I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
In the cavern of memory that is J.R.R. Tolkien's prose, few devices gleam with such quiet power as the mirror. From the silver basin in Galadriel's bower to the polished black of the palantír, from the doubled faces of brothers to the haunting way his protagonists study their own reflections, Tolkien constructs character through acts of looking back. The literal object matters less than what it reveals: a soul testing itself against an image it cannot quite control.
For readers wandering through his work — whether clutching the familiar Allen & Unwin paperback in a Brisbane second-hand shop or hearing the audiobook on a long drive across the Nullarbor — these reflective moments arrive like sudden clear weather. Tolkien's prose does not merely describe characters; it refracts them. To read him well is to sit before one of his mirrors and ask what kind of reader waits on the other side.
The most famous mirror in Middle-earth is, of course, the basin Galadriel fills with water from a silver ewer. Her gift to the Fellowship is not counsel or prophecy but an instrument of self-revelation. Things that were, things that are, and some things that yet may be, she tells them, though she cautions that the vision will be shaped by the mind that looks. This is no ordinary magic mirror; it is a confessional, an analyst's couch, a polished surface on which the observer's moods are thrown into sudden focus.
Frodo sees the Eye. Sam sees a vision of home turned tragic and then, against all probability, a glimpse of a Shire restored. What each beholds reflects the weight they carry. The Australian reader, particularly one who has spent years reading Tolkien alongside the long shadows of the country's own literary tradition, often notices how the scene feels less like fantasy and more like an old bush catechism. Each traveller kneels before the basin in turn, and the prose turns as patient as any homily told under a stringy-bark.
Yet the mirror does not merely judge. It dignifies. By giving each member of the Fellowship an interior moment, Tolkien avoids the trap of omniscient exposition. We know Sam because he has seen something, and chosen to act upon what he saw. We know Galadriel herself because she once refused the Ring and therefore can offer the basin at all. The mirror in Lothlórien is, finally, a mirror of moral choice, and it remains one of the most psychologically acute scenes in the entire legendarium.
If Galadriel's mirror offers clarity, the palantíri offer distortion. These seeing-stones function as ancient scrying devices that show the user whatever they direct their will toward, but also permit domination by a stronger mind. Denethor, Steward of Gondor, spends hours hunched over the Anor-stone, watching a war he believes he can read. Saruman twists his own stone in Orthanc, using it as a kind of intellectual telescope turned upon his own pride. Neither can see clearly, because both see too much of themselves in the glass. The palantír, in Tolkien's hands, becomes a portrait of the corrupted imagination, an instrument that returns to the user exactly what they have already become.
Aragorn's handling of the Orthanc-stone offers the counterpoint. He takes the palantír into his own hands not to watch, but to be seen. By presenting himself to Sauron through the stone, he forces the Dark Lord to confront a king he thought long dead. This is mirroring turned strategic, glass used as weapon. Australian readers who came to Tolkien through the Ballantine paperbacks circulated in university common rooms — at Melbourne, Sydney, or the old Australian National University campus — often mark this moment as one of the great reversals in twentieth-century fantasy. The heir of Isildur, by facing his ancestor's failure, becomes something his ancestor could not.
Long before Frodo ever reaches the Pass of Caradhras, his works build his figures as doublings and reflections. Frodo carries the Ring that Bilbo carried. Aragorn walks the line that Isildur broke. Boromir's envy of Gandalf's staff is answered by Faramir's quiet surrender of the Ring. Sam's plain courage is the mirror in which Frodo's exhausted nobility becomes legible. The structural brilliance of the work lies in these pairings; without them, the moral architecture would collapse into melodrama.
What makes these doubles so striking is the way they break. Boromir does not become Aragorn; he falls, and his fall is essential to the story. Sam does not replace Frodo; he complements him, then saves him, then walks home to a wife who notices his absence. Each double is allowed its own tragic or domestic fate. There is no neat resolution in which every reflection snaps back into its original. Tolkien's mirrors do not reconstitute; they reveal.
This refusal of symmetry has long appealed to readers raised in Australia's own literary traditions, where the romance of the bush and the long lines of the paddock reward endurance over triumph. A convention such as Nullus Anxietas, the gathering held by the Australian Tolkien Society in various state capitals, regularly draws enthusiasts who speak of Tolkien's characterisation with the same measured affection they bring to the poetry of Judith Wright or the prose of Henry Lawson. The doubled heroes of Middle-earth feel, to these readers, less like archetypes and more like neighbours.
Nowhere is Tolkien's reflective technique more theologically charged than in his treatment of death. For the immortal Elves, mortality is the mirror that shows them what they have lost the power to imagine. For Men, immortality would have been a prison, and the Gift of Ilúvatar is precisely the ability to walk out beyond the circles of the world. Galadriel's mirror, again, performs this work. When Frodo glimpses a future in which the Shire is destroyed, he sees the mortal condition: everything ends, and so everything must be cherished.
Australian readers, especially those who have grown up with the wide horizons of the outback and the patience of its seasons, often respond to this with a particular quietness. There is something of the bush attitude in the way Tolkien treats mortality — neither evangelical nor cynical, but pastoral, attentive, almost agronomic. The dead are not gone; they have gone on. Even Shelob, that most unredeemed of horrors, reflects something of the world she preys upon, a parody of the natural cycles she cannot share.
The prose of the Elven laments — Galadriel's song of Eldamar, or the slow grief of Elrond as he speaks of his wife — uses mirrors constantly. They look into the past because the present has no future for them. The mortal characters, by contrast, are always being invited to look forward. Tolkien's fiction is, in this sense, a long tutorial in how different eyes regard the same horizon.
Tolkien's most private mirror is the one he held to himself. The Notion Club Papers, drafted in the late 1940s and never finished to his satisfaction, imagine a club of Oxford friends who gradually dream themselves into Númenor. The conceit is openly autobiographical; the club meetings are modelled on the Inklings, the literary circle that included C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Tolkien uses the mirror of fiction to examine his own craft, his own faith, his own griefs. Smith of Wootton Major does something similar in miniature: an allegory of artistic vocation, a fairy story about a man who makes and unmakes his own imaginative life.
For a writer thinking about such reflexive technique, the work of contemporary authors exploring similar confessional territory offers rich conversation. A glance at Rachel Abbott's craft pages shows how modern novelists also use the doubling of self as a way of examining the labour of storytelling. Tolkien's legacy in this regard is less the inheritance of plot than the inheritance of method: the willingness to put one's own authorial face into the glass and ask what one sees.
To read Tolkien well, then, is to read him as he read himself. Each chapter in The Lord of the Rings functions as a small mirror, polished by his prose, waiting for the reader to bring forward whatever it is they wish to see. Australian readers, perched at the edge of an ancient continent, often feel that this is exactly the bargain the books offer. The Shire might answer, the West might answer, the path might answer — if the reader is willing, for a moment, to be reflected.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading