In past years, I’ve done a round-up (2022, 2021, 2020) but this time I thought I’d vary the format and frame it as a ‘look forward at’ (rather than ‘to’) and add some bonus Tolkien provocation too (following on from my recent ‘Tale of two Fantasy Exhibitions’ post). The point of doing a recap for me is mainly for morale: reminding myself what I have achieved despite various adverse circumstances. However, 2023 was more subjectively upbeat for me than the three years preceding it. This may just have been because I managed to get my now annual bouts of Covid and extreme PEM out of the way in the first third of the year, interspersed with the news of my Leverhulme Research Fellowship coming through (see the opening paragraphs in my Eastercon report for the rollercoaster experience of those early months). Over the late spring and summer, I managed to write some academic publications (including my parts of The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, which is coming out in hardback in February), an article on ‘Sci-fi and the Future of Healthcare’ for the Spring 2023 issue of Tribune dedicated to the NHS, and also to recover fully from the disastrous start to the year, so that I went into my research leave in the autumn feeling pretty good.
Ironically, feeling good gave me the energy to deal with catching up on medical appointments. So that by the end of September, I had organised optician and dentist appointments and beaten my GP practice into submission. In terms of the latter, what happened was that, despite not being texted for covid and flu jabs, I rang them up and was told I was eligible but then was turned away when I arrived for them. Cue stiff letter to practice restating my medical history since 2020 (which mostly concerns diagnoses of their own GPs – albeit ones no longer at the practice). This resulted in a conversation with a GP who told me that postviral/’long covid’ was completely different from ME/CFS, which is ‘neurological’ and would have entitled me to the vaccinations. But in ameliorative manner, I was nonetheless invited back for the covid and flu jabs (and, of course, took them up on that straight away). I asked how I could get diagnosed with ME/CFS and the short answer was that I can’t in Wales because there are no specialist chronic fatigue services available from the Welsh NHS. I was offered a referral to the Welsh NHS rheumatology services, which I accepted in lieu of any other offer, but they in turn referred me on to the Welsh Long Covid Service and I had an online meeting with them on 27 December from Berlin, where we spent Christmas this year. I’ve never particularly wanted to be defined as having Long Covid because the EHRC were so equivocal as to whether it counts as a disability for employment reasons, but it sounds as though the Welsh Long Covid Service is in the process of becoming a more general ‘postviral service’ covering ME/CFS as well, according to what I was told. How useful this will prove to be to me is open to question (I can pace myself and manage my fatigue levels reasonably, which seems to be mainly what they concentrate on) but it might cut though to my own GP practice a bit more effectively and stop them treating me like I’m making it up. We shall see but getting this level of recognition feels, at least for the time being, like a tangible return from expending valuable effort on it this autumn.
Therefore, going forward in 2024, I feel relatively free to concentrate on research and writing projects, which include my Leverhulme project on ‘Self-Reflexivity, Class Consciousness and Cultural Division in Britain’ (incorporating dispatches from the Culture Wars), the 1920s volume of the Decades series and my ongoing Clarke Award project, which will pick up speed later in the year. I’ve also got various other plans in the pipeline that I will discuss as and when they actually happen rather than in advance. Anyway, at the moment, if feels like a year in which it might be possible to move forwards on a work front even while I expect it to be a bad year in other respects. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight for the slaughter in Palestine. The war in Ukraine looks set to rumble on. There will be divisive elections in the US and the UK (possibly also in November). I also get the feeling that a lot of people who want to return to what they saw as 20C social norms are going to take advantage of the rightwing assault on difference and stick their heads up (well) behind the parapet in the name of … well, in the name of self-interest really but it will be presented as a call for the restatement of ‘adults in the room’ and ‘objective values’ etc. This has obviously been underway for several years, but it can be expected to intensify this year as we will be subjected to a barrage of ‘thoughtful opinion pieces’ and ‘bold editorials’ (like the appallingly transphobic leader in the Observer just before Christmas) in favour of ‘universalist values’ and against ‘identitarian politics’, which will in reality be advocating for hardline bio-essentialist and privileged positions. I also expect to see this play out more overtly in the world of literary and cultural criticism than hitherto. There are signs of ‘objective’ criticism rearing its ugly head in the service of those trying to reassert their elite privileged status. Objectivity sounds good, but in practice it normally means upholding views that are in accordance with tacitly accepted dominant values. Those touting such ‘objectivity’ are often defending their own privileged right to pronounce as they deem fit without disclosing the specificities of their viewpoint or the advantages they accrue from holding it. It is preferable, therefore, if people situate themselves in relation to what they are writing about, explain how they have come to their particular subjective position and allow readers to decide if they agree with this view or not. However, what is probably going to happen is that people doing this are going to be attacked for being unduly partisan. But if we really want to get free of all the old hierarchies, then now is exactly the time to be proudly and unashamedly partisan, while providing reasons supporting that position. Therefore, I thought I’d start the year off as I mean to go on by asking the question of whether Galadriel really should take the ring when Frodo offers it to her.
Galadriel legendary card from the Lord of the Rings Elven Council Magic the Gathering commander deck. Ring power guide from the commander deck.
This question is, as the President of a US Ivy league university might say, dependent on context. If you’re playing the LOTR– themed Magic the Gathering ‘Elven Council’ commander deck, as I was over Christmas, then you do want Galadriel to be your ring-bearer and gain the powers that go with that status. We played three games with the four LOTR commander decks and the one I won was due to Galadriel being tempted by the ring in line with the voting of participants (there was some dialogue at the time concerning the advisability of players other than myself voting for ‘domination’). If you’re reading the LOTR and regard Galadriel as a real person – which I’ve recently heard that real academic critics aren’t supposed to but nobody sent me the memo, so I’ll carry on regardless – then I think you have to respect her decision not to take the ring on the basis that she is wise and it seems right to respect her choice. On the other hand, one suspects that the (younger) Galadriel of the Amazon TV series, The Rings of Power – which was not without faults but on the whole much better than the hostile and negative criticism that it was subjected to from some quarters – would not only be tempted to take the ring but might well actually choose to wield it against Sauron. Yet weighing against such heresies there is the important – and, of course, more ‘critically respectable’ point – that thematically the LOTR is concerned with the renunciation of power. It might be argued that Galadriel, like Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir and Sam (most of the undisputedly good characters in the novel), has to refuse the ring in order to reinforce the logic of Tolkien’s position that this kind of absolute power necessarily corrupts, which is one I generally agree with (not least because I live in a state, the UK, which vests power not in its people but in an absolute concept of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’, which boils down to agreeing that whoever holds the ring gets control of all the resources and all the rules). Furthermore – the pragmatic ‘reader’ part of me insists on adding – the story wouldn’t be the same if Galadriel took the ring: it would be a different novel, possibly quite a lot shorter, and maybe now forgotten.
So, the balance of argument seems quite overwhelming (MTG aside). And yet there is something that still makes me want to ask the question, which in turn makes me think that there is something wrong with the paradigmatic framing which makes it appear as though the question is pointless. Or, to put it another way, what would need to be different about our world and our viewpoint and our baseline assumptions in order to make the question worth asking? Furthermore, what kind of world becomes possible if we can imagine answering the question in the affirmative?
For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming that use of the ring is not necessary inherently damaging in itself (as, for example, nuclear weapons would be). We know Tolkien rejected simplistically allegorical readings of the novel. Nor am I making an ends-justify-the-means argument. We know what that kind of world is like because we live in it. The enduring attraction and importance of Tolkien’s work is that it offers an alternative to such instrumentalist nightmares, but it does so at the cost of centring a relatively static symbolic order. What I am hypothesising is that Galadriel – as distinct from Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir and even Sam to some extent (although I have made a similar case for Sam elsewhere*) – represents the possibility of a different social order outside the confines of the choice that Tolkien offers his readers.
Obviously, unlike the others listed – indeed, unlike the vast majority of characters in the novel – the ‘man-high’ Galadriel is female, ‘the greatest of Elven women’. Unlike, most other comparable powerful figures (Elrond, Sauron) her backstory in the First Age tales of The Silmarillion is retrofitted. In other words, Tolkien invented her while writing the LOTR; she was not an already established character in his mythology and it took him several goes to fit her in: for example, at first, she was the daughter of Finrod Felagund rather than his sister. Indeed, the remaining textual fragments found in Unfinished Tales and among the various volumes of The History of Middle Earth, include contradictory and intriguing details, such as her possible relationship with Celebrimbor. As Christopher Tolkien notes in his editorial introduction to ‘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.’ Tolkien was still changing details of the back story during the last month of his life. Therefore, I am not going to attempt a reading of this history (at least, not today in a blogpost), but instead make some general points about her function within the LOTR and the possibilities she raises.
On one level, as Boromir suspects, she does represent a perilous temptation. One of the lampoon versions of LOTR represents this as a sexual temptation, which in some ways gets at the latent truth of the matter. It is not as sometimes suggested that there is no sexual desire in the novel, it is just buried very deep and otherwise sublimated. As it originally manifests within the writing of LOTR, Galadriel’s Lórien is a version of Fairyland: ‘a strange country’ along the banks of the Silverlode. Here it is useful to reference an earlier novel that Tolkien would have known. The interaction between Fairyland and the bourgeois (in the historical sense) titular hometown of the protagonists in Hope Mirrlees’s Lud in the Mist (1926) is replayed by LOTR in the relationship between Lórien and the Shire. Sam does bring home magic from the former to the latter (albeit via a circuitous route), where he will become mayor, and thus effect a hybrid transformation. He also becomes a sexual being, marrying Rosie, and fathering a daughter, whom we see him holding on the last page of the novel. In these respects, Galadriel offers something that is not found elsewhere in the novel, but which is essential to its resolution. This is why LOTR cannot simply be reduced to advocacy for the return of the King. But in my mind, the novel’s resolution could also be achieved without the return of the King. In fact, the function of the return of the King in the LOTR might well be read as predominantly concerned with the containment of Galadriel’s power rather than the overthrow of Sauron. This is why Aragorn’s marriage to Arwen, Galadriel’s granddaughter, is so symbolically important within the novel because it forces the power that Galadriel embodies back under male control (and Tolkien is aware enough of this to realise that Arwen will inevitably come to regret the arrangement). Another example of Tolkien understanding and representing a female alternative to the male symbolic order only to then counter it is the beautiful but sad story of ‘Aldarion and Erendis’ (also in Unfinished Tales). And other examples of a similar dynamic can be found amongst his work, which demonstrate that at some level he knew that this other conception of social order was necessary for good to prevail and yet he found it necessary to then reassert symbolic order to contain it. In 2024, I would suggest that we need this alternative conception of social order more than ever but, that this time, we should not go on to allow it to be re-constrained by the ‘return of the King’. In other words, metaphorically speaking at least, Galadriel should take the ring.
* Nick Hubble, ‘“The Choices of Master Samwise”: The Literary History of the 1950s’ in Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble, eds, The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (The Decades Series), London: Bloomsbury, 2018: pp.19-51; [ISBN: 978-1-3500-1151-9].
Prospective Cultures 