If there’s one soapbox I’ve stood on since I first watched The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season one, it’s that the series’ best character (yes, I said it, best), Adar, deserves to have an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” storyline and his own version of a heroic arc. And now, as the series’ second season comes tantalizingly close to releasing, for the first time, it seems like I may actually get my wish. A key aspect of The Rings of Power season two’s final trailer seems to center around Adar and Galadriel realizing that they have more in common than they think. (Another long-treasured hope of mine.) And as Sauron looms large over Middle-earth, there might even be a team-up on the table.
But will it actually happen? Can Galadriel and Adar put their (many and painful) differences aside to fight the true evil that threatens them all? The Rings of Power trailer leaves us in a place that could go either way. But I am here to say, that regardless of what actually comes to pass, Galadriel and Adar SHOULD work together against Sauron in The Rings of Power season two. The complicated paralells between them, ones that echo louder than their differences, demand it.
From afar, it might seem like there are no The Rings of Power characters more unlike one another than Galadriel and Adar. After all, Galadriel is a high elf to her core, the Lady of Light. She’s a staunch believer in the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong. Above all else, she’s on a mission to eradicate darkness from Middle-earth, permenantly. And, in Galadriel’s estimations, at least so far, that darkness firmly includes Adar at its center. Adar, meanwhile, exists as an elf fallen from grace. Over the ages, he’s been corrupted at the hands of Morgoth and Sauron and become the literal father of Orcs or Uruk, as we should probably call them in deference, the race most associated with evil.
Certainly, Galadriel would shudder to think she has anything in common with Adar, if her first meeting with the one-time elf is anything to go by. In it, she calls him “ruined,” among other pleasant things, and basically threatents to exterminate every one of his children. But although contemptous himself, Adar seems to see something in all of Galadriel’s rage at him that she can’t yet see in herself. He tells Galadriel in The Rings of Power season one, episode six, “It would seem I am not the only elf alive that has been transformed by darkness. Perhaps the search for Morgoth’s successor should have ended in your mirror.”
While the latter half of that sentiment certainly could be true, it’s the former that is of specific interest here. Adar refers to the way Galadriel’s fury and vengence have consumed her when he notes that she’s been “transformed by darkness.” But he’s more right than he knows at the time. At that very moment Galadriel is as bestotted with the Dark Lord himself, Sauron, in his Halbrand form, as she ever will be. Of course, she’ll soon further transform when she finds out the hard way that her stubborn, relentless pursuit of Sauron led her right to him, and him to his return. And its knowledge of this last painful transformation that Galadriel and Adar singularly share and make it so critical that they get the chance to work together.
Undoubtedly, Sauron hurt many people throughout the The Lord of the Rings‘ War of Wrath and after it. But none so intimately as Galadriel and Adar. They have both touched darkness, so to speak, and know what the feeling of hate Sauron but at the same time be drawn to him. In many ways, it seems to me that Sauron’s relationship with Adar was almost a prototype for Sauron’s relationship with Galadriel on The Rings of Power. In both cases, it seems that Sauron sought to corrupt an elf with pure intentions and bind them to his side and to his will. Adar was, perhaps, an imperfect model, one who became too corrupted, let’s say, damaged, but, in Galadriel, the Dark Lord saw an equal, someone to “bind him to the light.”
Still, Galdariel and Adar’s stories are remarkably similar. Adar, of course, succumbed to this corruption initially, allowing Sauron’s darkness to enter him in ways that we’ll hopefully learn more about in season two. But eventually, when the torment of his children grew too painful, Adar forcibly severed the ties between them. “I split him open,” Adar tells Galadriel, faintly prideful, faintly wounded. “I killed Sauron.” But we see throughout season one of The Rings of Power that Sauron lingers in Adar’s being. When the Southlander Waldreg accidentally calls him Sauron, he flies into a rage. When he sees what ostensibly is a homage to Sauron at Ostirith, he gazes up at it for a long moment, enchanted and terrified. And despite all the strife, he carries out the orders Sauron left behind for him and creates Mordor by exploding Mount Doom.
Galadriel, meanwhile, refuses to give into Sauron’s seductions once she learns his true identity and goes right to the attempted stabbing. Though for her too, the choice to refuse Sauron is clearly anything but simple, and costs her dearly. Clearly, her desires run in different directions although her brain knows what she must do. But again, despite strife, she too goes forth with the plans Sauron created for her, forging the elven Rings of Power. In short, though the contents of their journeys seem different, Adar and Galadriel travel twinned paths. They are mirrors of one another, both of them forged by Sauron. Both of them rejecting him, yet connected to him, and inadvertantly helping him get what he wants. And so it is only fitting they come together to defeat him.
And, most importantly, as The Rings of Power trailers seem to hint, both Adar and Galadriel will always have Sauron in their minds. At least someone defeats him. Gil-galad says in the latest The Rings of Power trailer, “Once the deceiver gains a being’s trust, he gains the ability to sculpt their very thoughts.” And Adar further notes, “Sooner or later, Sauron’s eye bores a hole, and the rest of him slithers in.” No doubt, both Galadriel and Adar feel this phenomonen acutely. Despite surface differences, the pair of them are perhaps the only two individuals in existence who have been engulfed by Sauron, but have resisted him, only to never truly free of him. And that is a character and story dynamic too naunced and fascinating not to explore.
After The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season one , I wrote that Adar was such a tragic character because he was singular. As neither a true elf, nor a true Uruk, he was all alone. But now it seems, there is more than one elf alive who has been transformed by darkness. And in deference to the deep parallels that connect them, I think it would be only right for Galadriel and Adar to team up on The Rings of Power season two, no longer singular, but united, against Sauron, the one who created them both.
