Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [139]
16 The statement that Elendil was the author of the Akallabêth is made only here. It is also said, elsewhere, that the story of Aldarion and Erendis, ‘one of the few detailed histories preserved from Númenor’, owed its preservation to its being of interest to Elendil.
IV
THE HISTORY OF GALADRIEL AND CELEBORN
and of Amroth King of Lórien
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.
Thus, at the outset, it is certain that the earlier conception was that Galadriel went east over the mountains from Beleriand alone, before the end of the First Age, and met Celeborn in his own land of Lórien; this is explicitly stated in unpublished writing, and the same idea underlies Galadriel’s words to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring II 7, where she says of Celeborn that ‘He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted; for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.’ In all probability Celeborn was in this conception a Nandorin Elf (that is, one of the Teleri who refused to cross the Misty Mountains on the Great Journey from Cuiviénen).
On the other hand, in Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings appears a later version of the story; for it is stated there that at the beginning of the Second Age ‘In Lindon south of the Lune dwelt for a time Celeborn, kinsman of Thingol; his wife was Galadriel, greatest of Elven women.’ And in the notes to The Road Goes Ever On (1968, p. 60) it is said that Galadriel ‘passed over the Mountains of Eredluin with her husband Celeborn (one of the Sindar) and went to Eregion’.
In The Silmarillion there is mention of the meeting of Galadriel and Celeborn in Doriath, and of his kinship with Thingol (p. 115); and of their being among the Eldar who remained in Middle-earth after the end of the First Age (p. 254).
The reasons and motives given for Galadriel’s remaining in Middle-earth are various. The passage just cited from The Road Goes Ever On says explicitly: ‘After the overthrow of Morgoth at the end of the First Age a ban was set upon her return, and she had replied proudly that she had no wish to do so.’ There is no such explicit statement in The Lord of the Rings; but in a letter written in 1967 my father declared:
The Exiles were allowed to return – save for a few chief actors in the rebellion, of whom at the time of The Lord of the Rings only Galadriel remained. At the time of her Lament in Lórien she believed this to be perennial, as long as the Earth endured. Hence she concludes her lament with a wish or prayer that Frodo may as a special grace be granted a purgatorial (but not penal) sojourn in Eressëa, the solitary isle in sight of Aman, though for her the way is closed. Her prayer was granted – but also her personal ban was lifted, in reward for her services against Sauron, and above all for her rejection of the temptation to take the Ring when offered to her. So at the end we see her taking ship.
This statement, very positive in itself, does not however demonstrate that the conception of a ban on Galadriel’s return into the West was present when the chapter ‘Farewell to Lórien’ was composed, many years before; and I am inclined to think that it was not (see p. 302).
In a very late and primarily philological essay, certainly written after the publication of The Road Goes Ever On, the story is distinctively different:
Galadriel and her brother Finrod were the children of Finarfin, the second son of Indis. Finarfin was of his mother’s kind