to other characters, there are queer readings and queer fannish reception where he’s concerned. These largely operate out of consideration of the homosocial context he’s sometimes found in, sometimes along characters like Elrond, or Thranduil and others, or the un-enumerated parts of his timeline–like times he canonically spent apart from Galadriel during their lives in Middle-earth, and the years after when Galadriel sailed to Valinor and Celeborn stayed behind in Middle-earth for a long time.

Alicia: With Thranduil.

Grace: With Thranduil.

Leah: Mmmm-Hmm!

Grace: So, there’s definitely a pathway to look at Celeborn and Galadriel’s relationship as queer despite being less visibly queer. And not for nothing, the fact that Celeborn is the one who gives her the name that she takes and Sindarizes to “Galadriel”, as we learn in Unfinished Tales, is… pretty notable in terms of supportive trans readings.

Leah: More on that later.

Grace: Indeed. The most notable Sapphic reading, though, that we’re looking at today is Galadriel’s relationship with Melian the Maia who is wedded to Thingol and lives in Doriath in the First Age, protecting Doriath with the Girdle of Melian. Galadriel studies and “learned great lore and wisdom concerning Middle-earth”–that’s from the Silmarillion [Sil. 115]–from Melian. There are striking similarities to the protection Galadriel holds around Lothlórien later on. But many readers might take a look at that relationship with Melian and perceive something a little bit queer there.

Specifically, in the draft text for the passage that I had just read, we’re told that Galadriel “received the love of Melian”. That’s from Histories of Middle-earth: War of the Jewels [HoME 11:178]; “there was much love between them” [HoME 11:35]–in the published text this phrase is applied instead to Galadriel’s relationship with Celeborn [Sil. 115].

Leah: Interesting.

Grace: That’s noted in “The Fall and Repentance of Galadriel” by Romuald Ian Lakowski. That’s utterly fascinating to me. A statement of love being made between two women in the draft texts, which lends it decidedly Sapphic context, especially given that when that phrase is shifted in publication, it clearly refers to the person Galadriel marries, now Celeborn, who is a man.

And then going on, in the Silmarillion, even within that edit, we get that Galadriel stayed in Doriath because Celeborn was there, but she “abode with Melian” You know… They were roommates! Just Gals Being Pals! And perhaps there was Only One Bed!

Leah: Only One Bed!

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: In fact, in one draft that’s noted in Treason of Isengard [HoME 7], it’s stated that Galadriel came to Middle-earth with Melian “… since the days of dawn, when I passed over the seas with Melian of Valinor”.

Leah: Wow, That’s fascinating.

Alicia: Yeah.

Grace: Yeah! That’s a version where Galadriel doesn’t show up on her own, or with the guy she marries, but with the woman that we’re told that she loves. There are lots of ways to interpret that, but that reads as pretty queer to me.

Leah: Hell yeah.

Grace: Overall, Galadriel is a character who rarely gets to pass the Bechdel test. She rarely gets to talk to other female characters or characters who are perceived as female, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t take Sapphic readings. Indeed, wherever Galadriel is seen sharing space with female characters in either text or adaptation, Sapphic readings abound. I will point to the recent airing of some episodes of “Rings of Power” and some significant glances that we can see between Galadriel and Míriel, for example.

Leah: Oh man. Yeah, absolutely!

Alicia: I want to, like, just jump in here and mention how there are a certain group of people who read Gimli as a female dwarf.

Leah: Yeah, I’m super into it. I’m super into that reading only because of the relationship between Galadriel and Gimli because… I have to say, I gotta to keep my iconic gay couple Gigolas intact. But I do love that idea of Gimli being a female dwarf. That’s super precious.

Alicia: I mean, why not both?

Leah: Yeah, why not both? Oh my God, why not both??

Grace: The queer readings don’t preclude each other. They’re just different pathways into ways that we can see this.

Leah: Absolutely. Well, speaking of Gimli, let’s move to the relationship that Galadriel has with Gimli. This is pretty recognizably in the pattern of a medieval chivalric romance, with Gimli and Galadriel performing the aristocratic dance of courtly love.

In this pattern or trope, of course, there are two lovers, a Knight and Lady, that perform an idealized romance which, in the stories, never actually leads to marriage but exists as an ideal pattern of behavior that dictates how real couples might court and eventually marry. The Knight fights for the sake of his Lady; with his victories, he earns her love and defends her honour. The Lady is a paragon of womanhood, virtuous, virginal (even when she’s married), perfect, unstained – and ultimately, unreachable. And that’s that, right?

Galadriel, of course, is married, and Gimli is only her staunch defender and devoted knight, and would never consider any sort of consummation or pursuit of an actual relationship, right?

Alicia: [ Unsure hum ] I think he considered it.

[ Laughter ]

Leah: Or would he?

Grace: Yep.

Leah: Or would she? Is this really only courtly love? How queer is the relationship between Gimli and Galadriel? Something to consider, as we move forward in our queer readings generally is the idea of an interracial relationship, between an Elf and Dwarf, or between an Elf and a Man, isn’t—it could be an inherently queer one in Tolkien’s world. Loving someone, never mind marrying outside of one’s species, one’s race – it’s like loving and marrying an alien. So, I think that’s a big thing to consider with Gimli and Galadriel.

Grace: I think also one of the things that’s a hallmark in considering whether those types of relationships are queer are the stigma that they face from within their own societies and groups. And even at times when there are these sort of cross-peoples relationships that occur in Tolkien and they’re treated overly overall fairly well? They’re still talked about as, you know, ending in doom and having, like, vast consequences.

Leah: Exactly.

Grace: So, I think there’s definitely some support for some, ah, some social stigma going on there.

Leah: It’s like, you know, a lot of its sort of like–it ends in some tragedy, maybe further down the line, you know, kind of down the road. But it’s always something that’s–it’s never encouraged.

Grace: Turns out Beren and Lúthien is actually about Bury Your Gays.

Leah: Oh! That’s so sad. [ Laughs ]

Alicia: Yeah, I hate that.

Leah: I kind of hate that.

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: I didn’t say it to be nice, you guys.

Leah: Getting back to Galadriel and Gimli. So, here’s another point: Galadriel speaks Khuzdul to him, naming the Mountains of Moria in his native tongue. That’s a turning point for Gimli not only in his relationship with Galadriel herself but with Elves generally. And later, I think, again, with Legolas, another queer relationship we’re definitely gonna get to, I promise.

 “It seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.” That is, of course, from The Fellowship of the Ring.

I think when we have seen so many other examples of Tolkien describing, basically, love at first sight, especially when one person speaks someone’s native tongue to them (Beren names Lúthien “Tinúviel”, and Aragorn names Arwen “Tinúviel” as well) I really think that this sort of line between them, we can see something big spark between Gimli and Galadriel with this exchange.

Alicia: I think that point that Galadriel knows any Khuzdul also is very important.  It’s in Unfinished Tales, I believe, when they’re discussing the movements of Galadriel and Celeborn, and how Galadriel got to Lothlórien in the beginning by going through Khazad-dûm, and her husband refused to do so.

Leah: Yeah, she went there. He didn’t. Wonder why. So, let’s take a look here at the key moment of the relationship between Galadriel and Gimli: Galadriel’s gift to him when he leaves Lórien. She gives him three strands of her hair at his request, something that she had specifically denied her own kin–suck it Fëanor–when he asked for it.

[ Laughter ]

Leah: Her hair is deeply tied to her identity–it’s literally her name (again, more about that later). And in gifting Gimli, a Dwarf, a basic stranger, three strands of hair just for his own joy and devotion, she gifts him literally something of herself. No one else in the Fellowship asks for a specific gift and no one else gets something so intimate. I don’t think that’s just out of a courtly love to inspire devotion in her valiant knight.

Grace: I think if you look at the impact that it has on Gimli as well… the significance and importance is staggering for him, and that doesn’t speak to just a passing acquaintance or what-have-you either. There’s something meaningful there.

Leah: Exactly. So, last, let’s look at that line in the Appendices: “It is said that Gimli went (into the West with Legolas) also out of desire to see again the beauty of Galadriel; and it may be that she, being mighty among the Eldar, obtained this grace for him.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Galadriel would petition the literal Gods to let just “a friend” into paradise. I think that Galadriel and Gimli, however their relationship manifests, have a deep romantic, maybe queerplatonic love between them, patterned on the courtly love ideal, but something more intimate and queer than at first glance.

Alicia: And now it’s time for me to jump in with one of my favorite ships. Ah… I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who, uh, suffered through the “Hobbit” movies and came out sailing a real big ship for Gandalf and Galadriel.

Leah: Definitely not.

Alicia: Yeah. There are two points in that movie in particular. In “An Unexpected Journey”, there’s that moment after the White Council where she’s just, like, holding his hands and asking his thoughts as to why he chose Bilbo and just…

Leah: It’s so sweet.

Alicia: I love that so much. It’s so sweet and so pure, and just, like, that kind of first teenage love but, like, tempered with the kind of longing and regret that love can get as you get older.

Leah: Yeah.

Alicia: And then there is that moment in Dol Guldur when she comes to save him and she’s obviously fading in the face of the darkness, and Ian McKellen reaches out to her and is like “my Lady” right before he gets taken off by the, frankly, ridiculous rabbit-sled-thing

[ Leah and Grace laughing ]

Alicia: And I tear up every single time I see that because, like, there is so much love–both, I believe, between those two characters and also between Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellen, they’re just acting the shit out of that and wow. I’m obviously not the only person who is touched by it. It’s not an incredibly common ship. Like, if you were to search, I don’t know, “Bagginshield” on AO3 you get about 50,000 results. You get about 1500 results (For Galadriel/Gandalf) which is ironically about the same number as “Silverfisting”, which is one of my other favorite ships.

[ Group laughter ]

Leah: Oh, interesting.

Alicia: It is interesting because those are two very, very, very different ships. We’ll talk about “Silverfisting” at some point, or “Silvergifting” if you’re not like me as a person.

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: But I have honestly been sailing the ship for a while based on purely textual evidence because Galadriel leaves Middle-earth without her husband. Galadriel leaves Middle-earth with Gandalf. They leave Middle-earth together because they were both Elven ringbearers–because Elrond is also leaving, as is Frodo, and Bilbo–so obviously they have that tie. But why didn’t her husband come?

Leah: Why, why, why?

Grace: Very important business with Thranduil. Very important.

Leah: Yeah, that’s right.

Alicia: Yes, exactly.

[Group laughter ]

Alicia: In terms of other textual evidence, I think you could probably lean into the ship. They likely met in Lórien. Like, the real Lórien, not Lothlórien. When Gandalf is still Olórin he stayed around Lórien. We have textual evidence that Galadriel also spent time in Lórien, you know, before the unpleasantness of the Fëanorian revolt.

Leah: The Unpleasantness.

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: Minor detail.

Alicia: I’m from the South, we’re used to referring to things as unpleasantnesses.

[Group laughter]

Alicia: But beyond that, like, in more actual textual evidence: She has this history of always backing Gandalf. She wants him to lead the White Council, she seems to have some sort of tie to Gandalf, more so than she has with other characters. Like, you get in the first scene with her when she’s testing the Fellowship–she’s seeing into their minds and seeing, you know, what their desires are, how she could potentially tempt them away. But she mentions in that “a grey mist is about him (Gandalf) and the ways of his feet and his mind are hidden to me.”

That says to me that they have a bond beyond what she has with at least the rest of the Fellowship. Like, they are mind-bonded in some way that she can actually sense where he is. And I think that’s really interesting how she has this mind-link with a Maia, of all people.

Grace: At least one Maia.

Alicia: Yeah, that’s true.

Leah: I was going to say–I mean maybe Melian as well.

Alicia: Gandalf has a history, when he was wandering around in Lórien as Olórin, of inserting wisdom into other people’s minds.

Leah: Oh.

Grace: Nice.

[ Group laughter ]

Alicia: And it’s something that Galadriel also does. Like, maybe she learned that from him, we don’t really know, but it’s interesting that they’re both— they have all of these concurrent things like they both are bearing rings, they have kind of similar powers in this way. And also: Galadriel chastises Celeborn for being a dick essentially. [ Laughs ]

Grace: This is my favorite.

Alicia: Because Galadriel is introduced as kind of subordinate to Celeborn, and then Celeborn says: “And if it were possible, one would say that at last, Gandalf fell from wisdom into folly, going needlessly into the net of Moria”

To which Galadriel responds “He would be rash indeed that said that thing.”

[ Group laughter ]

“Needless were none of the deeds of Gandalf in life. Those that followed him knew not his mind and cannot report his full purpose.” That is the closest I believe Tolkien gets to a “get fucked.” [ Laughs ]

Leah: Sit down, Celeborn.

Alicia: Sit down, shut up.

Leah: Sit all the way down.

Alicia: You don’t know my boyfriend as well as I do.

Leah: You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Alicia: Yeah, I just… I love that ship so much. And a lot of it is fueled by Peter Jackson, but it’s there. It’s there in the text too.

Leah: It’s definitely there.

Alicia: And it’s— to bring it back around to queerness. They are different, like, species as it were. Galadriel is definitely the mightiest of all Elves still left in Middle-earth, but she is not a Maia.

Leah: Right, right.

Alicia: And she has this— I’ve always, frankly, read this as kind of a ‘Celeborn’s ok with it ‘ sort of thing. He knows it’s happening–is just letting it happen because it makes his wife happy.

Grace: Mmmhmm.

Leah: Yeah, yeah, consensual non-monogamy. Yeah.

Alicia: Indeed, indeed.

Leah: How about we shift a little bit and start talking a little bit more about Galadriel’s gender roles. Grace, you want to take us away there?

Grace: Yeah! So, one of the things that I find absolutely fascinating in talking about Galadriel and queer identity or queering of the text is that Galadriel doesn’t fit into gender roles—either some of the perhaps preconceived notions of what a woman should be in Middle-earth or… really more what we as readers assume that a woman should be and act like in Middle-earth based on our reading of the details of the first world.

In her paper “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien”, Melanie Rawls points out that “From the opening pages of the Silmarillion it is clear that Tolkien believes that gender and sex are not one in the same; and that gender, or Masculine and Feminine, is a condition of the universe that goes deeper, higher, and wider than sex, mere male or female, in the necessities of reproduction.” [Rawls, “the Feminine Principle in Tolkien”]. She goes on to make the argument that those beings who achieve Good throughout Arda embody attributes of more than one “gender” as roles might typically be assigned.

Now, I do what to note that this article was first published in 1984, so there is a lot more binary terminology employed than scholars might use today. But the point that I take from it is that it is gratifying to see published work in scholarship at that earlier date, since a lot of criticism right now is the idea that discussing even the most remotely queer readings of Tolkien is frequently treated as an exceedingly new lens, a very modern lens, which is handily refuted here because 1984 is several decades ago and not, you know, a couple of years.

And then as we get into what Tolkien actually writes regarding gender roles and elves, there’s some really interesting things in “Laws and Customs among the Eldar” which is published in Morgoth’s Ring which is the 10^th volume of Histories of Middle-earth. There’s a quote in there that–he says “There are, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a nér can think or do, or others with which only a nís is concerned.” These are terms that he’s using to refer to Elven genders. And then he goes on to illustrate what interests, tasks, and hobbies fit in with gender roles for the neri and nissi—these elven genders that he maps onto the notion of men and women. He talks about fighting and healing, baking lembas vs. cooking, gardening, weaving, smithing, making music, seeking the lore of the wild…

But he is always careful, even in ascribing any sort of gender roles, to revisit the idea that these are common trends established by custom and common practice and not biological or societal dictates. We see terms like “more often,” “many delight in,” “they for the most part,” “done mostly by,” “most practiced by” throughout this passage. And then he ends the passage by unequivocally stating that “all of these things, or other matters of labor and play, or of deeper knowledge concerning being and the life of the World, may at different times be pursued by any among the Noldor, be they neri or nissi.” “There are no matters among which the Eldar only a nér can think or do, or others with which only a nís is concerned.”

Leah: That’s such an important quote. Before anybody @s us or starts yelling at us about the gender or bio-essentialism—which is, of course, the belief that conflates gender and sex, and ties our gender to our reproductive traits and our assigned sex— in “Laws and Customs among the Eldar” [HoME 10], chill out. We know. We’re going to talk about it and Tolkien’s more, um, let’s say troubling and essentialist notes in this essay in a future episode and believe me, there’s plenty to talk about there.

Grace: Boy howdy.

Leah:  Yeah. Yeah. Today, however, we’re focusing on what Tolkien has written about the Eldar that specifically eschews gender essentialism. Tolkien makes a point, several times, that the pursuits and concerns of the Eldar aren’t centered around biological reproductive functions. They aren’t restricted by them, and in all things (save childbirth) the Eldar are equal.

And bring this back to Galadriel’s roles: Galadriel’s role as a mother and a wife are secondary, even tertiary, to the other roles that she holds. And that, to me, reflects something really important about the Eldar generally, and something even more important about Galadriel. She easily moves between the gender roles of a man and a woman without contradiction or friction. Her roles as a woman are just as important as her roles as a man, and her femininity is just as important as her masculinity.

Grace: She’s also a character who is depicted as, you know, fostering this realm, and also a leader in military context. She fights and she heals. She does all of these things, holds all of these roles that don’t place her within one particular context, and actually challenge the idea of gender roles in general.

Leah: Exactly.

Grace: And it’s one of the reasons why I’m drawn to her is a character. That it’s not something that is just definitive on the basis of what you are assigned at birth, or what role you are supposed to have, what society limits you to. She takes on queer versions of gender, and plays with gender and how gender is expressed.

Leah: Exactly.

Alicia: I think part of that comes from the fact that Tolkien was an Anglo-Saxonist and he is basing Galadriel specifically on a cupbearer, which is one of the really important functions of Anglo-Saxon queens. You see this depicted in the Lord of the Ringswith Éowyn. A cupbearer receives the guests, they pass the cup of mead. It’s a ceremony that promotes social bonds amongst the King and his retainers, which were generally warriors, and it allowed women in Anglo-Saxon times to have an outsized diplomatic influence in comparison to what we generally think of when we think about gender roles.

Because we usually–in America in 2022, when we think about gender roles, we’re thinking about this, like, idealized 1950’s-esque ‘women in the kitchen having children’ kind of gender roles, and that is not historically how women were treated.

Leah: Exactly.

Alicia: In real life or in fiction. Because most of the examples we have of Anglo-Saxon women are in fiction such as Beowulf.

Leah: Right.

Alicia: And one of the other really important things that Anglo-Saxon queens did were to, obviously, receive the guests, and then bestow them gifts to create… it’s to reinforce that social bond that’s created when you’re passing around the cup of mead. Everyone drinks the communal cup, then everyone gets gifts, usually armbands. They’re then tied to the King. Galadriel directly does this in The Lord of the Rings. She is 100% a cupbearer. She offers the cup of farewell to the Fellowship when they leave, and then gives them personalized gifts that are going to help them on their journey— with the exception of Sam and Gimli. Sam’s gift’s not real helpful in Mordor! [ Laughs ] But everyone else got useful ones.

Leah: It’s helpful later though!

Alicia: It is helpful later. One of the other things that she gives is the Lothlórien cloaks. The ones that are depicted as literally turning into a rock in the movies. [ Laughs ] That, one, aligns her with being this cupbearer, this gift giver; two, it aligns her with some Norse mythology that we’re going to touch on a little bit later as a Valkyrie; they had a really high skill in weaving and sewing. It also aligns her with the Germanic demigoddesses, Norns.  They literally weave fate. Tolkien comes back to this in other places as well when you think about the Vala Vairë who lives in the Halls of Mandos and weaves the story of the world. It also aligns her with what is historically women’s work.

Leah: Right? Exactly, exactly. Like, Galadriel is a woman, like the women of both the medieval Germanic lands in real life and in Germanic myth. These women were mythic warriors and powerful seers. And these particularly feminine roles are just as essential to her identity as the masculine roles of warrior, and commander, and ruler of a realm that Galadriel has. I really think that these roles kind of highlight that her femininity is just as powerful as her masculinity. So, that’s kind of a nice segue to bringing us into, more specifically, Trans readings of Galadriel.

Alicia: All right. So, I purposefully got chosen to talk about this part because I am pretty firmly known as someone who likes to talk about Tolkien’s, uh… unending contradictions. So, this— I’m just going to read this directly because this is such a fantastic quote. It’s by Christopher Tolkien from “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn” in Unfinished Tales.

“There is no part of the history of Middle-earth more full of problems than the story of Galadriel and Celeborn, and it must be admitted that there are severe inconsistencies “embedded in the traditions”; or, to look at the matter from another point of view, that the role and importance of Galadriel only emerged slowly, and that her story underwent continual refashionings.”

Now, literally, Tolkien did this about almost everything. You can pick a Tolkien quote that contradicts basically any other Tolkien quote. Well known, I’m going to harp on that for the rest of my life, I’m pretty sure. But Galadriel is a really good example of this, and I’m going to harken back to some vintage Corey Olsen here [Signum University YouTube lectures, Unfinished Tales Session 6]:

Galadriel has four different versions in the Legendarium. I don’t actually know if we’ve used “Legendarium” before. The Legendarium is the entirety of Tolkien’s Middle-earth-related works. So, there’s Galadriel 1.0, which is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. She is a powerful, benevolent ruler with a bad reputation outside of her realm. As we just mentioned she is a cupbearer. She is a gift-giver, and to hearken back to what Grace was saying earlier from Rawls, she is total femininity to the exclusion of masculinity— just going to dive into that for one second. Rawls’ idea here in what is feminine versus what is masculine is that feminine is concerned with the self, concerned with the inside and masculinity is concerned with the outside and concerned with events. So, she’s super girly, essentially, in Rawls’ conception here.

There’s also Galadriel 2.0, which is what we get in the published Silmarillion. She is involved in the Noldorin rebellion. Her role in that is a little unclear. We do start to see here that the reason she joins the Noldorin rebellion is that she wants a realm of her own. And that–that desire to rule, to leave, to be self-directing is a very masculine role in Rawls’ conceit here.

And there’s Galadriel 3.0, who shows up in Unfinished Tales in the “Shibboleth of Fëanor”, which is almost exactly the same as Galadriel in the Silmarillion, except so much more. She is 100% on the “fuck Fëanor” train–

Leah: Yep.

Alicia: –Because Fëanor murdered her cousins. She actively fights against him at Alqualondë. And, in contrast to what we hear in, like, Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, where the pardon that she gets from the Valar is kind of, like, iffy—whether she actually received the pardon or is just staying of her own volition, or what. And Galadriel 3.0, she actively refuses the Valar’s pardon. She’s really piling on her pride, her desire to rule, her… one could say colonialism.

And then there’s Galadriel 4.0, who is my least favorite Galadriel.

Leah: Mine too.

Grace: Same.

Alicia: About a month before Tolkien died—my personal opinion here is that Tolkien was trying to get right with God—because Galadriel is famously his, like, Virgin Mary insert (if you were to read some of his letters that he wrote to select people) and he basically erases all of Galadriel’s flaws. She leaves Valinor with permission, she leaves Valinor alone. She’s not involved with any of the complicating factors of Fëanor & Co. It makes her a much less interesting character in my opinion.

Grace: Absolutely.

Leah: I also wonder, bringing back to trying to get right with God… I also wonder how much of this sort of re-visioning is him missing Edith.

Alicia: Yeah.

Leah: I really wonder if he’s sort of leaning into that special regard he has for Galadriel as the Virgin Mary and really highlighting that because, for him, Edith was a bit of an earthly equivalent in terms of his devotion. So, I don’t know, I kind of wonder if a lot of what we see of Galadriel 4.0 is just Tolkien missing his wife.

Alicia: It is definitely possible. It seems strange to me that he would have latched on to Galadriel in that instance, versus, like, Lúthien.

Leah: Lúthien, right.

Alicia: Since that’s historically who he— but, I don’t know, Lúthien is, you know, like, a young elf, and, like, maybe he began to see more of his wife in Galadriel.

Leah: Yeah.

Grace: I think there’s also just… when I reflect on this, the element that the lack of Edith’s presence means that she’s not a daily factor in his life anymore, and the role of a person who inhabits the body and gender of a woman in his life is no longer present on a day-to-day basis. That important counterpoint to his lived experience isn’t there. And that, I think, shows up in some of the changes that he makes to Galadriel’s character.

Leah: Yeah.  So, let’s shift again a little bit. Let’s look a little bit at the language that’s used to describe Galadriel. So often we see the language that’s used to describe her use opposing natural forces or natural opposites that are contrasted with one another. They’re not necessarily inherently contradictory but they’re part of a whole. When people describe Galadriel, they often describe her in terms of natural forms or nature, many of which are often transitory or fluid, or in these opposing pairs. Like that great quote from Sam describing her:

“The Lady of Lórien! […] Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as di’monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime. […] Perhaps you could call her perilous, because she’s so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river.” And that’s from Book IV of Lord of the Rings [“The Window on the West”].

She does some of this comparison too when she speaks to Frodo at her mirror and is tempted by the Ring. She says “I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!” [LOTR, Book II, “The Mirror of Galadriel”]

Alicia: [ In the cadence of Galadriel in the Jackson Films ] All shall love me and despair!

Leah: What a line.

Alicia: Ah, it’s so good. I have that tattooed on me, by the way.

Leah: Aw yeah!! So, these contrasts between forms: They’re mutable and changeable and yet also have an enduring timelessness. The sea and the sun, the mountain and the snow, the daffadowndilly and hard as diamonds.

The snow on the mountain is fleeting. It melts, but it can also become ice or a glacier—a kind of permanent sort of snow. The sun rises and sets, but, of course, it’s always present in the sky. The sea can be calm or stormy, and the lightning flashes and is gone again, but the foundations of the earth remain. So, my point here is that this language—this language of change and shifting, fluidity, this contrast with enduring stability, this language around Galadriel really makes me read her as inherently an individual of change, fluidity, and mutability, even as she is one of the most enduring, timeless persons in Middle-earth.

I think that with this language a really strong case can be made here that Galadriel is trans. And I think specifically, a strong case could be made that Galadriel is bigender and genderfluid.

So, what do I mean by trans? I mean that she is somebody who identifies as something other than the gender assigned to them at birth. And what I mean by genderfluid or bigender: bigender refers to somebody who identifies as two or more genders and genderfluid generally refers to someone who experiences shifts in their gender identity and presentation.

These two, bigender and genderfluid, can often overlap in expression but aren’t necessarily interchangeable. I think that this trans reading of Galadriel can also be supported by talking about her name–and again, we’ll get to that in a second. We keep teasing it!

Grace: We do.

Alicia: We do.

Leah: But let’s look at some more of this language of nature that surrounds Galadriel and the nature itself that is so strongly associated with her, which is the forest: a place of some opposing and somewhat contradictory forces.

Alicia: In Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Robert Pogue Harrison says “If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they typically have been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. If they evoke associations of danger and abandon in our minds, they also evoke scenes of enchantment.”

In “Galadriel and Morgan le Fey: Tolkien’s Redemption of the Lady of the Lacuna”, Susan Carter states that Galadriel belongs in the forest or in the wood because she is depicted as this pure character who is yet tainted with suspicion. You have her being referred to as an elf witch. Every single man you see after they leave the woods of Lothlórien and mention that they were there immediately starts distrusting the part of the Fellowship who they are speaking with, because she has known to have, like, a terrible power. She is likely saddled with that suspicion because, I mean, she’s authoritative but she’s also very elusive. She is the queen of her own domain, but her domain is very small.

Also, her magic is a little menacing. You think of Galadriel’s ‘ magic’, as she calls it to Sam, is her mirror— her mirror which is tied with water, which is a feminine symbol of power and fertility. The mirror does not show anyone good things. I’m assuming at some point it shows people good things. But in the actual book, it shows malice and it makes sense that people would be scared of her because you’re not guaranteed to have a good time when you visit her, right?

Like, Boromir came out of her testing of him… essentially a broken man. She has the power to build up and to strengthen bonds, but she also has the power to tear people down and that’s scary for Men.

Leah: Yep.

Alicia: So, she is aligned with that sort of, like, perilous type of femininity and I think some of this depiction goes back to Tolkien being an Anglo-Saxonist.

In Anglo-Saxon England, power is pretty gendered. Female characters in epic poems such as Beowulf are allowed to be intelligent, strong-minded, or verbally adept. But as written in Maxims I, which is a poem about how you’re supposed to live your life, battle and war must develop in the man and the woman must flourish beloved among her people and must be lighthearted.

Battle and war are not the exclusive domain of men, but the rejection of diplomacy for violence is seen as a subversion of classical femininity in the tradition of the old Norse Valkyries, which are divine beings who guide the souls of warriors at their death on the battlefield. Leslie Donovan in “The Valkyrie Reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn, and Arwen” —

Leah: [ Re: Shelob in the title ] Ooh, I can’t wait to talk about her—

Alicia: She says that the language surrounding Galadriel’s femininity and power does align her with this Valkyrie tradition. And also, with Norns, which we mentioned above. Partially in her role as cupbearer, because cupbearers are more closely associated with warriors than with child-rearing, and that therefore aligns her more with “masculinity” than “femininity”.

I’m ‘scare quoting’ this you, can’t see me. It’s fine.

[ Group laughter ]

Alicia: And in aligning Galadriel with Valkyries, he is taking this Old Norse ideal and assigning to it moral good, responsible leadership, and what we would consider in modern times, like, heroic ideals as opposed to scary ‘masculinized women’ ideals, which is what the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse people would have viewed them as.

Leah: Right. So, let’s shift again and let’s finally, finally talk about Galadriel’s name.

Her multiple names, actually, and all the ways that we can read a trans Galadriel in those names. So, first things to know is that the Eldar have a lot of complicated naming traditions. It’s important to know that there is a difference between given names, or essi, and chosen names. In “Laws and Customs among the Eldar” [HoME 10], we learn that “Since the Eldar were by nature immortal within Arda, but were by no means changeless, after a time one might wish for a new name.” This essential point of the Eldar wanting and choosing a new name is, I think, really strong support for an Elf who wants to, and does, transition.

And I’m including Galadriel in there.

When Eldar were born, they were given two names, or anessi, by the mother and the father. The mother name is recognized as the most important as it often indicated some essential or “true” nature of the child, recognized in a moment of foresight. In a quote from Unfinished Tales, we learn that Galadriel’s mother-name was “Nerwen”, translating to “man-maiden”, and her father-name, “Artanis”, “noble woman”. “She grew to be tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor; she was strong of body, mind, and will, a match for both the lore masters and the athletes of the Eldar” [UT + HoME 12 “Shibboleth of Fëanor”].

And I think this is—and I included the rest of the quote describing her because HOT, and also because I think it’s superinteresting, because I can see a gap in there for a Galadriel who transitioned really early in Valinor.  And also, I’m–again, I just want to remind people that she’s supposed to be, like, 7 feet tall or something, and I would love to see a gigantic Galadriel one of these days.

Later in the same essay, we learn “the name she chose to be her Sindarin name was Galadriel, or Alatáriel in Telerin or Altáriel in Quenya, for it was the most beautiful of her names, and had been given to her by her lover, Celeborn” [UT + NoMe]. She chose her name. It was given by her partner (like Lúthien Tinúviel, like Arwen Undómiel), but these given names were not true names unless they were actually adopted or self-given, and that’s exactly what Galadriel did. She chose her true name.

And that name of “Galadriel”–what does it mean? “Galadriel […] means ‘maiden crowned with gleaming hair’. It is a secondary name given to her in her youth in the far past because she had long hair which glistened like gold but was also shot with silver.  She bound up her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats (in Valinor)”. We learn this in Letters #348.

Remember when I said her hair is an essential part of her identity? And how her chosen name is literally a reference to her hair? And how she gave her chosen hair, her chosen self to Gimli–how queer is that? how fucking queer is that!? [ Laughs ] I really feel like this relationship with her names is sort of a really key point to reading a trans Galadriel.

Alicia: Indeed. It is also worth pointing out that Tolkien overtly masculinizes Galadriel. In The Lord of the Rings, he describes her voice as “clear a musical but deeper than woman’s wont”. He describes how tall she is. In The Silmarillion, he says that she is the “mightiest and the fairest of all elves that remained in Middle-earth”. All of these things align her with authority but also with masculinity. And although she is, in The Lord of the Rings, depicted as, like, such a feminine role, he does still use masculinizing language to refer to her physical being.

Grace: And he also gives several examples of her actions which are characterized in more traditionally masculine terms. She is one of the leaders of the Noldorin rebellion against the Valar–that’s stated in The Silmarillion’s index. There’s a line where he says “Even after the merciless assault upon the Teleri and the rape of their ships, though she fought fiercely against Fëanor in defense of her mother’s kin, she did not turn back.”

These characterizations of her actions and framing her actions as things that are within the masculine realm is part of this overt masculinizing of Galadriel’s character, this duality that there is, or… fluidity, as we said. What’s interesting to me too is that the language around Galadriel’s wisdom and action are often very similar to the terms that are used for characters who are presented as men within The Silmarillion.

So, you have actions that speak to that leadership and ability to fight and lead military troops with “Galadriel took up rule and defense against Sauron”— that’s in Unfinished Tales. But by the same measure, you get that “Celeborn withstood”, Elrond is able to “extricate” himself from orcs, Isildur “escapes” the orcs who attack him. Galadriel “escaped from Nargothrond on the day of its destruction” or in a different version “fled Nargothrond before its fall.” Gil-galad “defends Lindon and the Grey Havens” in Peoples of Middle-earth [HoME 12].

Male characters escape, aid, defend, command, guard, are overwhelmed in these contexts and these are the same pieces of language that are used to refer to Galadriel’s actions. Galadriel is framed in the same terms as masculine leaders.

Alicia: [ In Angry Nerd Voice ] If she’s such a masculine leader, where is her sword?

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: I’m so glad that you asked. You see, at the end of all of Tolkien’s writings of Middle-earth, Galadriel is, in fact, alive.

[ Alicia laughing ]

Grace: So, unlike most men that get a named sword or spear (hey, Gil-galad) in their death scene, Galadriel’s weapons are not named because Galadriel, unlike said men, doesn’t die.

Alicia: My nerd voice isn’t as good as Tim’s.

[ Group laughter ]

Leah: Aww, what a shame. So, I think we’re kind of wrapping up a little bit in this first episode of “reading queer Galadriel.” In our next episode, we’re going to explore how this same fluidity of how Galadriel’s gender identity, and her gender expression, and her gender roles impact the actions that she takes in Arda.

So, what are some of our takeaways here from this queer reading of Galadriel? We have been saying it throughout the entire episode: fluidity is the common trend in these queer readings for her character, especially when placed in contrast or juxtaposition with what is timeless and enduring about her. Shifting and change are essential parts of her identity and I think that they’re essential to a queer reading of her.

Alicia: And speaking of shifting, as Galadriel shifts from being a tertiary character in The Lord of the Rings through becoming a more central character throughout the writing of The Silmarillion and the other writings that inform The Silmarillion, her characterizations become complex, and as they become more complex, they become increasingly queer. I think that is a very important takeaway from this.

Grace: Hell yeah.

Leah: Agreed.

Alicia: My queer queen.

Leah: Ah… my queer queen.

Alicia: All right! Well, we are wrapping up today. Super excited to dive into the other eleven pages of notes we have about, uh, what Galadriel actually did! [ Laughs ]

Leah: We have so much about her! And I’m sorry and not sorry because Galadriel is one of my very favorite characters, and the more I kind of read about her and the more I learn about this complex and shifting and changing history that she has gone through in Tolkien’s writings, the more excited I get about her. So, thanks for coming with us I guess on these multiple episodes about her.

Alicia: If you liked what you heard today or, you know, even if you didn’t, you can find us on Apple, Google, Spotify or stream our episodes directly on Zencastr. That’s https://zencastr.com/Queer-Lodgings-A-Tolkien-Podcast with hyphens in between all of those words.

Please leave us a rating, like, share, and subscribe. You can find us on Facebook: facebook.com/QueerLodgings, on twitter @Queer_Lodgings, or if you want to email us, send us some fan mail, give us some ideas, tell us what we’re doing wrong/what we’re doing right?

Leah: But say it nicely!

Alicia: You can email us at [email protected].

Alicia: Bye everyone, it’s been great!

Leah: Thanks so much everyone, bye!

Grace: Bye!

Transcription by: Mercury Natis