This article contains spoilers for The Rings of Power season 2!
Light and dark, good and evil, entangling with each other in a perpetual war… always makes for an interesting story. And The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 just cast a worthy entry into this lot with its take on the relationship between Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Sauron (Charlie Vickers).
Haladriel is a great ship. But Saurondriel is better!
Ever since Galadriel jumped off the ship bound for Valinor and met Halbrand in tempestuous waters, their chemistry has been undeniable. Halbrand pulling an astounded Galadriel in as he hands her her brother’s knife has become part of many a fan edits. Their conversation after the war in the Southlands, in which Halbrand tells Galadriel that he felt something fighting by her side and he wanted to bind himself to her… had the dark romance girlies were swooning!
Halbrand and Galadriel quickly got a ship name—Haladriel. And yes, sure, Galadriel is not single; but she believes her husband Celeborn to be lost to her. And the void he left has been filled by her need for vengeance, which seems to find a kindred soul in the King of the Southlands, who had his land and people taken from him too. It’s all so tragically poetic that you can’t help but ship these two. However, at the end of season 1, it is revealed that Halbrand is none other than Sauron, the enemy that Galadriel had been pursuing. And a volcano erupts in the fandom as a new ship is born—Saurondriel. Haladriel is hot, and Saurondriel is hotter because who doesn’t love a fae princess falling for a dark prince?
But shipping Sauron and Galadriel isn’t just hot, it makes a lot of sense and is an infinitely better and more potent take on the exiting lore. It makes the story better. Here’s how.
Sauron and Galadriel are more mirrored than you think
Sauron is an aspiring Dark Lord. Galadriel is the Lady of Light. They’re the yin and yang that fit together to tell a well-rounded story. Halbrand’s charm and Sauron’s proposals have a deeply seductive quality to them. We saw it at work when he literally seduced Celebrimbor into becoming his collaborator on the Rings of Power, despite appearing to him as Halbrand at first, someone that Galadriel had warned Celebrimbor to not engage with. Why did it work then? Because it is indeed a seduction, as Sauron takes the form of that which appeals to one’s heart’s desire. It’s like your partner seducing you into bed by roleplaying your favourite fictional character.
The best kind of stories are born of this interplay between darkness and light. The light can only appeal, but the darkness can seduce and make an offer that is hard to refuse, even for someone as filled with light as Galadriel as. Over the course of two seasons, The Rings of Power has dropped several hints that draw parallels between Sauron and Galadriel. Sauron wants to be Morgoth’s successor. And in all his wretched darkness, abused, moulded, and twisted by Morgoth that he is, Sauron does seem like the natural choice.
And Sauron believes it too. While Morgoth sought to destroy and corrupt Eru Illúvatar’s creations, Sauron wanted to heal Middle-earth and restore it to perfection; only, it was perfection the way he wanted it. And for that, he wasn’t open to resistance from the other peoples of Middle-earth. Which is why he sought to craft the rings of power; he would subdue their will and destroy what already exited to remake it all in his image. He wasn’t Morgoth, but the thirst for power at the core of his being was no better. In the stories of the Second Age that Tolkien wrote, he suggests that after Morgoth’s fall, Sauron did repent for some time and was advised to seek the Valar’s forgiveness; only he never did, perhaps due to his pride and because he thought he could “fix it.” Sound like someone we know?
In season 1, Adar (Joseph Mawle) points out how there’s a darkness in Galadriel that would make her a fitting choice to be Morgoth’s successor too. Lest we forget, the Noldor elves have a dark history, replete with multiple kinslayings during the First Age. Galadriel may not have been a part of the war for the Silmarils, but she did leave Valinor for the lure of Middle-earth, a place where the elves thought they could create their own perfect paradise. She was proud, had a thirst for power, and an obsession with vengeance too. Elves like her looked down upon the Uruk and wanted to eliminate their race. And this is precisely the kindred feeling that Sauron detected in her when she revealed to him in Númenor that her loved ones could no longer distinguish her from the evil she was fighting. You can see why they are alike.
Sauron and Galadriel isn’t your basic enemies-to-lovers; it’s deeper than that!
What The Rings of Power then does is much, much more than a basic enemies-to-lovers-to-exes trope. They’ve been seeding this thought all along that “sometimes to find the light, you must first touch the darkness.” For Galadriel, this meaning becomes clearer in season 1, when she gives up her quest for vengeance, and in season 2, when she takes her friend Celebrimbor’s dying words to heart about becoming the literal embodiment of light in the world to fight the darkness.
For those complaining about the absence of Celeborn, fret not, because now that Galadriel has emerged out of her toxic relationship with Sauron, she is ready for her spiritual healing to begin as well. She’s going to go out and be her best self, heal Middle-earth with the elven ring Nenya, and then find her man, who is going to be her peace like her toxic ex never could! The return of Celeborn, the birth of their daughter Celebrían, and the founding of Lothlórien are going to be Galadriel finally living up to her moniker, The Lady of Light. And to the end of her days on Middle-earth, she will continue to live by Celebrimbor’s advice, that “light, not strength, will defeat the darkness.” And then, she will diminish and go into the West, and remain Galadriel…
But what does it mean for Sauron? The analogies are once again scattered all over The Rings of Power and The Lord of The Rings for us to see and interpret as we will. When Halbrand talks about binding himself to Galadriel’s being, he’s talking about anchoring his darkness in her light so that it can be balanced. As if her light is a prism through which if his darkness were to pass, the perfection he sought would finally emerge. This is why his stint in Eregion as Halbrand is so critical. He discovers what the mithril ore can do, and what Celebrimbor can do with an alloy of mithril and other mineral ores, and draws the parallel. Dark must be tempered with light. And technically, he isn’t wrong.
But in his case, when has that ever worked as expected? As Annatar, he tells Celeborn that forging the rings is as much a matter of craft as it is of spirit. There’s truth there. The intent of the craftsperson and the intent of the ringbearer play a major role in a ring’s power. The dwarves, despite wearing the rings, don’t surrender their will to Sauron; but their corruption is through metastisizing their greed. The kings of men, the weakest of the races prone to corruption, fall completely into darkness.
Yet, the elven rings, free of Sauron’s touch, and borne only by those that are full of light, do only good in the world. Had Galadriel fallen into darkness while wearing Nenya, she would have become the terrible queen that we caught a glimpse of in the LOTR movies. Had she become Sauron’s willing collaborator, for a period, it would have worked exactly as Sauron promised her; her light would’ve grounded his darkness. But then it would’ve been a constant battle of wills, and Sauron’s darkness would’ve won out.
In that sense, another reason emerges for Sauron’s desperate need to make Galadriel his Queen. Maybe Sauron wanted Galadriel not as his queen but as someone he could put on a false pedestal to worship but eventually blame all his failures on, like Morgoth. Let’s not forget that the kind of toxic gaslighting, torture, and abuse he exercises on Celebrimbor is what Morgoth did to him. Sauron both hates and loves Morgoth; wants to both escape from his shadow yet be deemed worthy to be his successor. So when he seeks someone as powerful, awe-inspiring, and “stronger than the foundations of the earth” as Galadriel, someone who can be a competent enemy but also someone’s whose light he covets, he wants her. He is seeking to replace the void that Morgoth left.
If Galadriel became his queen, Sauron would give her all that he promised. But when she began falling into darkness, he would gaslight her—and everyone else—into believing it was her fault, it was she who was weak, and her deceit that corrupted their plans, just like he did with Celebrimbor. And this way, he’d somehow in his mind absolve himself, whitewash what he was trying to do as healing that went awry instead of what it truly was, destruction and ruin from the beginning.
You may not ship Saurondriel, but you cannot escape it!
There’s no point crying over breached canon because art is up for interpretation once the artist puts it out in the world. You may think shipping Sauron and Galadriel is sacrilege and J.R.R. Tolkien is rolling in his grave. But what The Rings of Power or any other ‘adaptation’ of Tolkien’s work interprets the story as is completely up to the storyteller, as long as the spirit of the work remains sacrosanct. And that it does.
In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring, in the chapter ‘The Mirror of Galadriel’, Galadriel tells Frodo that “He ever gropes to see me and my thoughts, but still the door is closed.” This is alluded to in TROP as well as a direct line Galadriel says to Sauron during their duel in the season 2 finale. At first, it was a simple statement that could’ve meant Sauron was trying to strike a deal with Galadriel like he did with, say, Saruman, but she didn’t yield. But The Rings of Power takes all the above tidbits from Tolkien’s many notes about the complex mirrored natures of Galadriel and Sauron, and gives it another meaning.
What if Sauron was that toxic ex who was just trying to seduce back the girl who had once seemed interested in him? What if his attempts to pierce her defenses—like stabbing her with Morgoth’s crown in the season 2 finale—were an attempt to bring her over to the dark side because he didn’t want to do this alone? What if he realized she was the only one who ever understood him, and no matter who else joined him, it wouldn’t be complete without her? And what if Galadriel was healed and happy and all light, but a part of her was always threatening to pull her into the darkness where Sauron lay waiting, and it was a constant battle of wills to not go back to her ex, no matter how exciting and adventurous it sounded?
Now that makes this not only the greatest love story ever told but also the best story ever about the constant tug-of-war between the darkness and the light. And something tells me that Tolkien—who wrote about men constantly falling for the lure of power while a chosen few resisted—would appreciate the spirit of this interpretation.
Published: Oct 9, 2024 12:10 pm