Palantír

• 1. Introduction

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  A palantír is one of several indestructible crystal balls from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, its name built from the Quenya words palan, meaning far, and tir, meaning watch over. In the story, the stones let their users communicate across vast distances and glimpse events elsewhere in Arda, or even in the past. By the end of the Third Age only a handful remained in use, and the novel puts them into the hands of five very different figures at its most decisive moments: the Dark Lord Sauron, the wizard Saruman, Denethor, Steward of Gondor, and two members of the Company of the Ring, Aragorn and Pippin. To direct a stone's gaze at full strength, a user needed, in Tolkien's words, to possess great strength of will and of mind. What a stone showed was always real. What it left out was another matter entirely, and that gap is where the story's real danger lives.

• 2. Making Of The Stones

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  The palantíri were made in the First Age, as told in The Silmarillion, by the Noldor, Elves of Valinor in the Uttermost West, apparently the work of Fëanor himself, shaped from a substance called silima, meaning that which shines. Tolkien never states how many were made, only that there were at least eight. Seven passed to Amandil of Númenor during the Second Age, and when Númenor fell his son Elendil carried them to Middle-earth, leaving at least the Master-stone behind.

  Four of Elendil's stones went to Gondor and three stayed in Arnor, at Elostirion in the Tower Hills, at Amon Sul, and at Annuminas. The Elostirion stone was Elendil's own, and it looked only westward, across the ocean, toward the Master-stone kept at the Tower of Avallonë on the island of Eressëa. Gondor's four stones sat in Orthanc, Minas Tirith, Osgiliath and Minas Ithil.

  By the time of The Lord of the Rings, that inheritance had scattered into hostile hands. The wizard Saruman held the Orthanc stone. Sauron had seized the one from Minas Ithil, a city he had by then remade into Minas Morgul, home of the Nazgûl. Denethor, Steward of Gondor, still kept the Minas Tirith stone, while the Osgiliath stone had vanished into the river Anduin when that city was sacked.

• 3. What The Stones Could Do

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  A palantír's diameter could run as small as about a foot, roughly 30 cm, or grow into versions too large for one person to lift, but every stone shared the same core power: showing places far away or events already passed, and letting its user speak with anyone gazing into a different stone at the same moment, exchanging what the text calls visions of the things in the mind. Carved from a dark crystal that resisted any ordinary attempt to destroy it, perhaps only the fire of Orodruin could have broken one. Minor stones only revealed a new angle if the user physically walked around them, while the larger, major stones could be turned on their own axis instead. One stone stood apart from the rest: the Osgiliath stone held power over the others, including the ability to eavesdrop on what they showed.

• 4. A Guide That Misleads

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  Once a single palantír fell into the Enemy's hands, the honesty of every remaining stone became impossible to trust; the danger was never in what a stone showed but in what it left out, and a skilled wielder could choose exactly what to reveal to whoever watched from elsewhere.

  Even Sauron, for all his power, could not make a palantír lie outright; the most he could do was select true images that led a viewer to a false conclusion. Three such deceptions run through the story. When Sauron sees Pippin looking into Saruman's stone, he assumes the hobbit is the halfling who carries the One Ring and that Saruman has already captured it, so he sends the Nazgûl to Orthanc and leaves Ithilien unwatched, never learning that a different halfling, Frodo, is the one carrying the Ring. Denethor, shown the armed might of Sauron's fleet of Corsairs of Umbar sailing for Gondor, concludes that victory is impossible and takes his own life, not knowing the fleet has already been captured by Aragorn. Sauron, in turn, watches Aragorn boldly reveal himself with Elendil's sword and concludes that Elendil's heir now holds the Ring and is about to march on Mordor; he attacks Gondor before he is ready and neglects to guard Cirith Ungol or watch Mordor itself, while the real Ring is quietly carried toward the mountain all along.

• 5. Scholars On Speculation

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  The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey reads a moral in the recurring pattern of these deceptions. He argues the word speculation carries a double meaning that Tolkien is quietly playing on, since it means both to guess at the future and to peer into a speculum, a mirror or crystal ball. Trusting a stone over one's own judgment and courage, in Shippey's reading, is exactly the mistake the story punishes.

  Paul Kocher instead sees the hand of providence running through the same events. Wormtongue's decision to hurl the Orthanc stone from a window leads, almost by accident, to Pippin's foolish glance into it, which deceives Sauron and lets Aragorn later claim the stone to deceive him further. Convinced that Aragorn now holds the Ring, Sauron attacks Minas Tirith too soon and pulls his army out of Minas Morgul in haste, unwittingly opening the pass of Cirith Ungol for the hobbits carrying the real Ring, a chain of accidents that lets the quest succeed against impossible odds.

  The scholar Jane Chance frames Saruman's downfall in explicitly moral terms: his sin is seeking Godlike knowledge by staring into the Orthanc stone hoping to match Sauron. Quoting Tolkien's description in The Two Towers, that Saruman explored all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, Chance argues he traded real wisdom for mere knowledge that was never truly his to begin with, borrowed instead from Sauron. She notes the irony that palantír itself means far-sighted, the very quality Saruman's pride cost him.

• 6. Propaganda And The Silver Screen

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  Joseph Pearce draws a more modern comparison, likening Sauron's use of the seeing stones to broadcast propaganda and sow the seeds of despair among his enemies, the same techniques of mass communication used to spread propaganda during the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, the era in which Tolkien was writing.

  The stones survived into Peter Jackson's film adaptations, where the critic Allison Harl argues the camera itself becomes a kind of palantír. She writes that Jackson chooses to look through the perilous lens, putting his camera to use to exert control over the original text, and draws on Laura Mulvey's concept of scopophilia, the voyeuristic pleasure of looking, rooted in Sigmund Freud's writings on sexuality. Harl points to a sequence in The Two Towers where the camera, like the Evil Eye of Sauron, travels toward Saruman's tower of Isengard and zooms into the dangerous palantír, handing the cinema audience an omniscient, privileged view of Middle-earth that ends, fittingly in her reading, on Mordor and the Eye of Sauron itself.

  Jackson's choice to cut the Scouring of the Shire reshaped the stones' story on screen. Saruman dies at Wormtongue's hand much earlier, at the start of the extended edition of The Return of the King, and Gandalf recovers the Orthanc stone from Saruman's corpse rather than having it thrown from a tower window. In one final addition of his own, Jackson has Sauron use a palantír to show Aragorn a vision of a dying Arwen, a scene from the future meant to weaken his resolve before the battle ahead.