The Importance of The Scouring

The Scouring of The Shire is one of the largest and most discussed omissions in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy alongside The House of Tom Bombadil. Knowledge of the event often serves as a litmus test for whether or not someone has read the book or just seen the films. While its absence from the movies can be justified by its effect on the film's pacing, its importance to the overall story in the literature should be undisputed. George R. R. Martin once said, “Every time I read it, I understand the brilliance of that segment more and more.” However, the transition from the ultimate engagements against the forces of evil at the Black Gate and the fires of Mount Doom to a skirmish that seems incredibly domestic or trivial often puzzles or even frustrates many during their initial or repeat read-throughs, feeling like a step down from the climactic ending of the Hobbits' adventures abroad. Why then do so many deem it important and necessary? What multifaceted, layered meaning is Martin referring to?

​Those who have spent any time studying Tolkien will understand the myriad ways myths inform his world-building and character crafting. The "monomythic" formula, as described by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is broadly composed of three parts: separation, initiation, and the return. The final step, as described by Campbell, occurs when the hero comes back home with “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men”, having gone through the trials of the long journey, wholly transformed and capable of returning “the flow of life into the body of the world.” It is here that we can best observe the effect of the adventure on the hero, or, in the case of The Lord of the Rings, heroes. Their nature and abilities during the homecoming stand in contrast to their original selves. In The Return of the King, we see this previously in another character, Aragorn. Upon the apparent King's return to his rightful seat, after his separation and initiation, represented by his quest with The Fellowship and descent into the paths of the dead, he enters Minas Tirith, now willing and able to assume the throne and begin curing the people of Gondor, his healing abilities confirming the completion of his transformation from Ranger to King.  

The Hobbits return completely transformed from how they left, now elevated above their peers, not just in appearance, clad in armor and well-armed, but also in technical ability and heroic quality. The four heroes, seasoned by their perilous journey, now laugh in the face of the guards sent to detain them. This distinguishes them wholly from their fellow hobbits, who have lived in abject fear and obedience to Saruman’s decrees. Merry and Pippin, armed with the experience they have acquired as knights, effectively marshal the long-dormant forces of The Shire to outmaneuver and decisively rout Saruman's sheriffs. Sam, using the enchanted soil granted to him by Galadriel, re-greens The Shire and grows a new party tree. Beyond these acts, the three of them repeatedly take decisive action to swiftly dismantle Saruman's machinations. Following their heroics, Merry, Pippin, and Sam will all become well-respected hobbits and leaders among their people. Their arcs, for the most part, conclude in this chapter.

In fact, it is arguably Frodo, the main character, who plays the least significant role in the restoration of The Shire. Although he has returned physically, his travels have left an indelible wound on his soul, making him incapable of feeling at home in The Shire. While we see a growth in prowess among the other Hobbits, in Frodo, we observe the true nature of the burden he bore and the sacrifice he made. His desire to show mercy to Saruman represents his moral transformation. However, the lack of a Campbell-style return in the mold of his friends and Aragorn highlights that Frodo has not fully returned victorious and is struggling spiritually, and it contextualizes his decision to travel to the Undying Lands to seek final healing.

Through the events of this chapter, we again observe the thematic undertone of Faramir's famous declaration that he does not find intrinsic value in armaments but “love[s] only that which they defend,” making clear the rightwise purpose of taking up arms. Having spent the entire book aiding the free peoples of Middle-earth in the defense of their lands, the occupation and industrialization of their own home is a dark twist of fate, threatening to invalidate all that our heroes have accomplished. Sam's dreaded vision in the mirror of Galadriel is said to have been underwhelming in contrast to what he experienced upon seeing Bagshot Row again, bursting into tears beside the felled party tree. The feelings evoked in this chapter capture an extremely painful sentiment often only felt by the losing side in a war, not the victors, the feeling that it was all for nothing. What was the point in defeating Sauron and even setting off beyond the borders of Hobbiton if it was always destined to end this way? This combination of loss and despair is among the most difficult emotions any character in the book experiences, representing the stinging feeling shared by many who have survived combat and returned home to find it different from what they remembered.

The confirmation of our characters’ completion of their heroic journey and the nuanced portrayal of what it means to return home make The Scouring of The Shire not just a necessary formality but also an exploration of a deeply complicated subject. This makes it critical to the understanding of Tolkien's work as a whole and justifies its position as the penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings. In accordance with Martin's quote, I look forward to discovering further meaning in my next reading of this difficult yet brilliant chapter.

​-SDV

Why isn't Frodo a Hero?

 

Is Frodo the hero of The Lord of the Rings? In many ways, he is not – as discussed in class, Frodo does not get the happy, “heroic” ending that many other characters get. Sam settles down with the girl he had a hopeless crush on, has 14 kids, and lives out his days as mayor. Aragorn marries the princess, becomes king, and has the happily ever after of fairytale dreams. Frodo succumbs to the ring at the last moment – only saved by Gollum -- and returns home to find himself so utterly changed he no longer belongs.  

On the Fields of Cormallen, for a brief moment in the story, Frodo is a hero. Aragorn pulls him to the right of him and calls upon all the men and captains to “Praise them with great praise!”. And a minstrel of Gondor sings “‘For I will sing to you of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom’” Frodo is the titular character of a great poem!

Yet Frodo is not a hero in the Shire. Sam says, in the end of the Return of the King that “Frodo dropped quietly out of all the doings of the Shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own country. Few people knew or wanted to know about his deeds and adventures; their admiration and respect were given mostly to Mr. Meriadoc and Mr. Peregrin and (if Sam had known it) to himself.” Frodo loses this honour upon entering Shire: it is Merry, Pippin and Sam that gain the prestige of their mission. Frodo cannot translate his journey into the leadership and community that the rest of the friends do. Instead, it consumes and isolates him.

In their last conversation, Frodo consoles Sam on his departure, and says that “‘Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do,’”. Frodo is, in the completion of his quest, literally torn in two: Gollum permanently bites off his finger. He is, as he tells Sam “too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.” Frodo is, in a way that wanders from the path of the usual hero’s journey, changed in a way that does not allow him to go home.

Frodo’s journey also drifts from the original fairy tale setup established by Tolkien in Tree and Leaf: that the true form of the fairy-tale is the “eucatastrophic tale”, where “the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn””. Essential to the fairy tale is this turn, which allows this relief, “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart” to any man listening to it “however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures”.

Frodo has no true turn, no eucatastrophic ending. At best he ends his journey accepting his permanent loss. In the Shire, he does not become a hero of the old ways, fighting and leading. He tries to prevent bloodlust. Tolkien says in his letter to Christopher Tolkien, of the dangers of war that “But so short is human memory and so evanescent are its generations that in only about thirty years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches the most about fire”. The ills of war are not only often felt primarily by the soldiers, but even they forget and go on to glamorize them. Frodo has seen the dangers of war, and comes away as Tolkien does: dispirited and disturbed by it, even as memory fades.

Shippey writes that Bilbo is a modern character in a fantasy setting. Frodo is, much like Bilbo, a modern hero among fantastical ones. Tolkien says in letter five on Rob’s death that “I feel just the same to both of you – nearer if anything and very much in need of you – I am hungry and lonely of course – but I don’t feel a member of a little complete body now”. Just as Frodo is repeatedly described in the end of the book to be never again whole, Tolkien described the losses of the Great War.

Tolkien longs to write a mythology for England. But he could not make Frodo the mythological hero. He bemoans to Christopher in his letter “The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets) and always will be (despite the propagandists) – not of course that it has not is and will be necessary to face it in an evil world.” Frodo is, on the Fields of Cormallen, a hero spoken of in a poem. But when Frodo falls ill during Spring in the Shire, and says to Farmer Cotton, while clutching his neck that “It is gone for ever, he said, ‘and now all is dark and empty’”, we see his journey end not in the “eucatastrophe” of a fairy tale, but in the moral and spiritual loss of war.

Merry, at the spot where they “all started out together” says that “It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded”. But Frodo has seen the evil of the world, the waste of war. To go back to where they are “To me it feels more like falling asleep again.”

- ZJ

Down the Hobbit Hole

Why hobbits? Why do they exist in Middle-earth and why are our protagonists hobbits?

    In “Creative Anachronisms,” Shippey draws a parallel between hobbits and rabbits. Rabbits do not naturally live in the British Isles and were only introduced in the thirteenth century, so there does not exist an Old English word for them, yet Tolkien chose to include them in his world. In fact, rabbits are one of the relatively few animals explicitly mentioned in LotR. In letter 316 to R.W. Burchfield, Tolkien even defined hobbit as a “hole-dweller,” much like rabbits with their famous rabbit holes, and as Shippey points out, Bilbo is often described as a rabbit in The Hobbit. The reason for this is that, like rabbits, hobbits are distinctly English but also distinctly not Old English: they like “fried fish and chips” (book 4 chapter 4, p. 333), smoke pipe-weed (despite tobacco only arriving in Europe in the 16th century), and settle their disputes using contracts written in modern financial language rather than violence (Shippey, “The Ring as ‘Equalizer’”). Essentially, the hobbits exist somewhat as a stand-in for a modern English spirit that lets modern readers relate to them and discover Middle-earth through them, as opposed to the more historically correct Men.

    This approach can be further refined by considering the contradictory nature of what it means to be English: small-town unadventurous folk who love singing and eating vs. heroic global conquerors with their epic legends. The first, embodied by the hobbits, has its historical roots in the Anglo-Saxons whereas the second, similar to the Gondorians with their Númenórean ancestors, are more comparable to the Normans that conquered them. Not much is known about the origins of the hobbits before crossing the Brandywine, like the Anglo-Saxons and their migration over the English Channel, whereas the Men and Elves have very rich histories. Although Tolkien was more interested in telling stories of the latter, the story would be incomplete without the former.

    In class, we discussed how each of the four core hobbits of LotR (plus Bilbo) is characterized by a different aspect of service and consequently heroism, but I am intrigued by the less heroic, yet equally devoted, servants, Gollum and Wormtongue. Gollum devoted hundreds of years to the Ring, and when he lost it, he scoured the ends of Middle-earth (including Mordor) to find it and get it back. Depending on whether you view the Ring as its own autonomous entity imposing its evil will on others or just something that magnifies the evil that already exists in others, Gollum is either the single most disciplined or the single least disciplined character in the story (given Shippey's discussion of the word). It is this dedication to the Ring that makes him unintentionally destroy it. If you define heroism by the outcome rather than the intention, then this is one of the most heroic acts in LotR. Ironically, this is very similar to the dilemma that came up in our discussion on whether Frodo failed his mission or not, and if you instead define heroism by the intention, then Frodo is not particularly heroic either since he chose to keep the Ring. I only mention this because it happens a second time—with Wormtongue—and as we know, Tolkien loves his comparable pairs of characters. Wormtongue dutifully does Saruman’s bidding, sabotaging the Rohirrim and subjugating the Shire, until he reaches a breaking point and kills his master. Again, if he had been any less devoted in his service, such as by standing up for himself or defecting after the fall of Isengard, Saruman would have survived since Frodo was willing to spare his life. As far as I can tell, Tolkien does not give a conclusive answer to the question: is service only heroic when the one you are serving is good? 

    However, these two instances speak to an important aspect of Frodo’s story: his lack of agency in practice. The narrative seems to undermine or completely disregard the choices he makes, such as keeping the Ring a secret from the rest of the hobbits, embarking on his quest alone (leaving the Shire, Rivendell, and Emyn Muil), keeping the Ring at Mount Doom, sparing Saruman’s life, etc.. I find this aspect particularly interesting because it distinguishes him from his three companions—each of which gets to decide their own fate—yet makes him much more realistic. When reading letter 5 to G.B. Smith, I couldn’t help but correlate Frodo’s fate with that of many modern soldiers, drafted into a foreign war and stripped of his agency, only to return home to a barely recognizable country, injured and sick. Again, Tolkien is able to incorporate both the modern and the ancient with Frodo’s tragic ending and the fairytale endings of the other hobbits. This is similar to how the realistic evil of the scouring of the Shire serves to balance out the fairytale evil of Sauron’s Mordor. I also want to mention that the core hobbits mature during their quest, but all of them, except Sam, seem to eventually “outgrow” hobbit society and evolve into something that isn’t quite hobbit but isn’t quite Man, either—three-quarter-lings, if I may. Sam, formerly just a gardener, heals the Shire and becomes its mayor—because remember, the hands of a king mayor are the hands of a healer—whereas Merry and Pippin eventually move to Gondor, and Bilbo and Frodo seemingly transcend the mortal world altogether by sailing west for Valinor.

The town of Richecourt in 1918 (Library of Congress) for reference, since the scouring of the Shire is missing from the movies.

    I think that part of the reason why the Ring-bearer had to be a hobbit is encapsulated by their distaste for seafaring (except for those weirdo Brandybucks). The uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of the sea represents both possibility and peril: it is the route to discovery, but also to overreach. For example, the Númenóreans attempt to transcend death by sailing to Valinor, but the sea ends up destroying them. This hubris is distinctly missing in the hobbits who do not seem to have many aspirations through which they can be corrupted. Hobbits, who barely wish to leave home, definitely do not dream of conquering distant lands. Boromir was so easily corrupted by the Ring because of his desire to save Gondor and become king, whereas the Ring had no effect on Tom Bombadil who is already perfectly content with his life as it is, and Sam was even able to give it up after carrying it for two days because he only wants to serve Frodo. I think this tells us something about how Tolkien views morality: the defeat of great evil does not come from greater power, but from the refusal of it; and such refusal is most likely to be found among those who never sought greatness to begin with.

-ME

The Allure of Elves, Or, How Love of Love

            Upon my first watch of The Fellowship of the Ring, I found myself drawn by Arwen, Galadriel, Legolas, and even low-opacity Elrond, as funny as that might sound. Elves with their ethereal glow drew me in, and in other fantasy media, elves are my go-to favorite characters when they are present (i.e. Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3). Samwise Gamgee and I share the same enthusiasm for the Elves of lore, with us both being enchanted by the tales that we both have heard, heard by the former and seen by the latter. It truly is something that is quite odd, for in older tales, Elves are presented as some sort of mischievous creatures and not the image of serenity we think of usually in more modern media (except for Christmas media, of course, but we shan’t brush upon that in this post). So I began to wonder what really drew people like me to really like the Elves of Middle-Earth. So, using Tolkien’s own letters and the day’s lecture (plus some of my own tidbits of knowledge), I set out to find out. 

One of the key points that I came across over and over again is the nature of love and its connection to the Elves. That did not surprise me. I have seen many fans in online spaces fawn over the romance of Arwen and Aragorn, with the most notable aspect of their romance in these spaces being that Arwen gave up her immortality to be with Aragorn, her love. Arwen, upon becoming Queen of the Reunited Kingdom, gives Frodo her place on the ship to Valinor. Though this sacrifice seems like a fairytale at first, there is the “bitter and the sweet”, as Arwen described her (and Lúthien’s) sacrifice of leaving her Elven family and forging a new one with the addition of human death. Arwen and Aragorn have a happy marriage, with many children, a peaceful kingdom, and each other. When Aragron passes, she travels to Lórien and passes of a broken heart in the place where they first fell in love. Imagine the pain of heartbreak extended over millenia, where Arwen would have to endure such tragic loss and be unable to join Aragorn

Tolkien himself writes about his Lúthien and his Arwen, his wife Edith. As we have discussed, the love between them withstood much turbulence to persevere. The tale, though written as a somewhat cautionary tale, cannot help but ooze with the love he holds for his wife. He describes his tough decision: choosing between “...disobeying and grieving (or deceiving) a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers, but without any obligation, and ‘dropping’ the love-affair until I was 21” (Letters no. 43), with the addition of not regretting waiting until he was 21, but stating that it did personally affect him very much being away from Edith. Despite him being away from his future wife, the love he had for her withstood separation and the many trials he undertook on the path of their relationship. She, as Tolkien described, could have gone off many married someone else, but they found and chose each other even after years of separation, her sacrificing her prospects for his self-described “moderate degree” and "dwindling pounds” and even the chance of her becoming a widow for love and family. Such a choice seems romantic yet tragic, much like Arwen’s and Lúthien’s; it is one that could have gone another way had certain events happened, yet both Tolkien’s choice of love and Edith’s choice of love withstood trials, and it came out victorious. 

Then I thought about vampires. I think about vampires a lot, actually. Vampires, much like Elves, are so otherworldly that I cannot be helped but to be drawn to them. Louis du Point du Lac says it best in Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire:

“Do you think us beautiful, magical, our white skin, our fierce eyes? Oh, I remember perfectly what mortal vision was, the dimness of it, and how the vampire’s beauty burned through that veil, so powerfully alluring, so utterly deceiving!” (Rice 261).

This quote, which comes towards the end of the novel, is meant to dissuade a character from becoming a vampire, to which Louis attempts to contrast the nature of the vampire by saying that all that glitters is not gold. The immortal and beautiful vampires shoulder the burden of not being human, and living such long lives oftentimes alone, plagued with many tragedies. Louis speaks from a place of humanity, where he wants to preserve the little he has and the life of another, for his choice plagued him even after the events of the story.

Now, I know you’re wondering, thinking “God, Nicole, how does Interview with the Vampire fit into a discussion on the Elves of Middle-Earth?” 

Well, to that I say that immortality in both the worlds of Middle-Earth and in multiple vampire media (Anne Rice’s in particular) are essentially two sides of the same coin. Part of the reason I like vampire media so much is the issue of mortality, and the curse of eternal living. I find the mortality aspect of the immortal fascinating; those who still bear mortal issues oftentime feel miserably trapped by immortality. Louis du Point du Lac retains his “mortal nature” through the unwillingness to let his human side go; he loves, which is enough for him to stay grounded in life despite being dead. When he loses the people he loves most, all of that humanness that he kept was lost, and he was left to shoulder the burden of eternal life with no one to share it with. Louis cannot “un-become” a vampire. His curse is immortal life, and the only way to lift is to die, which is what he sought in the first place. The opposite side of the coin is the Elves, where they are able to relinquish their burden of prolonged life for… death! It is a strange paradox for Elves as compared to vampires and creatures. The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense to me as to why I liked both creatures. 

The issue of humanity is essentially the same. Elves are aspects of the humane, where they express a “devoted love for the physical world” as Tolkien says in Letter 181. Even so, their immortality allows them to watch, caring from afar while shouldering the care. In another letter, Tolkien describes it so:

“The Elves were sufficiently longeval to be called by Man 'immortal'. But they were not unageing or unwearying. Their own tradition was that they were confined to the limits of this world (in space and time), even if they died, and would continue in some form to exist in it until 'the end of the world'. But what 'the end of the world' portended for it or for themselves they did not know(though they no doubt had theories). Neither had they of course any special information concerning what 'death' portended for Men. They believed that it meant 'liberation from the circles of the world', and was in that respect to them enviable. And they would point out to Men who envied them that a dread of ultimate loss, though it may be indefinitely remote, is not necessarily the easier to bear if it is in the end ineluctably certain : a burden may become heavier the longer it is borne.” (Letters no. 245)” 

    The burden can only be lifted through such a human thing like death. 

I am drawn to vampires mainly due to their connection to humanity. Oftentimes, the expression of love, whether it be the last remnants of humanity or showcases of lust through the mechanizations of vampirism. It is why I really like Interview with the Vampire, for the struggle for humanity and the lament of losing it was paramount, and that drew me in. Conversely, it is also why I was drawn to the Arwen and the Elves. The sacrifices they are willing to make for their loved ones shows more humanity than anything. Sacrificing one’s eternal life for love made for such a compelling yet heartbreaking tale that I would not have helped to be drawn. Love is one of the things that makes humans truly human; Christian doctrine (at least, the part that I went over in another class) even dictates that love comes from God, and the love that God gives proves His Creation. Love is a human response, and to love is to be human.

—NPM

Love and Loss, or the Life of a Wraith

The idea that death was a wound has always seemed obvious to me. I have been fortunate enough not to have lost many people who are close to me, but the ones I have lost so far have hurt deeply. While the “Gift of Eru Illuvatar” sounds like a gift on paper, experiencing it does not make it feel much like a gift. When reading the Athrabeth, Finrod’s arguments sounded noble and high minded, but Andreth’s arguments made a lot of sense to me as a human. As a human, loss is certain, and that feels far more like a curse than a gift. With my disposition towards death being bad, I am captivated by the stories of Beren and Luthien and Aragorn and Arwen. From my negative view on death I can’t imagine what kind of strength of love would have Arwen and Luthien trade endless life for the certainty of loss and a grave. Finrod explains it from the Elves’ view, that immortality may not in fact be all positives, an immortal being with just a fëa (spirit) and no hröa (body) is a fate worse than death, as one remains bound to Arda. However, I still struggle to understand how the type of endless life that the Elves possess and knowing you will see your family and loved ones again, even with its drawbacks, can be a worse bond than the certainty of grief that Andreth faces.

It really stuck with me in class when it was said that, “She traded endless twilight for the brightness of one mortal lifetime filled with love, laughter, scraped knees, bedtime stories, and the wild, irreplaceable joy of watching her child grow.” Neither the marriages of Beren and Luthien or Aragorn and Arwen are “happy ever afters,” they both involved bitterness and loss. The story of Aragorn and Arwen is especially sad as Arwen dies alone in the now abandoned forests of Lorien. As she says during the tale “As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive." (Appendix A, Part I) Finrod can speak of it as a gift, for he will never have to face the loss, which Arwen understands now is why Humans speak of it as a curse, yet she knew it was a certainty when she made her choice and chose it all the same. 

This is where Letter 43 enters the picture. On the surface it may come off as a grumpy letter about the failings of love and the inherent limitations of the genders, but going under that I think it is cutting to the core of what marriage is. As humans we are going to die, getting married is guaranteeing yourself or your partner an immense amount of pain in death, and yet choosing to get married anyway. Choosing not to get married would save you some pain, but it would be like choosing not to interact with the world. With that logic we could try and forgo all bonds of relationships with others to escape pain, but then we would be like wraiths. Not interacting would be the worst of both worlds, one would be like a wraith described by Finrod as a fate worse than death, but then still dying anyway. It would be like receiving that one day of a human life time and choosing to waste it. In today’s world that could look like refusing to make friends because friends can leave or refusing to fall in love because it will inevitably cause pain. The point is not that these refusals fail to save us from pain, to some extent they might, but they will also prevent us from experiencing the things that would make the pain worth bearing. As Haldir states in the Fellowship of the Ring “and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” (Book 2, Chapter 6) I am beginning to wrap my head around the fact that maybe loss is what makes love so special. When Edith died, Tolkien wrote Luthien on her grave and when he died, Beren was inscribed under his name on the tombstone. The entire story of The Lord of the Rings is only possible because of the very marriage between Beren and Luthien. The descendants that result from Luthien trading that eternal twilight for one human day and a child, with all of the joy and sadness attached, play key roles in Sauron’s defeat. 

Towards the end of the Athrabeth, after Andreth argues that maybe Eru is a far off king letting princes do as they will, Finrod speaks of something stranger: the Creator entering into Arda and healing it from within. Over the course of the discussion they have logically arrived at the idea of the Incarnation. In Christianity, God does take a body, a hröa, as Jesus Christ and allows it to be destroyed on the cross. If death is a wound, it is something that God entered his own creation to share with us. If Jesus dies with us, then death must somehow be a gift. That's a part of the class that I am still processing, and the idea of death still scares me and I suspect it will for a long time, but maybe Finrod is right, and death is what makes life meaningful. Wouldn't a single day that changes be more meaningful than an eternal, never changing twilight?

—EN

Old Hope: Re-enchantment in a Disenchanted World?

“Elves and Men are just different aspects of the Humane,” Tolkien noted in Letter 181. That is to say, he did not construct and depict Elves and Men as two separate and independent species. Rather, in Middle-earth, Tolkien was observing and portraying two different modes of human existence.

“Death” functions as the anchor where these two modes of being both meet and diverge. Mortal Men are doomed to die, while Elvish “immortality” is not truly eternal life. Elves will also perish eventually, but only with the end of Arda. Death for them is so distant as to become almost unimaginable, producing a mode of existence that ostensibly resembles infinity. Their distinct modes of being yield two radically different psychologies, in which Men and Elves experience history differently, approach Eru differently, and ultimately participate in Arda differently. More importantly, both of these worldviews can still be found within modern humanity itself. Tolkien’s construction of Men and Elves is therefore not escapist mythology, but a genuine reflection — even a prophetic reflection — of real-world human existential conditions.

At the turn of the millennium, philosopher Susan Buck-Morss argued that the central project of the twentieth century had been “the construction of mass utopia.” The crisis of modernity was the collapse of traditional authority — religion, monarchy, transcendence itself. In response, humanity attempted to construct dreamworlds of its own.

For a moment, it seemed as if we had succeeded. Not because our dreams had been fulfilled, but because we once again believed that history possessed meaning, direction, and destiny. History had its subject — not one guaranteed by God, but one discovered and justified by humanity itself: technological progress, revolution, liberation, communism (even fascism, in the case of the Third Reich). The world remained enchanted because it still appeared intelligible, and because we believed ourselves to be progressing toward a future already visible on the horizon.

In both premodern religious societies and the ideological dreamworlds of the twentieth century, one finds a profound sense of confidence, and even passion (fanaticism, in its extreme forms).Where one knows that the world is unfolding toward a clear future—or simply that it is unfolding at all, rather than stagnating or repeating itself—there is little room for weariness.

“There is no weariness in the eyes of the Elves” (“Athrabeth” 316).  The Elves, in many ways, resemble this enchanted condition. In the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, Andreth’s anxiety and despair stand in stark contrast to Finrod’s almost instinctive certainty. Finrod possesses an unwavering trust in Eru and in the coherence of His Creation. Everything belongs within the design of the One. Even death, for the Elves, ultimately remains part of a meaningful cosmic order.

This is the crucial point: although Elves will eventually perish with Arda, they never truly experience death as existential anguish. Death remains comprehensible, integrated into the structure of the world. Moreover, the death of the Elves comes with the death of the world itself. They are never burdened with confronting the terror of an unknown world (or afterlife of soul) continuing without them.

Men, however, are different. As Andreth says: “we have no certainty, no knowledge” (“Athrabeth”311), Men are perpetually haunted by uncertainty because death may arrive at any moment. They cannot rehearse or prepare for its arrival, nor can they fully conceptualize what lies beyond it.

If Elves embody a state of enchantment, then Men embody disenchantment. They no longer possess confidence in the intelligibility of the world. In its place emerge frustration, melancholy, and radical skepticism. And this condition feels profoundly reflective of our own age.

After the collapse of the twentieth century’s dreamworlds since WW2 and Cold War, humanity was once again thrown into a vacuum of authority and meaning. We no longer believe that history necessarily progresses toward a utopian redemption - we have even begun to distrust the very idea of progress itself. We have lost our dreams, and in many cases, we have even become exhausted by the very act of dreaming itself. Suddenly Andreth’s questions no longer sound mythological — they sound exactly contemporary:

Are we the Children of the One?
Are we not cast off finally?
Or were we ever so?
Is not the Nameless the Lord of the World? (“Athrabeth” 320)

While the Elves are still speaking of Eru, Estel, and divine Creation, Men have begun to suspect that the foundation of these may already be broken. This is what makes Tolkien’s portrayal of Men astonishingly prescient. Writing within the twentieth century — an age still filled with ideological passion and historical confidence — Tolkien had already begun imagining the spiritual condition of the twenty-first: life in a disenchanted world.

Yet Tolkien does not simply advocate a return to enchantment, and this becomes clearest in the “Old Hope” of Men.

According to Andreth, some believe that Eru himself will enter into Arda and heal the Marring of Melkor from within history itself. Since Melkor’s corruption is structural and permanently woven into the fabric of the world, Arda cannot save itself through its own internal logic. Redemption must come from outside — from the foreign, the transcendent. Here, again, Tolkien redirects us to Men, the Guests of Arda, who remain perpetually disenchanted yet still long for re-enchantment, precisely because they belong somewhere beyond (transcends) the world they inhabit.

Yet the truly remarkable moment comes from Finrod. For the first time, the Elf who had previously spoken with complete certainty begins to hesitate. His language changes — he begins to say “maybe,” “I guess,” “I propound,” and so forth. He does not abandon faith in Eru’s design, but he comes to realize that perhaps the design is not something static and completed, but something gradually unfolding: Eru’s plan may not operate like a finished blueprint, and Arda itself may still be in the process of becoming.

Tolkien moves away from deterministic futurism altogether. As the Ainulindalë declares, “in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past.” Even Men, the Second Children, emerge as something unforeseen, beyond the vision of the Valar. And perhaps this is Tolkien’s deepest warning against modern ideological enchantment. Having witnessed the catastrophes of the twentieth century, Tolkien understood how easily attempts to restore absolute meaning, historical certainty, and collective destiny can harden into totalizing ideologies.

Thus Tolkien does not offer re-enchantment in the traditional sense. He does not secure and restore to us a stable “subject of history.” Instead, he leaves us with something more fragile, but perhaps also more humane: the possibility that meaning emerges not from certainty about history’s predetermined destination, but from our openness to becoming itself — a condition of perpetual unfolding and transcendence. In a disenchanted world, what we require is not renewed faith in a fixed historical destiny, but faith in humanity’s capacity to continue participating in an unfinished world.

- YC

Work Cited:

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Ainulindalë.” The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 1977, pp. 15–30.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.” Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One, edited by Christopher Tolkien, vol. 10 of The History of Middle-earth, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, pp. 303–66.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Letter 181.

An Unexpected Gift

Thursday’s class brought forward death and tried to make sense of it as a gift and in connection to love. I think that we can use the questions and examples presented by Tolkien’s elves to help understand the love in human death from a Christian perspective. Conveniently, I have recently been spending a lot of time meditating on St. Thérèse of Lisieux's thoughts on death, specifically, her acceptance of it. Day 8 of her Novena focuses on this theme and directs our attention to the Catechism's statement about death, which describes that in “departure, which is death, the soul is separated from the body” (Catholic Church 1005). St. Therese finds comfort in this, reflecting, “well, I have no fear of a separation which will unite me forever with the good God” (“The ‘Little Flower’ Novena”). Thinking about death by focusing on a separation, a subsequent gain, and finally a unification rather than a complete loss greatly helps explain why death is a gift, yet it is easy to remain unconvinced that this gift could outweigh the loss of everything known. However, the Catechism states, this is only a temporary separation which will be undone at the end of times when souls are brought back to their bodies. This reversal, I believe, helps validate Finrod’s point in Morgoth's Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part 1, The Legends of Aman, which argues that “the separation of fëa and hröa is ‘unnatural’” (Tolkien 330). 

In both the cases of The Fall and the ‘Marring of Arda’, the soul’s separation was unprecedented and only a result of these disruptions. However, what is unnatural is not always wrong, and this separation should not be seen as a way to cast negativity onto humans’ new existence. Andreth uses the separation of body and soul as an argument for disharmony in Man, stating that this means “his parts would not be united by love” (317) and furthermore that the body is an “imposition indeed, not a gift” (317). Well, if these bodies are a hindrance rather than a gift, it seems quite easy to understand why death would then be a gift. A release from the disharmony of our clashing body and soul, unnatural to the ground we walk on and live on. Except that is certainly not what it feels like. The love experienced through flesh, the warm sun, the shade of a tree, a sip of water, a hug from a friend, and so much more. All these experiences are examples of love experienced through the unification of body and soul, so love must exist in the union as well. The body is a gift that allows connection to all of its related creations. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). Even Jesus Himself came to Earth in a body with a soul, which He describes as in anguish before His death, as noted in John 12:27 and Matthew 26:38. When He dies, His body is left behind, and when He returns, His body is regained. It is made abundantly clear by Thomas’s touch of Jesus that Jesus returned to His flesh, but why would He do so if the body was a true imposition? The body is a blessing that allows him to touch and interact in a way that the soul alone could not provide. Jesus’s time physically on Earth demonstrates the love held in a body through the love He gives. We can look to His human example to understand the love that unites body and soul. 

The body is a gift to experience love. But how, then, can death be a gift as well? I think now is a good time to turn to Lúthien and Beren and the unique death that accompanies their love. The union of Lúthien and Beren, along with that of any elf-human couple, requires a choice not necessary between couples of the same being. The elf must give up their immortality to fully experience love and thus receive the gift of death. In this case, though the sacrifice is great, we can see death more clearly as a gift because it allows for such a powerful union. In Book 1 of The Lord of the Rings, when Aragorn tells the tale of Beren and Lúthien to the company, he says that after Beren died, Lúthien chose “to die from the world, so that she might follow him… together they passed” (Tolkien 189). I think what is to be emphasized in this story is that their union is most emphasized in their death. At least in this telling, though Beren and Lúthien share this tale, they are only described as “together” during their death. Only death was able to unite them, and is that not the greatest gift? To be united with what is loved most. The cost is what we know, but the reward remains to be fully understood, and there lies the struggle. The elves who chose mortality realized the value in death, which is love. 

Yes, death is a separation, but it also ends the separation between life and the greatest love. Furthermore, the separation of the body and soul will come to an end, and our current loss will be regained. What seems unnatural about death is remedied by all it provides, but earthly mystery makes the gift unclear, wrapped in a package most easily opened at our own death. However, it is not impossible to open the package while living by practicing faith and becoming closer to God; Arwen, Lúthien, and others, for example, were able to see the gift of the love they sacrificed for. While the love they departed for was more visible than the love between God and humans (in the sense that they were able to physically see their partner), there was still a great unknown in leaving the rest of their life behind. We can look to these elves as examples in our own experiences of death as a reminder to trust in the love that awaits.

-AHW

When the Forest Remembers: Tolkien’s Trees and the Fall of Saruman

In Letter 339 to the Daily Telegraph Tolkien sounds almost offended that anyone would “use [his] name as an adjective qualifying ‘gloom’” (Letter 339), especially in relation to trees. He responds that “In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies” (Letter 339), which sounds funny but also quite serious, beyond an affinity for trees he poses as trees capable of having enemies. They can stand on one side of a moral conflict, they seem alive enough to have a side and be injured or remembered or defended and even potentially avenged. 

I was able to participate in a discussion group last week focused heavily on the root of evil within Tolkien’s, and trees, unexpectedly, seem relevant for the continuation of this discussion of this discussion. We had a hard time attempting to pin down evil in Tolkien’s world, we see categorized version of evil, with monsters like Shelob being based on appetite and worse evils based on domination with Sauron and Saruman. And, although the root of evil remains difficult to locate, the manifestations of evil are a lot clearer in Tolkien’s world. Evil turns relation into use, evil begins to show itself when a thing is no longer encountered as itself. A tree is no longer a tree, this creature with memory and relation, but something flattened into purpose. And, although this is not yet violence it is the conditions that makes violence possible. 

Treebeard says it best “[Saruman] has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment” (The Two Towers, Book III, Ch.4 “Treebeard”). There is real accusation here “except as far as they serve him”, it’s more than this idealized “machine-loving enemy” (Letter 339) we often attribute to Saruman, Treebeard’s horror is that Saruman understates trees at the moment they become useful to him. A tree is allowed to matter as fuel, heat, smoke or military supply, but not as a living thing with its own duration. That means that a tree has already been reduced before it is felled, the axe only makes visible the violence that has already happened in thought. And Treebeard offers the exact opposite form of knowledge from Saruman. When Merry and Pippin first see him, Pippin feels that behind Treebeard’s eyes there is “an enormous well”, filled with “ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking” (TT, III, Ch.4) His own name is “growing all the time” because he says, “my name is like a story” (TT, III, Ch. 4). Tolkien isn’t making Treebeard old; he is imagining a form of consciousness shaped by duration, Treebeard is absorbed in survived time. This changes what it means to “know” a tree in Fangorn, Treebeard knows beings historically. His slowness in this chapter that often bring some comedic relief it brings a different moral tempo. Trees are not mute objects waiting to be used; they are lives that require patience before they can be understood. 
 
We come to understand Saruman’s evil quite clearly the trees being removed is translated into the language of his system. Treebeard says the trees are being left “to rot” or to be carried away “to feed the fires of Orthanc” (TT, III, Ch.4). The rotting trees show waste, destruction without even the excuse of need, while the trees brought to Orthanc show this conversion of living wood to heat, smoke and production. Treebeard line feels quite personal “Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had choices of their own that are lost for ever now” (TT, III, Ch.4). The “nut and acorn” reaching the smallest beginnings of a trees life beyond it can be useful or even visible. So Tolkien makes this loss not merely visible of the tragedy of the loss of a beautiful landscape but a deeper loss that seems almost linguistic. A speaking world has been silenced, Saruman’s evil is a violence against a world in which non-human things can answer and be known for the history they have witnessed. 

This is also what drives the Ents’ to march on Isengard, Treebeard realizes that staying still would not preserve the forest but abandon it, since Saruman’s destructive will would continue all the trees are left to be of use. In “Flotsam and Jetsam”, Pippin explains that Saruman “made the great mistake of leaving them out of his calculation” (TT, III, Ch. 9)/ Saruman’s defeat comes exactly from the same failure as his evil. He calculates based on the worlds he has reduced, he can count on the armies and fires and walls and machines he has created but cannot account for the possibility of the trees themselves acting. The living things he treats as material are able to become historical actors. Merry’s description of the Ents breaking Isengard further sharpens this, it was “like watching the work of great tree-roots in a hundred years, all packed into a few moments” (TT, III, Ch.9). The image here shows that the Ents defeat Saruman not by becoming another version of him, but using their force as tree-force, root-force, and this slow natural pressure being able to be accelerated into judgement. Isengard falls because of a kind of life Saruman ignored, becoming a force too powerful to remain in the background. The cleansing of Isengard with water makes this even clearer, Treebeard says that the waters will pass through “until all the filth of Saruman is washed away. Then Isen can run clean again” (TT, III, Ch. 9), the river had to run clean again to clean out Saruman’s inner corruption that has taken environmental form. 

Exodus 25 and The Dream of the Rood help us to complicate this argument that Tolkien is simply opposing “nature” to “making”. Exodus is full of human craft, the Israelites bring “gold, silver and bronze,” “olive oil”, “onyx stones” and “acacia wood”(Exodus 25:1-7), so wood that is shaped and overlaid with gold to make the ark, while the lampstand is hammered into the form “almond flowers with buds and blossoms” (Exodus 25:34). This making begins as an offering from “everyone whose heart prompts them to give,” (Exodus 25:2), and its purpose is dwelling “have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8). Wood becomes a site of presence, gold taking on the form of organic life, material have been transformed into a place of divine meeting. Orthanc consumes organic life to feed its fires, the lampstand imitates organic life. In Dream of the Rood, where the tree has been violently cut down, but the poem gives the wood memory, speech and makes it a sacred witness rather than reducing it to an object (Williamson Translation, The Dream of the Rood, line 33). The rood first appears as “a wonderous tree lifting up in the air” (Dream, line 5), which soon becomes unstable: “Sometimes it was stained with sweat, / Drenched with blood, sometimes finely / Dressed with gold” (Dream, line 26-28). And, it is capable of speaking of its own history, “Many years ago- […]/ I was cut down at the edge of the forest, / Severed from my trunk, removed from my roots” (Dream, line 31-33). This line brings the poem in direct conversation with Tolkien, the tree does not simply become the cross; it remembers the violence by which it was made into the cross. But the tree has taken its rooted life and forced into human violence, made to bear “outlaws” and “criminals” (Dream, line 36). But the poem refuses to let this be the meaning of the wood, because the rood bears Christ, its suffering becomes witness rather than mere use.  It is made to participate in the Crucifixion, and it can later “rise up high in heaven, a tower of glory” (Dream, line 95). The rood has been used far from Saruman’s sense of use, but that of Tolkien’s view, where transformation of wood must restore meaning and not strip it away. 

During the battle in chapter 7, Saruman’s forces carry “two trunks of mighty trees” as battering rams (TT, III, Ch. 7, “Helm’s Deep”). We see dead trees are turned into instruments of assault, exactly as the manifestations of evil entail. But by morning, “the land had changed,” and where the green dale had been, “there now a forest loomed” (TT, III, Ch. 7). The army that uses dead trees as tools is trapped before living trees as judgment, Tolkien makes the reversal exact: first the tree as object, then the tree as actor. Saruman’s hosts cower “in terror of the king and in terror of the trees” (TT, III, Ch. 7). The phrase is strange and wonderful because it gives trees a political and moral force on the battlefield. They are not just part of the setting of doom; they are part of the doom itself.

That brings me back to the question of evil. If the root of evil in Tolkien remains difficult to name, its manifestation here is unmistakable. Evil appears when a living world is made mute, when beings with memory and voice are converted into materials, when knowledge becomes extraction and craft loses reverence. Saruman’s crime against trees is not a side issue or a decorative environmental theme. It is one of the clearest forms his evil takes. He reveals that he has forgotten how to see them and in Tolkien, that failure of vision is already a kind of fall.

- LMN

Telperion, Fangorn, and Menorah

Tree imagery is so ubiquitous in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth that it can be easy to lose sight of what each instance means. The Ents, ancient and wise shepherds of the forests, embody trees as things enduring and mysterious in a way that feels inaccessible to those who live among them. And their resistance to Sauraman and his destructive forces at Isengard seems to suggest either a normative claim that nature ought to be left alone—their destruction being ultimately downwind of Sauron’s evil influence on the self-styled Wizard of Many Colors—and/or that it is folly to think that nature can be destroyed without consequence. Perhaps not dissimilarly, the threat posed to the hobbits by Old Man Willow as they first leave the Shire and enter the mythic world beyond positions trees as a symbol of an untameability in nature, even if Tom Bombadil—whatever it is he may be—comes along and chastises Old Man Willow into compliance. Meanwhile, in the twin trees of Valinor, trees seem to represent goodness, emitting light that stands in opposition to the darkness of the world, an image that Tolkien uses frequently to symbolize evil. Their descendant in the White Tree of Gondor, meanwhile, seems to represent salvation, both as its image is emblazoned on Aragorn’s heraldry as he approaches Minas Tirith in its time of need and as its restoration represents the titular return of the king. And yet the instantiation of the light that Telperion and Laurelin gave off—the Silmarils—seems to stand largely as objects of folly and temptation. In this vast confusion of images, it seems that trees represent something wholly different to Tolkien in almost every instance. Looking at the history of trees as symbols, however, helps to illustrate that this may not be the case. Rather, trees to Tolkien appear to represent various aspects of the divine in all its forms.

It is helpful to survey the way in which trees have been used throughout history to represent certain things. For the Greeks and Romans, specific varieties of trees were planted at temples to represent the different gods that were to be worshipped there. The trees were not supposed to be manifestations of those gods in a direct sense, but they did reflect something about their character and held symbolic significance, as epitomized in the laurel leaves of Nike/Victoria, the goddess of victory, crowning triumphants. For the Norse, the entire world was built around one great tree, Yggdrasil, that existed at the center of the universe and gave substance to all Creation. The tree superseded the personae of the individual gods of the Norse, the Aesir, and allowed for them to have life too. Insofar as there is a parallel between the Norse Aesir and Tolkien’s Valar and Maiar as gods, elementals, or angels, Yggdrasil seems in some ways to parallel Iluvatar, Tolkien’s God figure, or at least the world, Arda, His chief creation. Its strength, splendor, and steadfastness draw clear parallels between God and trees.

In Judeo-Christian tradition, as well, trees are closely linked to the divine. Some older Christian tales, such as the poem “The Dream of the Rood,” which features the cross upon which Christ was crucified telling of the glory of his sacrifice, place great emphasis on the tree that hosted what is perhaps the single most important moment in Christian theology, at least after Creation itself. Perhaps the most striking parallel, however, is that between Laurelin and the golden Menorah (or candelabrum) described in Exodus, both described as golden trees of light. The Menorah was to be wrought of gold and made to resemble a tree in its branches (Exodus 25:31–40). It was placed in the Temple at Jerusalem both to illuminate the inner sanctum and to serve as a reminder of God’s constant presence there through an ever-shining light. Laurelin, too, is a golden tree that emits light, glorifying Creation and driving off the fallen, becoming a target of the evil Melkor when he wants to strike back at his fellow Valar. Even if Telperion is not clearly representative of Iluvatar/God, unlike the Menorah, its opposition by those who are against Him suggests at least some association. These trees, at least, seem certainly to be symbols of the divine.

But not all instances of trees, in both Tolkien and Scripture, are so clearly positive. But it should be remembered that the forbidden trees in the Garden of Eden, eating from one of which led to the Fall of Man, were also manifestations of divine aspects in themselves, just taken in spite of divine will. Surely the Trees of Knowledge and Life represented attributes that applied to God. They are not in themselves sinful, but their violation was. This is, after all, at least the way that St. Augustine seems to conceptualize sin: as a violation of the divine or its will. Thus, it does not break the parallel between trees in both corpora that the Silmarils led Feanor and others into folly despite being, in a meaningful sense, fruits of the divine trees. If anything, the folly inspired by just such trees strengthens the parallel. The image of two holy trees in Valinor closely resembles that of two in Eden. Drawing this parallel more exactly would require a closer reading that is beyond the scope of this reflection, but it is difficult to imagine that Tolkien was not aware of it when he was writing The Silmarillion.

Indeed, the fact that the relationship between the Silmarils and the trees of Valinor as objects of folly akin to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge helps demonstrate how all the seemingly confused traits detailed above are indeed best understood as attributes of the divine. In addition to showing beauty that can lead people with free will to fall if they do not pursue it properly, the salvation represented by the White Tree of Gondor, in both its physical reappearance in Gondor and symbolically in Aragorn’s heraldry, is easy to connect with images of the divine as a savior. So too for the ancient majesty and mystery—and the benevolence—of Treebeard and the Ents at Fangorn. Their assumption, too, of agency in the will of nature also seems to point to God’s demonstration of His wrath when His will is too severely violated. This particular aspect of God as wrathful is more closely associated with His “Old Testament” appearance, but it should be remembered that if Middle-Earth exists in anything resembling Tolkien’s Catholic cosmology, this is still the form of God that operates until a much later age. Indeed, it appears that trees throughout Tolkien’s corpus represent various aspects of the divine appearing throughout the main narrative of The Lord of the Rings and elsewhere. Providence does not clearly feature much in Tolkien’s stories, but perhaps the image of the tree—greater and older than man, wiser and kinder, and yet unknowable even if vulnerable to folly and greed at human hands—is how people relate to God in their real lives anyway.

— JZ

“But You Are Not For Arda”: Diminishment, Mortality, Memory, and Paradise

Through the different natures of Elves and Men, Tolkien sought to explore death and the proper way to interact with the world of Creation. In Letter 181, Tolkien all but confirms this when he writes:

“Elves and Men are just different aspects of the Humane, and represent the problem of Death … In this mythological world the Elves and Men are in their incarnate forms kindred, but in the relation of their ‘spirits’ to the world in time represent ‘experiments’, each of which has its own natural trend, and weakness” (Letters, pg. 341).

Beyond confirming that Elves and Men have different natures, this quote hints at why those distinctions arise on a metaphysical level: the similar “incarnate forms” and different “spirits” of Elves and Men. I believe these distinctions are critical to understanding the different roles and fates Tolkien envisages for Elves and Men in his universe. Tolkien most clearly develops these ideas in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, where he introduces the concepts of hröa (body) and fëa (soul). To begin with hröa, Tolkien writes in Letter 181 that “Elves and Men are in their incarnate forms kindred,” thus implying that they share the same hröa (Letters, pg. 341). This is confirmed in the Athrabeth, when Finrod tells Andreth both Elves and Men “drew [their] hröar and their sustenance” from “the matter of Arda” (Athrabeth 309). The hröar of both Elves and Men are fundamentally of Arda. For Tolkien, both species needed this hröa to experience the world. 

        As we discussed in class, an existence as fëa only, but not as hröa, would not be satisfying. To prove this, we considered Sauron: after the Ring is destroyed, Sauron does not die. Rather, he loses his physical body, his hröa, and becomes solely fëa, taking the form of a menacing thunderstorm. Yet, in this form, he is unable to influence Arda and is blown away by wind from the West. Thus, beings need hröa to experience and influence Arda. As Ilúvatar would obviously want his Children to be able to enjoy His Creation, all beings thus have hröa. To be able to enjoy Arda specifically, their hröar need to be of Arda. This is why Elves and Men are common in this respect. They are even common in being affected by Arda Marred. Finrod tells Andreth that “you live in Arda Marred, as do we … all the matter of Arda was tainted” by Melkor (Athrabeth 309). Not even Aman has been free of the Marring since the Trees were destroyed. As a result, the hröar of Men are “weaker than they should be,” and the “health and stature” of Elvish hröar “is diminished” (Athrabeth 309). Regardless, the purpose of Elves and Men sharing hröar is clear: both are meant, at a baseline level, to experience Arda.

However, Elves and Men experience Arda in different ways, because they have different roles and different fates. As Elvish and Mannish fëar differ (Letters, pg. 341), unlike their hröar, to understand these differences and their consequences, we must look to fëar. In the Athrabeth, Tolkien explains the two key tenets of both Elvish and Mannish fëar. Elvish fëar are “bounded within … the Time of Arda” and are “unable to leave [Arda], while it lasts” (Athrabeth 331). Mannish fëar, on the other hand, “le[ave] Time … and never retur[n]” and were “not designed to stay long in Arda” (Athrabeth 331). This difference in fëar is directly responsible for the different fates of Elves and Men. Because Elvish hröa is of Arda, and Elvish fëa is bound to Arda, the Elves are therefore immortal within Arda while it lasts (Athrabeth 331). Finrod puts it best when he explains to Andreth that the Elves “belong to Arda (in hröa and fëa)” (Athrabeth 308) – they are fundamentally of Arda. Even if he dies, an Elf’s hröa and fëa both remain on Arda, so he can be reborn if he wishes. Men, on the other hand, while their hröa is of Arda, their fëa are not. As Finrod says, the “fëar of Men are not … confined to Arda” (Athrabeth 308). Rather, Mannish fëa leaves Arda after the hröa dies. Because the fëa leaves Arda, Man is mortal: his fëa is not within Arda and cannot thus be reembodied in the left-behind hröa. 

It is clearly this difference in fëa that explains the different “natural trend[s]” (Letters, pg. 341) of Elves and Men. Finrod says as much:

“Each of our kindreds perceives Arda differently, and appraises its beauties in different mode and degree. … To [Men] all things that he sees are new and strange, and in that degree lovable. To [Elves] all things are familiar, the only things that are, his own, and in that degree precious” (Athrabeth 315).

So, Elvish immortality means that to the Elves, “all things are familiar”, and therefore they are largely content with their surroundings. Further, because the Elves are immortal, they can pursue the “artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men” (Letters, pg. 341) (they are exempt from much of the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, essentially). As a result, they have a “devoted love of the physical world, and a desire to observe and understand for its own sake” (Letters, pg. 341). Men, on the other hand, because they are mortal, constantly experience new things and are thus never content with their surroundings. In the constant struggle for survival, they seek to understand the natural world not for itself but as a “material for use or as a power-platform” (Letters, pg. 342). It is this basic difference in nature that explains many of the differences between Elves and Men. For one, while the Elves are content with their surroundings, Andreth says “no heart of Man is content” (Athrabeth 307). This is precisely why Men look to nature as a “material for use.” The Eldar, then, say that Men “look at no thing for itself; that if they study it, it is to discover something else” (Athrabeth 316). Men are thus inherently curious beings (Tolkien, it seems, would be a fan of the Life of the Mind). It is perhaps this feature that makes Men uniquely predisposed to Melkorianism in the Elvish view. There is a very thin line between studying something to understand it and to use it for your own ends (as we saw with Aulë and the Dwarves and Fëanor and the Silmarils). 

The Elves’ love of the natural world instills in them their unique “weakness” (Letters, pg. 341): a deep-seated “unwilling[ness] to face change” (Letters, pg. 342) and an attendant desire to “preserv[e] the past” (Letters, pg. 342). Hence, Sauron was able to deceive the Elves into forging the Rings of Power: he played upon their desire to prevent their realms from naturally decaying over time. However, such a thing is impossible in the mortal lands of Middle-earth. We see this with Galadriel, who is an Elf and thus is of Arda. With her power boosted by Nenya, she recreates Aman to an extent in Lothlórien. Yet even her real recreation of paradise must fail, because no one can escape the passage of Time. Hence, Galadriel laments that:

“The leaves are falling in the stream, the River flows away. 

O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore 

And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor” (The Lord of the Rings 485).

Galadriel does not get to indulge in her escapism: she must either return to the real paradise, Aman, or remain a powerful figure in Middle-earth while accepting the diminishment of her artificial realm. In this way, Tolkien seems to be harkening back to his essay “On Fairy-Stories”: he is directly rejecting the notion that memory and stories are escapism. The usage of the Ring Nenya here is also very interesting to me. By using the Ring to stop the flow of time (in a sense) in Lothlórien, Galadriel has attempted to bend Arda to her will. To me, that seems like a distinctly Mannish activity, based on the two natures laid out previously. 

Farewell to Lórien by Ted Nasmith

Beyond the Rings, the Elves have two ways of “avoiding” the change they fear, though neither is truly effective in mortal Middle-earth. The first, more palliative than preventive, is through memory of the past and stories. The second, and more literal, is sailing West to the Undying Lands of Aman, or paradise. However, this method is in a way contingent upon memory as well: Eärendil only reaches Aman because he gets the Silmaril, which, as we discussed, is the memory of the Light of paradise in Aman before Morgoth marred it. As a natural expression of their main weakness, memory seems to be especially the province of the Elves. As Finrod says:

“In memory is our great talent, as shall be seen ever more clearly as the ages of this Arda pass: a heavy burden to be, I fear; but in the Days of which we now speak a great wealth” (Athrabeth 319-320).

The Elvish desire to recall memories of a higher past is directly contrasted with the Mannish desire to explore the present and future throughout The Silmarillion. When Beren enters Doriath, he is described as “doomed to roam,” and “lonely still to roam” (The Lord of the Rings, pg. 251). Lúthien, meanwhile, dances happily on the greens of Doriath, singing to the music of Daeron. When the Green-elves of Ossiriand first find Men, they tell Finrod that Men are “hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore [they, the Green-elves] are their unfriends” (The Silmarillion 142). While the Green-elves seek to exist in harmony with Arda, and venerate the past beauty in which they found it (and preserve it), Men seek to understand that beauty and use it

Man’s hunger for new things becomes Man’s “weakness” (Letters, pg. 341) when it becomes excessive hunger. We are told that the Men who arrived in Beleriand, fleeing from the East, “were eager to learn the lore of the Elves” (The Silmarillion 147). This makes sense, as the lore of the Eldar would constitute new knowledge. This is shown more directly with Beren. As he retrieves a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown, he is overwhelmed by its Light. He is the first mortal to behold the Silmarils, and suddenly, he is captured by the desire to have more, and so he decides to cut the other Silmarils from the crown (The Silmarillion 181). This insatiability leads to the awakening of Angband, the loss of his hand, and eventually, Beren’s very death. The idea of paradise comes in here as well: the Silmarils, as we discussed, are the memory of the Light of paradise. Perhaps Beren’s sudden desire is a rekindling of the Mannish desire to attain the Light over the sea they are unable to possess. Beren is not satisfied with one Silmaril, with the memory of the Light of the Trees; rather, he wants to gather all three Silmarils, all the Light of the Trees left on Arda, all of their paradise that is physically left. 

Beyond Beren, Faramir tells Frodo that the Kings of Gondor died out because they spent their days “in high cold towers ask[ing] questions of the stars” (The Lord of the Rings 886). They thus became too focused on the mysteries of Arda and the stars, and ancient heraldry, and not focused enough on the outside world. Their desire for knowledge became unbalanced in one particular direction. The Stewards, Faramir says, have been “wiser” for that very reason: “they recruited the strength of our people from the sturdy folk of the sea-coast” and focused on defending Gondor (The Lord of the Rings 886) while also preserving Gondor’s lore (Denethor, for example, is very learned). Thus, Tolkien thinks Men should pursue new things, knowledge, and stories of the past, but there is a limit: as with Galadriel, memory should not become escapism; the outside world still exists. In this way, Tolkien harkens back to “On Fairy-Stories” once again. While both Man and Elf may rely on memory and stories for sustenance and empowerment, neither can use them to ward off the inevitable flow of Time.

- WRM