The Feminine Journey: Eve, Mary, and Galadriel
What is a woman? This question has gained a certain amount of notoriety in the recent American political conversation, but it has been a question since Eve’s creation. Her equality of humanity with man implies the same call to holiness, but her distinction as woman implies a unique path to sanctity. Every woman is called to receive her feminine identity as a gift, and also to cultivate it as a responsibility. The question remains: what does this mean? What is a woman, and what is the significance of being one?
Christ, when posed questions by seekers and skeptics alike, often responded with a story. Stories have a unique power to touch the heart, as the mind and the emotions react to what is presented. The vast literary landscape of the West is comprised of storytellers who engage with the same questions as the philosopher and the theologian, but they articulate their answers through an art that is compelling, inspirational, and deeply human. The Church has cultivated this intellectual tradition as she seeks to sanctify her children and bring them to a full understanding of the truth. The twentieth-century English author J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and his faith shines through his works such as The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. His heroines, including Lúthien, Éowyn, and Galadriel, each embody the feminine vocation, responding to the question of woman’s identity and shedding light on what many allude to as “the feminine genius.”
The most perfect image of femininity is the Blessed Mother, “the world’s first love.”[1] Until Mary, there was never a perfect woman: “It was a radically new thing that entered into fallen human history when God gave us a woman––a mortal woman, not a goddess––who was both sinless and perfect . . . It is an idea that could only have been given to us by God.”[2] She perfectly exemplifies the maternal identity, and to her is owed the coming of Christ into the world. Her fiat shows both surrender to God and active receptivity.[3] J. R. R. Tolkien referred to her as the one “upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and in simplicity is founded.”[4] No one could ever speak of, admire, or love her too much. In G. K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse, he describes the Blessed Mother:
One instant in the still light,
He saw Our Lady then,
Her dress was soft as western sky,
And she was a queen most womanly—
But she was a queen of men.
Over the iron forest
He saw Our Lady stand;
Her eyes were sad withouten art,
And seven swords were in her heart—
But one was in her hand.[5]
She is rightly revered above all other creatures, seen as “fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners.”[6] Our Lady is both the tender mother and the warrior queen who helps crush the head of the Enemy, while at the same time remaining radiantly feminine. Therefore, the Blessed Mother is the definitive icon of redeemed womanhood.
St. Edith Stein said, “Every other woman has something in herself inherited from Eve, and she must search for a way from Eve to Mary. There is a bit of defiance in each woman which does not want to humble itself under any sovereignty. In each, there is something of that desire which reaches for the forbidden fruit.”[7] This journey from Eve to Mary is shown in the story of Galadriel in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. She was born in Valinor, the earthly paradise, to the royal household: her father was the youngest son of the high king. Among the mightiest of the elves, “she was strong of body, mind, and will, a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar in the days of their youth.”[8]
Galadriel heard the speech of Fëanor, who “urged the Noldor to follow him and by their own prowess to win freedom and great realms in the lands of the East,” promising that “we alone shall be lords of the unsullied Light, and masters of the bliss and beauty of Arda. No other race shall oust us!”[9] Galadriel possessed greater wisdom than Fëanor, and her keen insight perceived the darkness of his heart.[10] Despite this, she was not free of pride: “Galadriel, the only woman of the Noldor to stand that day tall and valiant among the contending princes, was eager to be gone. 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.”[11] This desire for power over others is her “reaching for the forbidden fruit.”
She joined the Rebellion, refusing the offer of mercy, and so was banned from Valinor of her own choice. Her resolve now was to “follow Fëanor with her anger to whatever lands he might come, and to thwart him in all ways that she could.”[12] In her wisdom, she did not oppose their enemy openly like her kinsmen did; she did not participate in any of the battles of the First Age, instead quietly navigating the politics of Middle-earth. It was during this period that she married Celeborn. She said, at the end of the Third Age, “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.”[13] Once the enemy was overthrown, and the Valar again extended mercy to the Noldor, Galadriel “proudly refused forgiveness or permission to return,” and this refusal she believed to be “perennial, as long as Earth endured.”[14]
Galadriel “fought the long defeat” for the next seven thousand years, ruling first at Eregion, where she received a ring of power, then at Lothlórien. When the Fellowship came to Lórien, Frodo brought with him Galadriel’s final test: the One Ring, the fulfillment of her wish to subdue others under her rule. Unlike Frodo, or nearly anyone in Middle-earth, she had the power to wield it. She said to Frodo, “[D]o not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy. . . . [E]ven as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind . . . And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”[15] One could hardly overstate Galadriel’s power. Even as her power waned, she could read the mind of the enemy and yet preserve herself and her land from his corruption. She knew it would be a great credit to the Ring, if it caused her to take it by force, but Frodo offered it to her freely. She said, “In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a queen. And 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!”[16] She ultimately resisted, refusing the Ring and the power it would give her. In an extraordinary act of humility, she said, “I pass the test. . . . I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”[17] This is the end of the Galadriel’s journey “from Eve to Mary”: rebellion in Valinor to “reach for the forbidden fruit” of power and dominion, to refusing the thing that can give her all she desired and retaining her identity. She was finally permitted to return to the West and be reunited with her kindred; with her passing, the Third Age ended and the last of the Eldar departed Middle-earth.
Galadriel’s journey from rebellion in Valinor to rejection of the Ring embodies what St. Edith Stein describes as the feminine journey to holiness, going from Eve’s pride to Mary’s humility. While The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are both works of fiction, the timeless wisdom of Tolkien’s writings can bring greater understanding to woman’s identity and her most fundamental vocation.
St. Edith Stein, pray for us!
[1] Fulton Sheen, The World’s First Love, ed. Darrell Wright (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1952), Internet Archive, 2009, https://archive.org/details/TheWorldsFirstLove/mode/2up.
[2] Carrie Gress, The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture From Toxic Femininity (Charlotte: TAN Books, 2019).
[3] Receptivity, often seen as an integral aspect of womanhood, can be either active or passive. Passivity is mere tolerance, not responding in any way to the gift received. The gift is something that happens to the woman rather than something she intentionally accepts and cooperates with. By Mary’s “active receptivity” is meant her choice to accept God’s mission for her, and her doing so with joy and with the intention of committing her whole self to serve God by being His mother.
[4] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 172.
[5] G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2020), 107.
[6] Song of Solomon 6:10.
[7] Edith Stein, Essays on Women, Collected Works of Edith Stein, volume 2, ed. Lucy Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, trans. Freda Mary Ocen (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 2017), 119.
[8] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 241.
[9] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien, Second Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), 83.
[10] Tolkien, The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, 241.
[11] Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 83-84.
[12] Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 242.
[13] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), 357.
[14] Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 407, 386.
[15] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 364-65.
[16] Ibid, 365-66.
[17] Ibid, 366.
