#3000+ year long mind battles must be exhausting i hope everyone in Lorien brings her snacks and drinks and footrubs

[conundrumoftime]

Nenya, the Ring of Adamant

Rings of Power is leaning heavily on water imagery with Galadriel even before she gets her ring, and I will bet anything it will continue to do this and go with the visual imagery of Peter Jackson’s ‘drowned Galadriel’ to show her dark/tempted-by-power self. 

But let’s take a minute to consider Nenya not only as the Ring of Water, but its other name as the Ring of Adamant.

Adamant is its gemstone (Vilya has a sapphire, Narya a ruby). Adamant might possibly be a diamond but more likely it’s used in its mythical sense of a stone that’s even harder than diamond; Barad-dûr is a ‘black tower of adamant’ in LOTR. So it represents strength. And it has the secondary sense as an adjective of strength of will, too - to be adamant is to be determined, strong-willed, unshakeable in conviction. Perfect for Galadriel, who by LOTR time is (Haldir says) locked in an endless mental struggle with Sauron: ‘the two powers that are opposed one to another, and ever they strive now in thought, but whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not been discovered’. 

But. Also. ALSO. ‘Adamant’ the mythical stone has another sense, now archaic, of being a magnet or a lodestone - something that attracts iron towards it. And this is the sense that you see used symbolically in literature.

Here in the first of John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’, a plea to his creator:

But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,

That not one hour I can myself sustain;

Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,

And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

And here from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant.

But yet you draw not iron, for my heart

Is true as steel. Leave you your power to draw,

And I shall have no power to follow you.

And the likely reason it has this sense of attracting things to it, and this getting linked so easily to emotional attraction, is from folk etymology of its origin where ‘adamant’ is seen as linked to the Latin word ‘adamare’ - ‘to love passionately’, or ‘to fall in love with’. 

So Galadriel gets the strongest stone in the world; which also means an unshakeable, determined will; which also attracts its opposite towards it; which does so because it is the stone of love.