Palantír

[Chrysophylax Dives]

A spillover from @Turin Ringhûn's thread on Galadriel's Mirror, where I invoked the Palantíri, which are of course something else. On that thread @Troelsfo blew my mind by showing me how better to read The Lord of the Rings. I'd long taken the Palantíri as giving mortals something like the telepathic powers that Galadriel displays when she silently tests each member of the Company. But Troels prodded me to read JRRT in an obscure note explaining:

Two persons, each using a Stone 'in accord' with the other, could converse, but not by sound, which the Stones did not transmit. Looking one at the other they would exchange 'thought' - not their full or true thought, or their intentions, but 'silent speech,' the thoughts they wished to transmit (already formalized in linguistic form in their minds or actually spoken aloud), which would be received by their respondents and of course immediately transformed into 'speech,' and only reportable as such.

Tolkien is extending comparative philology to the level of comparative mind reading! Here are two distinct pictures of silent communication: (i) direct looking mind-to-mind (the Lady Galadriel); (ii) reception of the word-thoughts of another (the hobbit, Pippin + 2 Seeing Stones). The second is no less mediated than our spoken words, mixing our spoken and written communication such that the inner thought is communicated through the eye while looking at - not a sign, but - a face. It is surely less 'magical' than the art of Galadriel and is maybe obscurely illuminated by this account of understanding another person through language published in a book of 1938 by R. Collingwood, Tolkien's one time colleague at Pembroke:

The hearer… takes what he hears exactly as if it were speech of his own: he speaks to himself with the words that he hears addressed to him, and thus constructs in himself the idea which those words express. (The Principles of Art (1938) [1958, 250])

When I first read this it also blew my mind - it is nothing like what seems to go on when I listen to someone, and yet it kind of makes sense... Now I'm wondering, if we substitute 'see' for 'hear', does Collingwood spell out an analogy of the communication Tolkien describes with the stones, such that silent thoughts are transferred from one mind to another: in everyday life by spoken sounds, but in the fantastical image of a Seeing Stone, by seeing in the Stone the face of another?

(Lockdown thoughts. Edits: tidying up)

[Boromir88]

Awesome, thank you simon.

The note on the seeing stones that Troelsfo pointed out is interesting. I think it does explain a few things that happen with the palantiri better.

One misconception of them is they could be used almost like a telescope, that can zoom in and "spy out" a distant area. The 'image' in a palantir seems to be just the face/physical body and the surroundings are either blacked out or unrecognizable. Which is why Sauron's use of them is quite minor and just a small effort to undermine and weaken Saruman and Denethor.

1. When Pippin looks into the palantir:

Then he came. He did not speak so that I could hear words. He just looked, and I understood.

"...Tell Saruman that this dainty is not for him. I will send for it at once. Do you understand? Say just that! The Two Towers: The Palantir

Confirming the note that words were not spoken in this encounter. Sauron just looked and Pippin understood. The other thing of note is Pippin is outdoors when he looks in the palantir. Sauron believes Pippin is inside Orthanc and asked to send for Saruman. So the 'vision' in the Palantir does appear to be just the faces/physical bodies of the viewers.

Then we have the other portion of the note: Looking one at the other they would exchange 'thought' - not their full or true thought, or their intentions, but 'silent speech,' the thoughts they wished to transmit

This isn't really a mind-reading in the sense that Galadriel is able to do, where she can read the true hearts and minds of people. It's a transmission of thoughts, but not even the "true intentions" but only thoughts they wishes to transmit. So there can be quite a bit of deception and danger when using the stones.

2. In Sauron using the palantir to undermine Denethor:

Denethor had long studied how to use the stones. He wasn't the 'true' heir as the Kings of Gondor were, but it did strengthen his will when using it, in a way that Saruman did not have. Saruman had no 'right' to use the Orthanc stone. This does help Denethor resist a little more and maybe get the best of Sauron sometimes. But overcome with grief at the loss of his son (and apparent loss of his other son) Sauron's finally able to best Denethor's will. Sauron transmits to Denethor only the thought that Sauron wishes, showing Denethor the inevitable destruction of Gondor:

In this way Denethor gained his great knowledge of things that passed in his realm, and far beyond his borders, at which men marvelled; but he bought the knowledge dearly, being aged before his time by his contest with the will of Sauron... Appendix A: Gondor and the Heirs of Anariont (The Stewards)

In the Tale of Years on March 13th: Frodo captured by the Orcs of Cirith Ungol. The Pelennor is overrun. Faramir is wounded. Aragorn reaches the Pelargir and captures the fleet.

On March 15th, Denethor burns himself on the Pyre. So either on the 13th or 14th, it appears Denethor would view the palantir for the final time and lose in this battle of wills/transmission of thoughts. Sauron beats down Denethor's will (who is filled with grief) and transmits deceptive thoughts...the black sails coming up the Anduin (Denethor nor Sauron would have known Aragorn had taken the ships), Frodo's capture on the 13th, the Pelennor overrun, Faramir's seriously wounded. All deceptive thoughts Sauron probably transmitted to Denethor to finally break his spirit.

3. The contest of Aragorn and Sauron in the palantir:

In this one, people question how Aragorn's will triumphed over Sauron's will. How is Aragorn able to make Sauron see what he wants him to see? Tolkien said the contest was further away than it was with Denethor and that Aragorn was the rightful heir of the stone. These gave Aragorn an advantage and he was able to bend his 'thoughts' to cause fear and doubt in Sauron:

He drew a deep breath. 'It was a bitter struggle, and the weariness is slow to pass. I spoke no word to him, and in the end I wrenched the Stone to my own will. That alone he will find hard to endure. And he beheld me. Yes, Master Gimli, he saw me, but in other guise than you see me here. If that will aid him, then I have done ill. But I do not think so. To know that I lived and walked the earth was a blow to his heart, I deem; for he knew it not till now. The eyes in Orthanc did not see through the armour of Theoden; but Sauron has not forgotten Isildur and the sword of Elendil. Now in the very hour of his great designs the heir of Isildur and the Sword are revealed; for I showed the blade re-forged to him. He is not so might yet that he is above fear; nay, doubt ever gnaws him.' Return of the King: Passing of the Grey Company

This causes Sauron to rush his assault on Minas Tirith, before his full plan was ready.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Boromir88 Thanks very much for this! I feel like @Troelsfo opened up a whole new realm for me that I had quite overlooked. You write:

"Then we have the other portion of the note: Looking one at the other they would exchange 'thought' - not their full or true thought, or their intentions, but 'silent speech,' the thoughts they wished to transmit. This isn't really a mind-reading in the sense that Galadriel is able to do, where she can read the true hearts and minds of people. It's a transmission of thoughts, but not even the "true intentions" but only thoughts they wishes to transmit. So there can be quite a bit of deception and danger when using the stones."

This is certainly correct, but I only half understand it. Sam, after his 'silent interview' with Galadriel says he felt 'naked' - and that word is also used with reference to Sauron (e.g. the threat to Eowyn by the Ringwraith-king and Frodo talking to Sam on the way to Mordor). So, by extending the metaphor, one is not 'naked' when using a Seeing Stone. You point to two 'layers of clothing': thoughts as distinct from "hearts and minds" and also the thoughts someone wishes to transmit. My confusions arise from two factors:

(i) Tolkien insists that these thoughts are already framed in words (albeit silently, in the mind) and so I think he is saying that words are a kind of 'clothing' or intermediary between our 'naked selves' and what others see of us. This really blows my mind because it seems to go to the heart of Tolkien's thinking about language, but, as I said, I don't really understand it.

(ii) I cannot help feeling that the Seeing Stones at the time of the story have become a trap comparable to the Elvish Rings. Galadriel says to Frodo that Sauron strives always to read her mind but still the door is closed, and the implication seems to be that if Sauron recovers the One Ring then the Three Elven Rings become traps - that the door of Galadriel's mind will be opened to Sauron whether she wills it or not. Something like this seems to take place with the Palantiri... But your comparisons of Denethor, Saruman, Pippin and Aragorn show it is not simple... (I have to leave my post as it: testimony only to my confusions - but I have some hope this could be cleared up).

[Dimcairien Luiniel]

I will confess that I have not read the books in ages, so forgive me if this question is completely dumb, but how many palantirs are/were there and where are they located? It seems obvious that Sauron has one, and I think Saruman's and Denethor's are different stones. But do places like Rohan have/had a palantir?

[Boromir88]

@simon : @Boromir88 Thanks very much for this! I feel like @Troelsfo opened up a whole new realm for me that I had quite overlooked.

Same! I always remembered questions about military uses of the palantiri. And it seemed to me they wouldn't be too useful in the "battlefield" usage, because they weren't 'spying' devices. They seemed to me to be more communication devices, but an individual could use them to 'spy' and gain information. Sauron's use of the palantir was pretty minimal. He only saw a small benefit of psychological warfare to weaken Denethor and Gondor's resistance.

Also, the palantir can not be made to lie. That is, you can't transmit false images. That doesn't mean those images couldn't still be misleading. I felt like Troelsfo's quote cleared up a lot of this for me because I couldn't quite reconcile with how Denethor lost his mind and all hope if the palantiri could not be made to 'lie.'

His trust was not entirely unjustified. Sauron failed to dominate him and could only influence him by deceits. Probably he did not at first look towards Mordor, but was content with such 'far views' as the Stone would afford; hence his surprising knowledge of events far off. Unfinished Tales: The Palantiri

What happens though, is in that final contest on March 13th or 14th, Sauron feeds Denethor misleading images. The 'black sails' Denethor doesn't know those ships Aragorn's Grey Company has already taken and believes they're corsairs.

(ii) I cannot help feeling that the Seeing Stones at the time of the story have become a trap comparable to the Elvish Rings.

I agree. Now there was a danger to Sauron to use the palantir as well. Aragorn able to 'wrench' the stone to his will and reveal to Sauron the re-forged Anduril, caused Sauron to rush his attack before his full plans were ready. But it's also clear that Saruman and Denethor made mistakes by using their seeing stones.

@Dimcairien Luiniel I will confess that I have not read the books in ages, so forgive me if this question is completely dumb, but how many palantirs are/were there and where are they located? It seems obvious that Sauron has one, and I think Saruman's and Denethor's are different stones. But do places like Rohan have/had a palantir?

From what I remember...there were seven known.

There is the Orthanc Stone, which is the one Saruman and later Aragorn uses.

The Anor Stone, which is the one Denethor uses and the Kings of Gondor were the "rightful" owners of the stone.

The Minas Ithil stone, which is the one Sauron gets after Minas Ithil fell into his hands and the Nazgul.

An Annuminas and Amon Sul stone that were lost when Arvedui and his ships sank at Forochel.

I think there was an Osgiliath stone that ended up being lost in the Anduin.

And the Elostirion stone or "Elendil Stone" that stayed in the Tower Hills to maintain communication with the Arnor stones, but the Elostirion stone was said to be oriented towards the West looking towards Tol Eressea.

[Edit: Fixing a terribly constructed sentence that made no sense]

[Eldy Dunami]

Boromir88 recapped the seven palantíri in possession of the Dúnedain, but the total number of stones is unclear. They were created by Fëanor in Aman during the Years of the Trees, but as far as I'm aware Tolkien created the concept for the purposes of The Lord of the Rings and never wrote them into any First Age tales. In the Third Age, the "Master-stone" resided on Tol Eressëa, presumably taken there by returning Noldorin Exiles who survived the destruction of Beleriand. (It should be noted that the Master-stone, which is mentioned in The Silmarillion, does not feature in the much longer discussion of the stones found in Unfinished Tales.) I don't believe Tolkien ever specified when this occurred, how many (if any) other stones were taken back west, or how many (if any) never left Aman in the first place. It's unlikely the Dúnedain themselves would've known either, especially by the end of the Third Age.

The palantíri first entered human possession in the very late Second Age, when they were given by the Eldar to Amandil, final Lord of Andúnië, "for the comfort of the Faithful of Númenor in their dark days, when the Elves might come no longer to that land under the shadow of Sauron" (TS, Of the Rings of Power). This implies the seven stones were previously held on Tol Eressëa, as the Eldar of Eressëa were the ones who visited Númenor.* After the destruction of Númenor, the stones were divided between the two new Realms in Exile, but they were always seen as "an inalienable gift to Elendil and his heirs, to whom alone they belonged by right" (UT, The Palantíri), though of course it was possible for others, such as Sauron and Saruman, to unlawfully use them. They were never given as gifts to allied realms such as Rohan, though the out of sync stone at Elostirion was maintained by Círdan (Ibid, note 16), who placed it on Elrond's ship as he departed Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age (LOTR, Appendix A).


*In contrast, the Akallabêth tells us the Eldar of Eressëa stopped visiting Númenor even in secret during the reign of Ar-Gimilzôr, who died nearly ninety years before Sauron's arrival. If so, the stones must have been a gift from the Eldar of MIddle-earth, who remained in contact with the Faithful, or else have been given earlier in the timeline, possibly to Amandil acting as an agent for his father or grandfather. However, both scenarios require a counterintuitive reading of OTROP, so it's probably better to simply let this stand as an inconsistency.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I will confess that I have not read the books in ages, so forgive me if this question is completely dumb, but how many palantirs are/were there and where are they located? It seems obvious that Sauron has one, and I think Saruman's and Denethor's are different stones. But do places like Rohan have/had a palantir?

@Boromir88 lists the 7 stones and @Eldy Dunami reminds us that an 8th is also known - the master stone on the other side of the sea. Forgive me for again pushing my enthusiasm for the early drafts of LOTR, but tracing the locations of these stones illuminates the coming into being of Middle-earth.

Tolkien seems to have known from the start that the exiles of Númenor brought out of the ruin 7 stones. The Stone of Orthanc explains the communication between Saruman and Sauron, so pointing to a second that was housed in Minas Ithil and fell into Sauron's hands when it became Minas Morgul. By this point of composition (late 1942), the ancient history of Gondor had been worked out, so if there was a Stone in Minas Ithil so also in Osgiliath (now lost) and Minas Tirith - so opening the door on Denethor's story. All this seems to have been clear to Tolkien very rapidly, but the locations of 2 of the remaining 3 stones (on Middle-earth) was not.

Two elements of the story we know are bound up in the imagination of potential sites. The black Stone of Erech, to which Aragorn summons the dead oath-breakers, was first imagined as a Palantír (War 300-5), while the Hornburg, the great tower at Helm’s Deep in Rohan, said to have been built by “the sea-kings” of old “with the hands of giants” (TT 689), is the relic of another attempt to house a fifth Seeing Stone in the south (War 76).

In the event, all three remaining stones were situated in the north, thereby entering the imagined ancient history of the forgotten northern kingdom. Initially, Gandalf says there was a Stone housed at Fornost (War 76) but in the published story Fornost is replaced by Annúminas. I know this is an obscure detail, but I think we glimpse here a process of imagination of the ancient history of the exiles of Númenor: Elrond at the Council tells how, after the death of Elendil, "Annúminas fell into ruin and the heirs of Isildur “removed and dwelt at Fornost on the high North Downs”.

The Stone of Amon Sûl,or Weathertop, appears for the first time only in a very late typescript, a sort of crowning detail of one of the greatest parts of the story, which had been first composed almost a decade earlier.

Significantly, the first draft of Gandalf's conversation with Pippin about the Stones, in which two Stones are said to have been housed in the North with one at Fornost, places the other in Mithlond in the Gulf of Lune. So from the start, Tolkien knew there was a Stone in the white elf-tower that appears in Frodo's dream in Crickhollow. This tower had appeared in the first month or so of composition of the story - Bingo talks of three elf-towers to the west of the Shire, from the tallest of which one could see the sea (though no hobbit had ever climbed it). This white elf-tower was derived from two texts written two years earlier - 'The Fall of Númenor', where the exiles are said to have built high towers to look back over the sea, and the famous Beowulf lecture, where the author of Beowulf is said to have built a tower from which he could look upon the sea.

This last detail suggests to me that the Palantíri were imagined, from the start, as not only bound up in specific towers but bound up too in the kind of 'metaphorical' vision of myth that Tolkien had developed in 1936 and named metaphorically in terms of 'looking over the sea.'

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I get back to this with a couple of quotations that I wanted to think about in relation to the Seeing Stones.

First, the quotation that has been on my mind since I first grasped that these Stones reflect an art different to the direct mind-reading of Galadriel and other high beings. Duncan, the king who Macbeth murders in his sleep, says in reference to the previous Thane of Cawdor (who also betrayed him and in whom he had placed absolute trust):

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

So, I think a Palantír was imagined by JRRT as just such an art. Concretely, this Stone is an object of art that allows the act of reading to be performed, not by way of letters, but by looking at the face of the thinker of the thoughts communicated to us. Naturally, the art that makes such a Stone is elvish - which is an astute commentary on Shakespeare's line, or so it seems to me, because the play reveals Duncan as a lousy judge of character and, while we may sympathize with his declaration we also know that there is, kind of, somehow, an art to reading people by their faces, only we would be hard pressed to spell out what is involved - an elvish art indeed.

Second, by chance today I came upon an ancient quotation (Cicero, letter to Piso), reportedly given in a 16th century manual of physiognomy:

The face is the silent word of the mind.

I really like that second quotation in the context of this line of thought on the Palantíri, an elf-stone that allows the body to work a different magic of language.

postscript edit: my intuition is that LOTR here is mining Shakespeare's Macbeth very deeply indeed. Duncan's declaration that a face cannot be read follows in the midst of the meeting with the witches, which Tolkien in his commentary on Beowulf singles out as acutely conveying an ancient English idea of necromancy. The silent word of the mind that is the face is read in a Seeing Stone, a work of great elvish art, but the achievement of such reading, in the story at least, always involves a struggle with The Necromancer.