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Old 09-21-2004, 01:30 PM   #14
davem
Illustrious Ulair
 
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
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davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Quote:
For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!’
‘I looked then & saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, & if he moved they shimmered & changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.
‘ ‘I liked white better,’ I said.
‘White!’ he sneered. ‘It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. the white page can be overwritten, & the white light can be broken.’
‘In which case it is no longer white.’ said I. ‘And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is made of has left the path of wisdom.’
Morgoth was the first to ‘break the White Light, when he destroyed the Lamps, & the single, unbroken, light was lost to Middle earth. Then the Light was split into Gold & Silver, in the Two Trees, Telperion & Laurelin& was no longer constant, but fluctuated. When Morgoth killed the Trees, the Light was further broken, into the Silmarilli & the Sun & Moon. From then on, images of Light recur, but always in lesser forms - Glorfindel manifests the Light when he appears to Frodo as a being of Shining Light, driving back the darkness of the Ringwraiths, fragments of ‘unlight’, & also in the Phial of Galadriel, which drives back another manifestation of Darkness, Shelob.

But where does this desire to break the Light come from? What is the purpose of breaking it? Well, the more it is broken down, the weaker it gets, because the Light originally was One, single, whole. the movement is from holism to fragmentation. Also in language: the language of the Elves at Cuivienen was once the only tongue, but it too was broken & fragmented, & moved towards ‘darkness’. Quenya was the language of the Calaquendi, speakers of Light - their language was a language which was light made audible. But it was ‘superceeded’, by Sindarin, the Grey Elven tongue, which was replaced by Adunaic in Numenor, which became superceeded again by Westron, & at the extreme was Sauron’s Black Speech.

But why do it? In Saruman’s case why choose to break the Light? What’s in it for him? And why is gandalf’s suspicion aroused when Saruman calls himself Saruman of Many Colours, Saruman Ring-Maker?

The Rings were designed to control - but how? to break up the world into the ‘ten thousand things’, to divide & conquer.

Quote:
’Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him’ (Haldir)
It is this power of division, of estrangement that gives Sauron his real chance of winning victory. And its no coincidence that in the great single combats against the Darkness so many of those on the side of Light are golden haired - Fingolfin, Glorfindel, Galadriel (generally against Sauron & when she single handedly throws down Dol Guldur) & Eowyn. Its also no coincidence that women achieve some of the greatest victories - it is Luthien who defeats Sauron in single combat - the only being ever to do so alone, & who also overpowers Morgoth, sending him to sleep (probably the only moment of rest he ever knew - thanks to Jean Chasse at this year’s Oxonmoot for that insight), & we know that at one point Tolkien considered giving Luthien golden hair. So, it is women who have a power against the Darkness, & the most obvious example is Luthien herself. But why & how? Certainly women have a power against this tendency towards ‘fragmentation’. The absence of women seems to leave the men open to the Darkness, to division & breaking. Women are the Light bearers, & where the Light shines the Darkness loses its strength. Look at the family of the Stewards of Gondor in LotR - it starts to fall apart when Finduilas dies. And the women seem to need this role - it seems to be the role Eowyn has taken on herself in Rohan, & once Theoden is healed by Gandalf, freed from the influence of Saruman & Wormtongue, she seems to feel she has no role, is not needed to hold things together. So, women seem to be the power against fragmentation, against breaking down, against the darkness itself. Certainly it seems that (as other’s have pointed out, that perhaps the single most powerful thing in Aragorn’s life, the thing that enables him to resist the lure of the Ring, is Arwen’s love for him -if he takes the Ring he will lose Arwen, & we could suppose the same is the case with Sam & Rosie.

Both Sauron in Barad Dur & Saruman in Isengard (& even Bilbo & Frodo in Bag End) live intensely ‘male’ lifestyles, & so are tempted more by the power of breaking & fragmentation. It seems the more focussed men are on the masculine things, the more susceptibel men are to the power of darkness - perhaps the reason LotR focusses on male characters - because men are the ones at risk of breaking the Light in search of power. Women in the Legendarium seem to be the source of healing, of eros, & so are not so easily seduced by what the Ring offers. Of course, Galadriel seems to be the exception to this - yet her mother name was Nerwen (manmaiden).

(All that mostly inspired by Flieger’s ‘Splintered Light’ & Chausse’s talk ‘The Power of Females in Arda’ at Oxonmoot 2004).
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