In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, reincarnation always involves getting a body of the same kind as the one lost. Elves that die in battle or from mishap in Middle-earth are reincarnated as elves in the Blessed Realm. Gandalf returns as a wizard. He is wiser and more powerful, but that is the result of the growth of his soul. Gandalf the White doesn’t have the same body as Gandalf the Grey. If he had, his return would have been a case of resurrection rather than reincarnation.
But if elves can be sure that death will lead to getting another body, why would the elves envy the ability men have to die? Even the elves in the Blessed Realm are jealous of the human ability to die and leave altogether. Why? What could be missing? One possible explanation is that these elves find unending delight boring. Even a good thing over and over without end can become dull. The idea that such a paradise might be undesirable has contributed to philosophical discussions about the possibility of human immortality.
Immortality on Planet Earth
Only a minority of philosophers today believes in personal immortality. Before the last century, however, many philosophers expected that their souls would continue after their bodies died. Usually this expectation arises from a religious conviction. Socrates’s belief that his soul would live after his body had died probably rested on a version of a Pythagorean mystery religion. A number of Eastern philosophical traditions are based on either Hindu or Buddhist religious commitments. These philosophers expect that we will be reincarnated, a fate very similar to that of Tolkien’s elves. Human souls, they say, are clothed in bodies made of flesh. When the body dies, the soul is given a new body as its house or covering. Some hold that every living thing is a soul, and at the death of any particular body the soul transmigrates (moves) into another body. In these traditions it is usual to think that the kind of body the soul gets next depends upon the actions of the soul in its previous life. Souls of humans may be reincarnated as lesser beasts if they live wicked lives as humans.
Religious and philosophical schools that believe in reincarnation are most common in Eastern cultures. Christian and some Jewish philosophical systems also hold that humans are immortal. But instead of expecting reincarnation, these traditions look forward to resurrection in the afterlife. Unlike reincarnated souls, a resurrected soul gets the very same body back,8 but with all its diseases and weaknesses removed. Just how this works is ultimately mysterious, involving a miracle that God performs to reunite soul and body. For Christians, the mysteriousness of how resurrection could happen is usually overwhelmed by the wonder of knowing that it has happened. Jesus Christ was executed on a cross, his body was sealed in a tomb, and on the third day he rose from the dead. His body was the same body—the holes left from having nails driven through his hands were still there—but it was a glorified body, beyond pain, disease, and death.9 As a Roman Catholic, Tolkien himself believed this about Jesus, but none of his characters in Middle-earth experience resurrection.
Philosophical attention to the afterlife reached its high point in the Middle Ages. Christian philosophers such as Augustine, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas wrote extensively about the nature of the soul, its connection to the body, and reasons for thinking that the soul is immortal. Many of these arguments continue lines of reasoning found in the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Similarly detailed discussions of the soul’s immortality and resurrection can be found in the works of Jewish and Muslim philosophers, such as Maimonides and Al-Ghazali. And philosophical defenses of resurrection are not limited to the Middle Ages. Peter van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks are two leading philosophers today who argue that humans will be resurrected after they die.10 In all of these discussions immortality is depicted as one of eventual and unending bliss. Some believe that purgatory lies between death and the heavenly paradise. But just as with Tolkien’s character Niggle (in “Leaf by Niggle”), perfect happiness is the final condition.11
Philosophical confidence about human immortality, though, has been under attack in recent years. And religious pictures of heaven have been subjected to special scrutiny. Many philosophers still argue that annihilation is all we can expect after death. Others insist that stories about heaven are just fantasies used by powerful priests to trick gullible people into obedience. Still other philosophers contend that even if there were a heaven of endless delight, it wouldn’t be a blessing to go there.12 Tolkien’s elves in the Blessed Realm grow weary of unending life. Why not think that the same would be true in the heaven expected by many Muslims, Jews, and Christians?
Philosophers who doubt the existence of heaven have drawn attention to this difficulty. In Greek mythology Sisyphus is cursed in the Underworld with the task of endlessly rolling a rock to the top of a hill, only to see it immediately roll back to the bottom. Albert Camus focuses on the hideousness of this fate in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Not only must Sisyphus struggle to raise the rock each time, but his punishment is made infinitely worse by his awareness that it is all pointless. Every time he walks down the hill to start again, Sisyphus has time to think about the futility of his existence. Heaven isn’t supposed to have the painful labor of pushing a rock, but why not think that it would be nearly as undesirable as Sisyphus’s fate: endless, pointless, and boring?
The awful tediousness of unending existence has also been a significant theme in recent popular works. Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series finds himself sorry that he is deathless precisely because it is boring. With nothing meaningful to do and absolutely forever to do it in, he decides to insult everyone in the universe one at a time, in alphabetical order.13 Here again, deathlessness looks a lot more like a curse than it does a blessing. Similar stories of boring immortality can be found in the Star Trek series14 and in the LucasArts video game The Dig.
Not everyone, though, is convinced that endless existence must be painfully dull. Heaven has its philosophical defenders, going back at least to Boethius (c. 480–525 A.D.). Facing his own execution, Boethius confidently looks ahead to life after the death of his body. He expects that his heavenly afterlife won’t be boring because heaven is beyond time. His afterlife won’t be an endless series of dull or pointless moments. Rather, it will be a completely full existence where time has no meaning. More recent defenses of heaven have compared it to the embrace of lovers—where time seems to stand still—or to the delight children take in doing the same thing over and over.15
Boethius’s solution wouldn’t apply to the elves of the Blessed Realm. Their existence is certainly time-bound. But while a heaven beyond time avoids the boredom problem, it doesn’t make heaven all that attractive. We have no way of picturing ourselves as existing outside of time, so we have no way of imagining life in a heaven of this kind. The time-stands-still embrace solution and the child-like delight solution could apply to Tolkien’s elves and might apply to us. But both of these approaches look more like short-term evasions than solutions. Eventually the embrace must end; and even children who are easy to please get tired of the most interesting toys.16
Why Arwen Chooses Death
At this point it is tempting to conclude that Tolkien calls death a “gift” simply because it releases men from the wearying tedium of endless existence. But it is unlikely that Tolkien intends for us to draw this conclusion about death. Apart from his insistence that the story wasn’t written as an allegory of any kind, The Lord of the Rings is part of a larger history that is purposely written from an elvish point of view (L, p. 147). What elves would value dominates the way the story is told. Release from the burden of endless existence is a source of eager interest because it is something the elves cannot have. The fact that they cannot leave the circles of the world makes them emphasize that life can be wearying, futile and boring. The best existence elves can hope for (the Blessed Realm) is one where work is rewarded and pain is rare, but it is still a finite world. Because it is finite, it is possible for them to know all there is to know about it. For the elves,
immortality is simply living as long as this finite world of limited goods endures.
Unlike the elvish “immortality” of deathlessness in a finite world, the Christian heaven that Tolkien looked forward to is an endless afterlife of fellowship with a limitless good. The most blessed of the elves would at some point run out of things to learn about the circles of this world. For theists, on the other hand, heaven involves getting to know God—an infinite good—better and better. The blessed in this kind of afterlife cannot exhaust all that can be known about God. Elvish immortality has to be repetitive eventually, but the immortality Tolkien expected can’t be. It will always be possible to learn more about God. And since Tolkien believed that what might be learned about God is always amazingly good, it will never be boring.
But even if heaven won’t be boring, Arwen’s choice still needs explaining. Although they call death the “gift” of men, elves do not expect that dead men will enjoy an afterlife where delight increases forever. And while wise elves simply admit that no one is sure what happens when men die, most elves believe that dead men cease to exist. Wise men do not know any more than the wise elves. And most men fear that the common expectation of annihilation is true. Arwen and Aragorn, however, are not common. They are uncommonly wise, and they love uncommonly deeply. Arwen’s choice of Aragorn, and their willing acceptance of death, can both be explained by focusing on their wisdom and their love.
In her choice of Aragorn and his fate, Arwen prefers a finite life of deep love to an unending life without that love. In order to marry Aragorn and enjoy that relationship, she would have to take on his mortal nature. It wasn’t possible to have the great joy of his love and be deathless. Had she chosen elvish immortality instead, endless life without love would not give as much joy as sharing a brief life with Aragorn. Arwen does not choose death for its own sake. She chooses life with Aragorn for its own sake and accepts eventual death as a price she is willing to pay to get it.
But that was not her only choice. In the end, like Aragorn and Frodo, she also chooses to accept death before it is forced upon her. Although Arwen, Aragorn, and Frodo know very little about what comes after death, they know two crucial things. First, they know that those with the “gift” do not remain within the circles of this world. Second, they know that death is a gift from Ilúvatar, the creator-God of Tolkien’s world. They are Ilúvatar’s children, special objects of a love more profound than the love between Aragorn and Arwen. In the end they accept death both because it releases them and because they expect that what comes next will also be a blessing.
What kind of blessing it will be hasn’t been revealed. The oldest among the elves look forward to a “last battle” and the destruction of this world. But their stories don’t end there. They go on to tell of this world being “remade” without the presence of evil. The souls of the elves (and in some stories the souls of men) return to this world and enjoy unending bliss.17 The origin of these stories is unclear, but they are consistent with what they know about their creator’s love for them. Aragorn’s last words to Arwen before he gives up his life speak of this hope: “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!” (RK, p. 378) Death delivers them from the pains and frustrations of life in this world. And as beloved children of their creator, Arwen, Aragorn, and Frodo look forward to an even better life in a world remade. We should be so blessed.18
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1 Following Tolkien’s usage, I will use “men” to refer to the race of humans in his story, both males and females. For references to non-fictional humans, I will use gender-inclusive terms.
2 Arda, in Tolkien’s invented world, consists of Middle-earth (the mortal lands east of the Sundering Sea) and Aman, which consists of Valinor, the home of the Valar and some elves, and Eressëa, an island inhabited by elves.
3 Aristotle, Physics II.1–2, 192b10–194b16.
4 J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), pp. 330–360.
5 Jean-Paul Sartre presents us with a similar scenario in No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Random House: 1989). In the title play, three strangers are stuck in a room with each other for all eternity.
6 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1.
7 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism,” in Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957); and Albert Camus, “Absurd Reasoning,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).
8 At least this is the traditional view. See for instance St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supp., Q. 79, art. 1; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume 2, translated by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), p. 998. Many contemporary theologians reject this view of the resurrection.
9 Matthew 24, John 20-21, and I Corinthians 15.
10 Peter van Inwagen, The Possibility of Resurrection and Other Essays in Christian Apologetics (Boulder: Westview, 1997); Trenton Merricks, “The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting,” in Michael J. Murray, ed., Reason for the Hope Within (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
11 “Leaf by Niggle,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966).
12 Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 82; Garth L. Hallet, “The Tedium of Immortality,” Faith and Philosophy 18:3 (July 2001), pp. 279–291.
13 Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, in The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 317ff.
14 Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 1, Episode 22, “Skin of Evil.” Star Trek Voyager, Season 2, Episode 18, “Death Wish.”
15 Lauren A. King, “Life in Heaven: Sometimes It Sounds Boring,” Christianity Today 27 (April 8th, 1983), p. 66; G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 263.
16 Hallet, “The Tedium of Immortality,” pp. 285–87.
17 Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, pp. 319ff.
18 I’m indebted to my son, Jonathan Davis, and my students Ryan Davidson, Matt Fray, Matthew Krueger, and Ryan Wright for research assistance and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
11
Tolkien, Modernism, and the Importance of Tradition
JOE KRAUS
It’s all a very close call, isn’t it? The Ring and its evil almost win at the end of The Lord of the Rings, and it’s not hard to think about all of the ways that things could have turned out catastrophically. If Gandalf hadn’t realized that Bilbo’s ring was the One Ring before Sauron could mobilize the Black Riders, that would have been the end before it started. If Frodo hadn’t focused on everything he had learned from Bilbo, Gandalf, and Elrond, then he and Sam would have been lost once the Fellowship disintegrated and they found themselves alone. If Aragorn hadn’t outsmarted Sauron—if he hadn’t revealed himself at the perfect moment or if he had failed to lead a convincing counter-attack on Mordor and drawn Sauron’s attention away from Frodo—then the whole War of the Ring would have been hopeless. If the forces of the good, Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, Aragorn, and Frodo, hadn’t realized that using the Ring would ultimately corrupt them, then Sauron’s evil would have won no matter how the battles had ended.
Too many close calls in a story can get boring or comical—think of how many machine-gun bullets never hit Rambo as he runs across one open field after another—but there’s a pattern to the way Tolkien allows his characters to make many of their escapes. That is, the heroes of The Lord of the Rings often rescue themselves because they remember something important that their enemies have forgotten. Gandalf, for instance, discovers the Ring because he, and he alone of the powers in Middle-earth, remembers to look after the Shire. He, Aragorn, and Faramir are brave, but they ar
e also prepared. They venture into places where they know they will face danger, but they never rush in. They have studied history, lore, tactics, languages, and geography, and they know as much as they can about whatever it is they are attempting. They have their trusty swords and their quick wits with them all of the time, but they have also done their homework. Thus, Tolkien seems to tell us, knowledge is a crucial part of what it takes to be a hero.
In this essay, I argue that one element of Tolkien’s vision in writing The Lord of the Ring was to imagine a world where scholarship and respect for tradition provide real and tangible power. Remember that Tolkien was a professor who studied and taught the languages of Northern Europe, so he was committed to the values of the humanities. In addition, however, he also served as a soldier in World War I and watched his son Christopher serve in World War II. As a consequence, he knew all too well that engineers and industrial leaders were the sort who determined victory in modern warfare. He knew as well that there were entire schools of thought with little regard for the religion, history, philosophy, and ancient cultures that he prized. Part of what he does in The Lord of the Rings is offer the fantasy that, in a time of tanks and machine guns, ancient languages and arcane history still matter, that without them there is no hope for the final victory of the good. In other words, he creates a fantasy that many of us English and philosophy teachers probably share: if you listen carefully to everything that we tell you in class, then maybe you will be able to go out and help save the world.
Shooting Arrows at Modernism
Tolkien is saying more than simply “pay attention in class,” though. He values a particular kind of study, a study that leads to an understanding of the philosophy of the past and so offers a moral arsenal in the struggle against technology and the temptations of power. He calls for his characters—and presumably his students—to recognize their personal link to the moral and philosophical traditions of Europe because the alternative is disaster. He asks them to regard their connection to Western history and culture as an almost religious one. As he describes his own affinity for that tradition in a letter to his son, Michael, “I was never obliged to teach anything except what I loved (and do) with an inextinguishable enthusiasm. . . . The devotion to ‘learning’, as such and without reference to one’s own repute, is a high and even in a sense spiritual vocation” (L, p. 337). That is, Tolkien wants to communicate a sense that the most important thing an educated person can do is to understand what the great thinkers of the past have to teach us about the moral structure of the universe. If we cling to tradition, we will find the wisdom to survive today. While such an idea may sound conventional—and in many ways it is as conventional as the English countryside ways that the hobbits of the Shire follow—it was distinctive for the time in which he wrote. A generation earlier, thinkers as different as Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, and Sigmund Freud had proposed radical new ways of thinking about art and humanity that threatened to tear down established ideas of conduct and beauty. While most of Tolkien’s own contemporaries in the humanities embraced and extended such ideas of the “modern,” he called for a return to tradition. During the half-century in which technology went from the Wright Brothers to the atomic bomb, Tolkien insisted that older values could still make a difference in the real world.
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