The symbolism of Finrod’s dagger, which she always carries with her, is a symbol of her burning desire to right the wrong of the terrible wars she has seen, but it is this same burning actually leads her to make the ultimate mistake of her life: keeping Sauron alive when she first meets him, unaware of who this stranger from the Southlands is, and why he is in the Sundering Seas, to begin with. Already, within season 1 of the show, she has learned some tough lessons, which will shape her into the wiser, more reserved lady of Lorien known in the movie adaptations.
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But her most renowned scene, in which she turns into ‘drowned Galadriel’ and takes on the fearsome green glow of an evil tyrant, shows that she still has this anger, and this potential for great darkness inside her, and that although she has learned to subdue it over the many long years that pass between the Rings of Power and the Lord of the Rings, it is still something that could lead her down the wrong path if she let it, as it did before.
When she takes Frodo to the glade, and lets him glimpse into the future that awaits if the one ring is not destroyed, she takes a huge risk, because knowing the possible outcomes of the story will inevitably change the path that one chooses to take to avoid them, as can be seen by Mirirel’s vision of the fall of Numenor in the Palantir, showing the flood that changed the fate of Middle Earth across the ages. In impressing the seriousness of the task at hand upon Frodo, she prompts him to make a choice - to abandon all hope now, at which point the quest will fail, or to bear the responsibility of seeing it all the way through, even if it means doing so alone.
Understandably, Frodo’s first reaction is fear. When Bilbo left the ring to him over 17 years ago in the Shire, the young hobbit never could have imagined that it would come with so much turmoil and heartache. He has just come from the forest in Lothlorien, having heard the beautiful words the elves sing in their lament to Gandalf, who has just fallen from the bridge of Khazad-Dum in battle with the Balrog.
This grief is fresh on the hobbit’s kind, and then Galadriel shows him that there is even more sorrow and destruction on the path ahead. In fact, the very next thing that will happen is that Boromir will try to take the ring, and he may not have died if Gandalf had been there, but the breaking of the fellowship was always going to happen at some point due to the allure of the ring. Knowing that, who could blame Frodo for offering up this curse and this burden to the lady of Lorien, who he sees as a much stronger, wiser, far more capable person of being its keeper.
He previously offered the ring up to Gandalf also, for exactly the same reasons, because he doubts himself to be the right person for the job, but Galdriel holds too much power, just as the grey wizard does, and Gandalf could have made an even worse dark lord than Sauron. That is why, when given the chance to take the ring, Galadriel goes into her scary evil queen mode, both as a reminder to Frodo of what will happen if he trusts the ring to the wrong person, but also as a reminder to herself of the horror that she is capable of.
As she snaps back out of it, she says probably her most famous words of the entire trilogy “I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.” The most obvious interpretation of that is to take the test as a literal thing, which she has passed as opposed to failing it by accepting the ring and giving in to her deepest darkest desires.
But actually, these iconic lines have an alternate meaning, which is to say that she is finally letting go of the anger and the responsibility that she bore for all those years, and is allowing it to be someone else’s now, someone more capable of doing what she could not, and defeating the evil at hand.
Therefore, the line’s more accurate meaning would be “I pass the test to Frodo”. Thus she can finally accept the diminishing of the elves, trust the idea that Frodo can and will destroy the ring and rid Middle Earth of Sauron’s menace, and find enough harmony to allow her to retire to the Grey Havens. She didn’t go back to Valinor when she had the chance in Rings of Power, because she still carried the promise of avenging Finrod and defeating Sauron weighing so heavily upon her, but now that she passes this test on to Frodo, she can finally return to her home in peace.
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