“In the place of the Dark Lord you will install a queen. She Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn, treacherous as the sea, stronger than the foundations of the earth! They will all love me desperately.” Galadriel resists the temptation of the One Ring by realizing its inordinate power. That will be the crossroads of the elven queen, which here J.A. Bayona introduces us to her committed and warlike youth.
Because the One Ring – the rings of power in general – functions as the definitive allegory of modern political power, both because of the way it transforms whoever wears it and because of the unease it unleashes in those who crave it. It is well known that Tolkien’s work is an anti-modern story –the fires of Isengard’s industry devour the forests to produce weapons and will be defeated by walking trees– the result of the horrors of World War I, the first mechanized war. But what makes it universal as a modern myth is its versatility.
The world wars called into question a century of rationalism and progress, and Tolkien took refuge in the creation of the most formidable facsimile of medieval legend to raise an ode to the simple life of the English countryside and point out the threats that await it. The main one, the One Ring and its bearers, the political power and those who hold it.
It is logical that this crisis of civilization returns today when democracy languishes and there are many reactionary political movements –from the new Trumpist authoritarianism on the right to the red-brown sanctimoniousness on the left– that are convinced that the best of humanity dwells in the past sweetened and not in a gloomy future. Today, like Galadriel, many suffer from the megalomaniacal temptation of the Dark Enlightenment and others, like Samwise Gamyi, only yearn to return to the orderly cultivation of the land and smoking a pipe every evening.
