NEW LIVER, SAME EAGLES

quietblogoflurk:
There are lots of passages in LOTR that I love, but my uncontested favorite is this sentence by Galadriel:
‘Dark are the waters of Khaled-zaram and cold are the springs of Kibil-Nala and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dum in elder days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.’
This is the moment Gimli gets her, or at least he gets that she gets him. In this one sentence,
She acknowledges that Gandalf (and Gimli) was not wrong to pass through Moria.
She shows empathy for Gimli’s wish to see Moria again, even if it is ruined or unsafe.
She deliberately uses the Dwarven names of places - endonyms instead of exonyms, Khazad-Dum instead of Moria, Dwarrowdelf instead of Black Pit.
She doesn’t only show respect and understanding, she shows knowledge - in addition to knowing dwarven names, she seems to know dwarven culture, since the descriptions she uses are very similar to the ones in Gimli’s song.
Knowing Galadriel’s past, it seems like her understanding of Gimli’s grief for Khazad-Dum stems from her experiences with losing… well, she lost a lot of people and places over the eras. She stood witness to the losses of various paradises, she gets it. But the fall of Gondolin is the most obvious parallel, or maybe Doriath, and the knowledge that Lothlórien can only be a faint echo of its glories.
Knowing Galadriel’s future, it seems like her grief for losing Middle-Earth forever also shines through the sentence. The world is changing and beautiful things fade or die or must be left behind, and she knows this probably best of everyone on Middle-Earth.
And in this one utterance of knowledge and compassion, where she acknowledges the beauty of dwarven lands and the grief of their loss, she uses one-syllable adjectives, which, as @thearrogantemu pointed out, are Tolkien’s favorite mode of signaling beauty, age and gravitas. Dark. Cold. Fair.
the respect and understanding she shows for the lost glory and lost beauty of the Dwarvish kingdoms #I think for Gimli that’s like the moment where you realize someone has read the same book and loves it like you do #not just a willingness to be generous #but the mutual recognition of shared values #and especially coming from someone whose people have historically been dismissive or antagonistic (thearrogantemu)