Love Is Now Mingled With Grief

Joy and Sorrow in The Lord of the Rings

The Fellowship reaches Caras Galadhon in Lothlórien. Credit: New Line Cinema

As the members of the Fellowship of the Ring are blindfolded in preparation for their journey to meet Celeborn and Galadriel, the elf Haldir of Lórien laments to them that this measure is necessary because his people exist on “an island amid many perils” (Fellowship, 390).¹ Though some have considered leaving Middle-earth, he explains, they are not sure that they would be able to make the long and dangerous journey to the sea. Furthermore, Haldir is not even aware of the exact location of the havens of the High Elves.

Merry interjects at this point, sharing that he knows the Elf-havens are west of the Shire.

Haldir asks that Merry describe these Elf-havens to him while they journey deeper into Lórien, for though the havens and the sea are remembered in song in Lórien, it has been long since any of his folk have looked upon them themselves.

‘I cannot,’ said Merry. ‘I have never seen them. I have never been out of my own land before. And if I had known what the world outside was like, I don’t think I should have had the heart to leave it.’

‘Not even to see fair Lothlórien?’ said Haldir. ‘The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places, but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.’ (391)

What does Haldir mean by love ‘grow[ing] perhaps the greater’? Is it in spite of being mingled with grief? Or is it somehow because it is ‘now mingled with grief’? How exactly would the mingling of love and grief result in love growing perhaps the greater?

One way Tolkien illustrates this idea is in the impact that losing Gandalf the Grey has on the Fellowship, especially Frodo and Sam. In tracing the journey of the Fellowship from Moria to their stay in Lothlórien and connecting it with the eventual reunion that Sam and Frodo have with Gandalf—now the White—in The Return of the King, we see examples of just how the mingling of love and grief produces a greater love both in the present and in the future than there might have been without the mixing of the two.

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