The Key-spring of The Lord of the Rings

“Death, the inevitability of death,” Tolkien once remarked, is the theme central to “practically all” large stories that hold the interest of human beings. He believed that a central aspect of what it means to be human is our relationship to our own mortality. In his seminal essay “On Fairy-stories,” he had this to say in much the same vein: “the oldest and deepest desire [is] the Great Escape: the Escape from Death,” which appears throughout fairy-stories, their “scientifically inspired” counterparts, and “other studies.”

That Tolkien was heavily focused on humanity’s mortal condition is apparent even in The Lord of the Rings, which is ostensibly more about the nature of Power and Domination. He said as much on numerous occasions in his letters, but perhaps most fascinatingly in a 1968 interview conducted by the BBC, from which the opening quotation of this blog post is also cited. At the end of the interview, Tolkien was asked about his own view of life and how it relates to his fictional world. He responded by pulling a newspaper clipping from his jacket pocket and from it quoting Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death:

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

“Well,” he continues, “you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key-spring of The Lord of the Rings.” That Tolkien would so strongly state the most powerful theme he sees in his book is of course significant, but as mentioned before, it is by no means a unique occurrence of such a statement (cf. Letters 186, 203, 208, etc.). But the de Beauvoir quotation is significant in its explicit exemplification of this idea.

The importance of the quotation is that it expresses man’s fear of death in Tolkienian terms while being utterly distinct from his mythology. This shows the universalizability of Tolkien’s central theme. The ever-present resentment of humanity for its mortality and its suffocating fear of death is a powerful and ubiquitous feeling. Death is the most universal experience for our species. And de Beauvoir sums up the roiling emotions behind it in A Very Easy Death.

But Tolkien does not of course mean to say that her statement is the correct way to view death. It is the “key-spring” in that it is the primary driving force for the events of Tolkien’s mythology. In his world, the desire to cheat death, to remain embodied within the bounds of the physical world for as long as possible, is found throughout the race of Men. Perhaps the clearest and most direct expression of this idea comes from Andreth, the Wise-woman of the House of Bëor, who laments the unjust fate of her kind in the “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.” She believes that Man was not always meant to be short of life, to die and leave the world, but that such was the contrivance of Morgoth. He, so it was said among her people, had corrupted the destiny of the Edain, and thus had their lives been cut short and their futures doomed. To her mind, Men were meant to be as elves, to reside within the Circles of the World for all time.

This is the same belief that was held by the corrupted later kings of Númenor. In the days of their people’s glory, the rulers of the island held the view “that a ‘good’ Man would or should die voluntarily by surrender with trust before being compelled” (Note to Letter 212). They laid down their scepter before being taken by age and becoming dotard. But the thirteenth king Tar-Atanamir, refused to do so, clinging to life until he was taken against his will. It was he who had scoffed at the elves of Valinor, openly declaring his resentment for the mortality he viewed as having cursed him. He and his people had grown envious of the elves, whom they called “the least of the deathless.”

In both of these cases, it is seen that Men are desirous of the fate of the Eldar. Andreth is revealed to be bitter at her old age in large part because of her love of an immortal elf. But this is of course not as it was meant to be in the beginning. Death is the “Gift of Ilúvatar” to the race of Men, unique to them, which the elves say “as Time wears even the Powers shall envy” (The Silmarillion, Chapter 1). It was Morgoth, the prime mover of evil who began it. He alone is responsible for the introduction of fear into the world, which dates even to the birth of the elves themselves. (Cf. Tom Bombadil’s words that he “knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside” (The Lord of the Rings, Chapter 7)). And from his work the fear of death spread among men. The “Athrabeth” explains further that Morgoth even made Men to worship the darkness and to turn utterly from the light for a time.

The history of Men was therefore plagued through time with their dread of death, so that by the time of Sauron’s rule as the “Dark Lord,” he was further able to pervert the Gift into a twisted lie. The clearest example in this case is that of the Nazgûl. The rings that Sauron gave to them were able to confer longer life. But this was of course no true immortality. The Men who received them became wraiths, shadows of the Shadow, wasted and weary as the centuries came and went.

In all of the cases presented, the role of de Beauvoir’s passage is clear: Tolkien’s Men are fearful of the unknown that awaits them upon their deaths, and so they resent their mortality and seek for any means they can to circumvent it, with disastrous results. Perverting the will of Ilúvatar is utterly hopeless. And thus, the “Great Escape” from death into immortality sought throughout fairy-stories is the most pernicious of lies. Man is not meant for immortality. Once “achieved,” it is revealed to be merely some horrible kind of “endless serial living” (On Fairy-stories), like that of the Nazgûl.

A final and summarizing illustration of this concept is found in the Narn I Chîn Húrin, the Tale of the Children of Húrin. Húrin, a Man, is chained to a chair on the slopes of Thangorodrim as punishment for his role in resisting Morgoth. Still defiant, Húrin declares to Morgoth that “though all Arda and Menel fall in [his] dominion,” he would still never be Lord of Men, for he could not pursue them beyond the Circles of the World. Morgoth declares that “beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing” and that within them, none could escape him. Morgoth’s lie is the same he has told forever, and Húrin’s statement of faith is the pure manifestation of his belief in the Gift of Ilúvatar. And after all of Húrin’s family is killed through the horrible works of Morgoth, this glimmer of hope remains to us who read of it. Though the lives of these fallen Men in Arda were made into a misery by the forces of evil, they did escape beyond the Circles of the World in the end, departing the physical world for one utterly beyond the grasp of Morgoth. In doing so, they realized the True Great Escape: not one away from death and into false immortality, but into the embrace of the Gift of Ilúvatar.

          – Andrew Stump