Post on 21-Apr-2023
Immortality and the death of love: J .R.R. Tolkien and Simone
de Beauvoir
Renée Vink
(Slightly altered version of the paper published in The
Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference, Birmingham. The Tolkien
Society, 2008)
During the second half of the 1990s, l saw a documentary on
Dutch TV about the life and works of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien
(J.R.R.T. A Film Portrait). Among many other interesting things this
filmed portrait contained fragments from a BBC interview with
the Professor dating back to the sixties, ln one of these
fragments, Tolkien quotes an author I would never have
associated with him: the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
The passage in question was about human mortality, but most of
the content went right past me, positively shocked as I was to
hear a conservative Englishman like Tolkien refer to a text of
a left-wing Frenchwoman like De Beauvoir with obvious approval.
However, the documentary did not mention a title, and I decided
not to go and search for such a tiny needle in the substantial
haystack of the French author’s oeuvre.
Then, approximately ten years later, something jumped at
me while I read an article in a Dutch magazine about the theme
of mortality in literature (Vrij Nederland). Among the many titles
mentioned there was a novel by Simone de Beauvoir, Tous les
hommes sont mortels, and to judge by the description, this
appeared to be the very book Tolkien quoted in the BBC
interview. Moreover, what the article said about it strongly
reminded me of one of Tolkien’s texts, published after his
death in the History of Middle-earth series. My interest re-awoke
with a vengeance. I read the English translation of De
Beauvoir’s novel, All Men Are Mortal, and it turned out to be even
more relevant than I had thought, as l hope to show in this
lecture.
All Men Are Mortal tells the story of the ruler of an
imaginary Italian city-state during the early Renaissance. This
man, Fosca, a literary embodiment of Macchiavelli’s Prince,
deeply regrets the fact that his life will not be long enough
to make his city the best, safest and most prosperous place on
earth. One day, when the city is in danger and he despairs of
its survival, he encounters an old beggar who offers him an
immortality potion. After a brief hesitation Fosca accepts what
Jean Jacques Rousseau once called a “triste present”1 – a sad
gift - and it works: he does become immortal. But when he sets
about to achieve his ideal by every means he has at his
disposal, he discovers it was never a matter of having more
time to live. Human nature remains unchanged. He is unable to
prevent people from committing the same mistakes and follies
over and over again, not even his nearest and dearest, neither
by advice, nor by coaxing, and ultimately not even by force.
Eventually, all his contemporaries die on him and he
leaves his city to embark on a never-ending journey throughout
time. On a few occasions, his hope that he can change humankind
for the better is rekindled, but it always ends in
disappointment. He loses his illusions one by one, and as time
goes by, his life becomes more and more of a burden. Everyone
he loves and befriends grows old and dies, leaving him bereaved1 In Emile, ou l’éducation.
and more and more fearful of entering into any new
relationships. In the end, he loses the capacity to care about
the world and other people: by embracing immortality he has, in
fact, relinquished his humanity and turned into a monster - for
all men are mortal.
This biographical account is set within the framework of
an encounter between Fosca and the young, modern, ambitious
actress Regina. She starts out by being envious of his
immortality and coveting it for herself, but ends up horrified
by the bleak reality of his kind of life, if it can be called
life. The illusions he has lost over the centuries are ripped
from her in a very short period of time. After Fosca has left
her Regina feels that his account has defeated her and stripped
her of her being: “He had disappeared, but she remained the
same as he had made her - a blade of grass, a gnat, an ant, a
bit of foam.” (AMM, final page) But the end of this passage,
also the end of the book, leaves the reader with the suggestion
that this spiritual death, this reduction to nothingness, can
signal the birth of new insights with which to approach the
world of mortal man. Regina begins to scream, but the words the
French original uses here are those commonly used to describe
the first cry of a newborn child, “pousser le premier cri”.
This summary is too short to do full justice to this many-
layered novel, which deals with other issues as well. Though it
was later turned into an unsuccessful film and translated by
Queen Margarethe of Denmark – who also illustrated The Lord of the
Rings once! – the novel found little acclaim when it was first
published. Reviewers considered it weak and confusing. Checking
about half a dozen summaries of the novel on the Internet, I
found as many different interpretations and conclusions, which
suggests that it is difficult to assess what statement it is
actually trying to make. In this lecture, I intend to focus on
the theme of mortality versus immortality in both De Beauvoir’s
novel and Professor Tolkien’s writings, as this is where the
two authors meet.
For those who know Tolkien’s work, Fosca’s story will
probably evoke the fate Gandalf describes in Chapter 2 of The
Fellowship of the Ring: ‘A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the
Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more
life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a
weariness.’ (LotR, Bk I, Chapter II) This fate befalls Fosca as
well as the mortal lords of Middle-earth who became the Nazgûl.
In fact, he is worse off than they are. The Ringwraiths will
perish together with their Lord; for them, there is a way out,
so to speak, Fosca, on the other hand, is completely unable to
escape from the bondage of life. To him, Death would truly be
the gift it is so often said to be in the corpus of texts
dealing with the sub-created world of Arda. In his case, even
suicide is impossible: he has become invulnerable as well as
immortal and when he cuts his throat it simply heals again. He
is truly doomed to stretch his existence forever and beyond.
In this, he is unlike any incarnate being in Tolkien’s
writing. While Fosca remains the sole embodiment of immortality
in his reality (basically our own), Tolkien’s fictional
writings contain a wide range of attitudes towards death and
its opposite, deathlessness. Though
Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the passing away of her own
mother and recorded the slow, lingering dead of her friend
Jean-Paul Sartre in her diary, All Men Are Mortal (henceforth:
AMM) is her only fictional work to deal with this particular
theme. In fact, it may have been influenced by Sartre’s play
Huis Clos, which appeared only two years earlier. This is about
three strangers stuck together in a room for all eternity,
without any means of escape. It is the play that contains the
famous words “L’enfer, c’est les autres” – Hell is the others.
If De Beauvoir’s novel can be said to have a related message it
would be “You create your own hell.” Still, death and
(im)morta1ity are not central concerns in De Beauvoir’s work,
and even in AMM she raises several other issues as well.
For Tolkien, however, they are a central concern. As he
stated in the important letter to Milton Waldman, dated 1951:
“All this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality and
the Machine.” (Letters, 131) In another letter he said of LotR:
“I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real
centre of my story. The real theme for me is about
something much more permanent and difficult: Death and
immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the
hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave and seemingly lose it;
the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ not to leave
it, until its whole evil-aroused story is comp1ete.”
(Letters, 186)
It has often been said that The Lord of the Rings is all about the
desire for power and its tendency to corrupt. Peter Jackson’s
films focus on this and the environmental aspect, while the
theme of death versus immortality remains mostly limited to the
love-story of Aragorn and Arwen, where it is impossible to
ignore. But according to the author, the will to dominate is
not the real issue and never was.
One might wonder if Tolkien is not playing down the power
theme here, and if he is not, in fact, referring to his entire
Legendarium rather than to LotR alone: the theme of death and
immortality pervades the tales of the Elder Days and Númenor as
much as it determines the story of the One Ring, or more.
Still, even in LotR the theme obviously plays a central role.
When Gandalf characterises the Great Rings, the very first
thing he tells Frodo is that they protect the wearers against
natural death. The desire to preserve, to arrest change, to
prevent decay and to keep “things always fresh and fair”'
(Letters, 181) is what motivated the smiths of Second Age Eregion
to co-operate with Sauron, which leads to the forging of the
Great Rings. Sauron is obviously driven by the desire to
dominate, but he goes about it by attempting to perpetuate his
power, externalising it and concentrating it in a nearly
indestructible, one could almost say “immortal” object outside
himself. And once Sauron is gone, the theme of death and
immortality continues to play a role in LotR until the end and
far into the appendices, most notably so in the Tale of Aragorn
and Arwen.
Interestingly, in AMM, Fosca’s main motive to drink the
immortality potion is related to the desires of the Elves of
Eregion: the wish to protect and preserve his city when its
enemies besiege it:
“Was it true that the dead lived again in heaven? Up there
I will have neither hands nor voice. I will see the gates
of Carmona opened, I will see the Genoese raze our towers,
and I will be helpless. Ah! I hope that the priests lie
and that I die completely.” (AMM, Bk I)
It is in this situation and in this state of mind that Fosca
takes the potion. The beggar never had the courage to drink it,
because, as he confesses, “I’m afraid to die, but an eternal
life - how long it must bel” Fosca’s wife Catherina warns her
husband by bringing up the fate of the Wandering Jew, cursed to
live forever. Yet he listens to neither of them and drinks it
anyway.
Obviously, it is not the fear of being annihilated that
drives Fosca. What he dreads first and foremost is being unable
to achieve what he desires most: to save his city and turn it
into an earthly paradise. He does not want to die without
having accomplished anything noteworthy. If Tolkien’s mortals
fear to die, they usually do so for other reasons. In the
Akallabêth it is told how many of the later day Númenoreans
felt the weariness of the world creep upon them and how “the
desire of everlasting life, to escape from death and the ending
of delight, grew strong upon them.” Eventually, incited by
Sauron, they rebel against their mortality: “Why do the Lords
of the West sit there in peace unending, while we must die and
go we know not wither, leaving our home and all that we have
made?” (Silmarillion, 264)
Another mortal, Andreth of the house of Beor - more about
her later! - is quite vocal in her resentment of her own
mortality. In a lengthy discussion she challenges the Elvenking
Finrod by asking:
“What know ye of death? To you it may be in pain, it may
be bitter and a loss - but only for a time, a little taken
from abundance. (...) For ye know that in dying you do not
leave the world, and that you may return to life.
Otherwise it is with us: dying we die, and we go out to no
return. Death is an uttermost end, a loss irremediable
(...) Be a Man strong or swift, or bold; be he wise or a
fool; be he evil or be he in all the deeds of his days
just and merciful, let him love the world or loathe it, he
must die and must leave it - and become carrion that men
are fain to hide or to burn.” (MR, 311)
Stark words, even more so than the words of Regina in AMM. At
the end of her discussion with Finrod Andreth asks: “And when I
go to what halls shall I come? To a darkness in which even the
memory of the sharp flame shall be quenched?” (MR, 325)
So, what is the problem for mortals in Tolkien’s
legendarium? It appears to have several aspects. One is envy of
a race that closely resembles that of mortals but does not die
of old age, though its members can, and do, succumb to
violence, grief or world-weariness. Another aspect is fear and
uncertainty of what will come after death. Yet another is the
unwillingness to leave behind everything one has achieved. Of
all these, only the unwillingness to leave things behind
remotely resembles F0sca’s motive for drinking the immortality
potion, though it is precisely the fact that he has not yet
achieved what he wants, that makes him so unwilling. What all
of them seem to share, is their insistence to see this life as
the only life they have and this world the only place worth
living in. Fosca even rejects life after death if it prevents
him from having a larger part in life before death.
In De Beauvoir’s novel, the development has a kind of
logical inevitability. An immortal man and a mortal woman meet,
and an exchange takes place. The woman considers immortality
something to be coveted. The man sets out to correct her. Early
in the book, before Fosca tells Regina the story of his life,
they have the following conversation:
‘Nothing has changed,’ Regina said. ‘What peacefulness.
You see, Fosca, for me, this is eternity. Those calm
houses, the bells that will ring till the end of the
world, that old horse climbing the hill like his grandsire
climbed it in my childhood.’
Fosca shook his head. ‘No, that’s not eternity.’
‘Why not?’
‘There won’t always be villages, or carts, or old
horses.’
(...) One thing only was certain: that this
countryside, older than any living memory, would one day
disappear. Regina felt a wrench in her heart. (...)
suddenly the world was nothing but a parade of fleeting
visions, and her hands were empty. She looked at Fosca.
Could anyone’s hands be emptier than his?” (AMM,
Prologue)
Again, Fosca’s experience with time evokes the lasting
regret of the Elves for all things passing. As Galadriel
laments: “Like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years
numberless as the wings of trees! The long years have passed
like swift draughts of the sweet mead in lofty halls beyond the
West.” (LotR, Bk II, Chapter VIII) And her words about having
fought “the long defeat” echo yet another remark by De
Beauvoir, though not from AMM but from Le sang des autres (The
Blood of the Others): “If you live long enough, you’ll see
every victory turning into defeat.”2
However, Fosca is no deathless Elf He is something that
neither he nor anyone else was ever meant to be; his
immortality is completely unnatural. Tolkien, on the other
hand, changed the parameters. Along with a number of
individuals who go against nature by trying to become immortal
(but fail), he introduces a substantial group of people
destined never to die of old age. In his sub-created world, the
difference in perception between mortals and the
undying is the difference between two races, inherent to their
respective natures. The readers are not invited to experience
the abnormal situation from the inside. They never get to look
through the eyes of a Ringwraith, while Bilbo hardly lives
beyond his normal life span and Frodo leaves Middle-earth when
he is still in his fifties
Both authors, in their own ways, experiment with the idea
of what it could mean to be immortal in a mortal world, but
Tolkien takes the experiment further. Having created a
secondary world of his own to use as a setting for his tales,
instead of working with primary reality and history, he
introduces deathlessness as a natural phenomenon. This way, he
avoids obscuring the issue like De Beauvoir did, in a way. By
making Fosca the only immortal in the world and therefore the
loneliest person imaginable, she also made his world-weariness
inseparable from his loneliness. Contrariwise, Tolkien’s Elves
are by no means lonely individuals. And yet, their
deathlessness tums out to be a mixed blessing at best. They are
2 In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy this quote is incorrectly attributed to Jean Paul Sartre.
unable to leave this marred world with its ever recurring evils
but must endure it until the end with anguish in their hearts,
envying I1uvatar’s gift to Man, Death - a gift that even the
Powers shall envy in the end (Silmarillion, 42).
As Tolkien surmises in his essay On Fairy Stories, the
“mortal tales” of the Elves must be concerned with the escape
from deathlessness" (Tree and Leaf, 59), and indeed he gives us
precisely such a tale with the Lay of Leithian, ‘release from
Bondage’ (Silmarillion, 162) - Lúthien Tinuviel’s release from the
bondage of elvish longevity. Unlike the others of her race,
Lúthien is able to leave the circles of the world at the end of
the story. All the other Elves can do, is to exchange the
mortal shores of Middle-earth for the Undying lands of Valinor
in order to find peace of mind and heart, or to remain in
Mandos forever, as Finrod’s brother Aegnor does (MR, 325)
The Elvish longing to escape from deathlessness may seem
the logical counterpart of the human fear of death, yet when
reading On Fairy-Stories, something bothers me. Maybe I am not
wholeheartedly convinced of this elvish anguish because I am
unable to imagine what it really means to be immortal. Maybe it
is because Tolkien himself was mortal and did not quite succeed
in showing the elvish anguish he spoke of. Despite his general
statements and various remarks in letters and essays, the
overall picture is elegiac rather than tragic. The tale of
Beren and Lúthien is dramatic enough. It contains challenges,
confrontations, tights, mortal perils, sacrifices, and sorrow.
Alter Beren’s death, Lúthien fades away with grief. When
offered the possibility, she chooses to be released from the
bondage of deathlessness, as the man she loves will have to
leave the Circles of the World and she does not want to be
parted from him for what could be all eternity. In this
episode, the anguish briefly becomes palpable. Yet the story
never turns into the fully-fledged tragedy that characterises
so many mortal stories about death.
Not very surprisingly, the most dramatic episodes of De
Beauvoir’s novel also have to do with the relationship between
the immortal Fosca and his mortal loves. The tone shifts as
time progresses. Catherina, his first wife, never faces his
immortality, as she dies of the plague shortly after he drinks
the potion. His second love, Beatrice calls him “not a man but
a corpse”, because he has lost the ability to change, including
the ability to procreate. “And suddenly, I saw myself in the
depths of her eyes - dead,” Fosca says. “Dead as the cypresses,
the unblooming cypresses which know neither winter nor summer,
nor spring, nor
Autumn.” He forces Beatrice to marry him anyway, but they never
live like husband and wife. She claims to be afraid of his
body, because to her it is an alien thing. “I can’t bear being
caressed by hands that will never rot,” she says. “It makes me
ashamed.” (AMM, Bk I) In the end, Fosca gives up trying to win
her and lets her go. And though she could have given him her
love, she is afraid to do so and leaves.
With the third woman, Marianne, Fosca does have a lifelong
relationship. That is, it lasts while she lives. Unlike
Beatrice, Marianne is not afraid to love him, because he omits
to tell her about his immortality, even though he is aware of
the heartache it will ultimately cause: “So little time. We
would love each other for thirty years, forty years, and then
her coffin would be lowered into a grave precisely like the
graves in which Catherina and Beatrice were lying. And once
again I would become a shadow.” Fosca marries her despite his
knowledge that there will be a time “when Marianne would be
dead, when our life together would be buried at the bottom of
centuries, useless, lost.” He clings to the belief that, though
Marianne will die, she will live on in his heart longer than
she would have lived in the heart of any mortal man. But once
she finds out what he has been keeping from her, she
contradicts him harshly, leaving him not even this consolation.
“If you were mortal, I’d go on living in you until the end of
the world, because your death would be the end of the world for
me. But instead, I’m going to die in a world that will never
end.” Lying on her deathbed she cannot bear to think that her
husband will live on without her, find other loves and never
even join her in death. She rants about the unfairness of it
all and her last words, which she says twice over, are: “I
detest3 you.”(AMM, Bk IV)
Fosca in his turn loses what joy he had left in life:
“With Marianne’s death, an entire world had foundered, a world
that would never again emerge in the light. Now, all the
flowers began to look alike, the sky’s varied shades became
indistinguishable, and the days were destined to have but a
single colour - the colour of indifference.” He resolves never
to love again. When a fourth woman, Laura, offers him her love,
Fosca thinks: “A few days, a few years, and then she would be
lying on a bed with a shrivelled face.” So he tells her that
it’s useless, that everything is useless.” (AMM, Bk IV)
3 Friedman translated ‘Je te déteste’ as ‘I hate you’, but as Marianne’s reaction contains an element of loathing, a more literal translation seems better.
In AMM then, immortality ultimately means the death of
love itself. It is when he loves and loses, not only his loved
ones but even their love, that Fosca most desperately wants to
die, to be released from the burden of living without end. And
it is here, in the failure of love between mortal and immortal,
that the two authors, Tolkien and Simone De Beauvoir have their
closest brush.
In Tolkien’s entire legendarium, there is one instance of
a romance between an undying Elf and a mortal that fails
because their fates are different. Not that it turns into a
tragedy because one of them grows old and dies before many
years have passed, while the other will remain young and may
not die while the world lasts. In Tolkien’s text, the tragedy
is rather that this love never finds fulfilment. I am, of
course, referring once more to the ‘Athrabeth’, the story of
the mortal woman Andreth and the Elf Aegnor, brother of Finrod
Felagund. Tolkien tells it on the last pages of a much longer
dialogue between Andreth herself at a later stage of her life,
and Finrod. The framework in a way resembles AMM, which is
also basically a dialogue.
The gist of it is that Andreth and Aegnor fell in love
when she was still young, but that he turned away from her. She
believes he did so because he thought her, a mortal, too far
below him, and this has turned her into an embittered woman.
Why did he scorn her? she wonders. “I would not have troubled
him, when my short youth was spent. I would not have hobbled as
a hag after his bright feet, when I could not run beside him.”
(MR, 324-5)
Finrod replies: “So you feel now. But do you think of him?
He would not have run before thee. He would have stayed at thy
side to uphold thee. Then pity thou wouldst have had in every
hour, pity inescapable. He would not have thee so shamed.” He
denies that his brother rejected her because of her mortality;
Aegnor only wanted to retain a memory “that is fair but
unfinished than one that goes on to a grievous end. Now he will
ever remember thee in the sun of morning, and that last evening
by the water of Aeluin in which he saw thy face mirrored with a
star caught in thy hair.” He goes on to foretell that Aegnor
will fall in battle and never leave the House of Mandos as long
as Arda lasts.” (MR, 325)
There are some interesting parallels between Fosca and
especially Marianne on the one hand, and Andreth and Aegnor on
the other. A man who will not grow old and decrepit loves a
woman who will, and tragedy ensues. The men have recourse to
memory but in the end that does not help them: for both, life
loses its appeal. Aegnor refuses re-embodiment, though being
dead is an unnatural state for Elves. Fosca calls himself a
shadow and lapses into indifference and even temporary
insanity. The women become embittered. If Marianne had died
young, her last words to Fosca would have been different; the
worst death possible for someone married to an immortal is
probably dying of old age. Finrod’s assessment of unions
between mortals and Elves appears to be correct: “If any
marriage can be between our kindred and thine, then it shall be
for some high purpose of Doom. Brief it will be and hard at the
end. Yea, the least cruel fate that could befall would be that
death should soon end it.” (MR 324)
When Finrod speaks of this “high purpose of Doom”, the
‘Athrabeth’ presents this as foresight: he can only be
referring to the union between Beren and Lúthien, and that
between Tuor and Idril, and chronologically, the dialogue
between Finrod and Andreth precedes both. Actually, though,
‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and the ‘Lay of Leithian’ were written
before World War II, whereas Christopher Tolkien dates the
‘Athrabeth’ to 1959, or more roughly, somewhere between 1955
and January 1960 (MR, 304). And 1955 was the publication year
of the English translation of De Beauvoir’s novel.
Now I would very much like to suggest that reading AMM
inspired Tolkien to write the ‘Athrabeth’. But the Professor
was notoriously averse to admitting any influences4; in his
opinion identifying the ingredients that go into in the
cauldron of story says little about the actual taste of the
soup. (Tree and Leaf, 23) Unfortunately it would be cheating to
claim such an influence without first coming clean. For unlike
I led this audience to believe, the Simone de Beauvoir book
that Tolkien quotes in the aforementioned BBC interview is not
All Men are Mortal. In fact, the quote is from the book De Beauvoir
wrote about the death of her mother, Une morte douce, translated
in to English as A Very Easy Death. This translation was
published in 1965, not long before the BBC interview, and what
Tolkien quotes is this passage at the end of this book:
There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that
happens to Man is ever natural, since his presence calls
the whole world into question. All men must die, but for
every man his death is an accident. And even if he knows
it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
(Beauvoir 1965)
4 He did admit being inspired by William Morris (Letters, 303).
To which he adds: “Well, you may agree with the words or not,
but those are the keyspring of The Lord of the Rings,” confirming
once more that LotR is first and foremost about mortality - as
is the case with most of Tolkien’s writings.
Nevertheless, I do not believe the similarities between
AMM and Tolkien’s Writings about death and immortality to be
mere coincidence. So I will go out on a limb and maintain that,
given the fact that Tolkien read A Very Easy Death shortly after
it was published5, it is not too far-fetched to assume he also
read the novel, either in French or in translation. The title
alone must have held more than a little appeal to him. Still,
it is the taste that makes the soup, and if anything, the
‘Athrabeth’ looks like a critical commentary on AMM.
It is only in this dialogue that the problematic nature of
unions between Elves and mortals seems to become a real
concern. Idril and Tuor, the first mixed couple to get together
in Tolkien’s work, set out for Valinor when Tuor feels “old age
creep upon him”, but The Silmarillion almost reassuringly suggests
they found a cure for it when Tuor was numbered among the
Firstborn. (Silmarillion, 244-5) In the story of Beren and
Lúthien, the elvish partner dies after her mortal lover’s
death, but a potential tragedy turns into eucatastrophe when
the gift of mortality is granted to her as well. (Silmarillion,
187)
One Silmarillion Elf appears to see the potential for
heartbreak quite clearly. As he says,
5 Added in 2015: Christopher McLachlan, however, argues that Tolkien found the quote in a review in the Times. (Tolkien and Wagner. The Ring and Der Ring. Zürich/Jena: Walking Tree publishers, 2012, 68.)
“It is not fitting that the Elder Children of Ilúvatar
should wed with the Younger; nor is it wise, for they are
brief; and soon pass, to leave us in widowhood while the
world lasts. Neither will fate suffer it, unless it be
once or twice only, for some high cause of doom that we do
not perceive.” (Silmarillion 210)
The speaker is Gwindor of Nargothrond, and he is warning
Finduilas, who is in love with Turin. He uses the same phrase
Finrod uses in the ‘Athrabeth’, “high cause of doom”, yet
unlike Finrod’s words, Gwindor’s sound more like a lecture than
like a compassionate attempt to make the pain more bearable. No
wonder: Gwindor loves Finduilas, and his reasons for speaking
against such a marriage are subjective. Also, the Elf-maiden’s
love remains unrequited for other reasons than the gap between
Elf and mortal.
The ‘Athrabeth’ remains the first and only example of a mutual
but tragic love between mortal woman and a man who is
practically immortal in his entire Arda legendarium. Even so,
Tolkien’s execution of the theme turns out different from De
Beauvoir’s. Unlike Fosca and Marianne, his lovers never get
together, but Tolkien mitigates the cruelty of their tragedy.
Finrod comes up with a list of explanations why it did not work
out and never could have. Also, at this point, he has already
told Andreth that the Elves do fear death, remote though it may
be. This is the first time we hear anything like it concerning
the Elder race; it is called the Shadow Ahead and it is not the
same thing as fading, which merely seems to result in a loss of
physical solidity. For all the Elves know, they may perish
utterly when the world ends: unlike Men they are bound to it,
body and soul. In the secondary world of Arda, there is no such
thing as unqualified immortality for incarnate beings, and none
of them is without fear of death.
Finrod further predicts that his brother will never leave
the Houses of the Dead - implied: for Andreth’s sake. And
finally he goes out of his way to offer her consolation, doing
his utmost to disabuse her of the notion that Aegnor never
declared his love because he scorned her. Still, the idea that
Elves in general may have left mortals with precisely such an
impression does have a basis in the HoMe. The ‘Grey Annals’
version of Gwindor’s warning to Finduilas has: “Not meet is it
that the Elder Children should stoop to the Younger” (WJ 83,
author’s italics), instead of ‘wed’, as in the 1977 Silmarillion.
Could it be that Andreth had a reason, however slight, to
believe herself unworthy? Did Finrod, seeing how embittered she
was, engage in a kind of damage control? And is it so very
strange that the mortal partner should feel inferior?
As we saw, in AMM one of Fosca’s women tells him that to
be touched by hands that will never rot will make her feel
ashamed. In the ‘Athrabeth’, Finrod warns Andreth that once she
would have grown old and decrepit, Aegnor’s pity would have
shamed her. Despite Finrod’s best efforts, the notion of
fundamental inequality in such relationships is hard to ignore.
It looks as if Tolkien really does these lovers a favour by
letting their romance fail.”6 One could also say that Fosca is
6 In story-internal terms, there is no such development, just a number of texts written by different races with a different outlook on life and death. The tales of Idril/Tuor and Beren/Lúthien are of Elvish origin, the tale of Aragorn and Arwen is Mannish (Written by Findegil of Gondor: Tolkien, LotR, Prologue). Who originally wrote the ‘Athrabeth’ is unknown. My guess would be Finrod himself.)
selfish by claiming Marianne’s love, knowing how it will end,
and that Aegnor’s decision is better, though he fails to get
his reasons across.
Looking at the general picture, it is possible to discern
a development in Tolkien’s writing on the subject of unions
between deathless Elves and mortals. It begins with what is
hardly more than unconcern in the case of Idril and Tuor. In
the tale of Beren and Lúthien and later in that of Aragorn and
Arwen, the author avoids the “hard end” - to quote Finrod - by
letting the undying partner receive the gift of mortality. But
the later tale ends on a bleaker note than the earlier one.
Arwen has a difficult time facing the ultimate reality of
mortal life when Aragorn passes away: “If this is indeed, as
the Eldar say, the Gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to
receive”. (LotR, Appendix A) The Athrabeth, finally,
acknowledges the fundamental problem inherent to marriages like
these and declares them undesirable, a few exceptions
notwithstanding.
In fact, the Athrabeth constitutes a shift, of sorts, in
the metaphysics of Tolkien’s secondary world. Firstly Finrod,
basing himself on Andreth’s own statements, introduces the
notion of punishment for a fall into the concept of human
death. Until then, even in texts allegedly written by mortals,
such as the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, death was treated solely
as a gift, be it a gift not all mortals are eager to receive.
In the ‘Athrabeth’, Tolkien moves a little closer towards a
primary world Christian theology. Death becomes the enemy it is
in the New Testament and the idea that originally Men were not
meant to die and that their death is unnatural, is voiced
loudly by Andreth and eventually adopted by Finrod, be it in a
modified version.
Secondly, for the first time in his Arda-legendarium,
Tolkien moves beyond the Last Battle, the Dagor Dagorath, and
the end of Arda Marred. Having envisaged a tragic, unfulfilled
love between two incompatible parties, he offers an outlook on
a reality not merely beyond death but beyond the end of the
world itself; a reality where the lovers can be united. Before
the ‘Athrabeth’, the separation of Elves and mortal Men after
death seemed absolute.
Looking at Lúthien upon her return from the Houses of the
Dead, Melian knows “that a parting beyond the end of the World
had come between them, and no grief of loss has been heavier
than the grief of Melian the Maia in that hour.” (Silmarillion,
188)) About the last meeting of Arwen and Elrond in the hills
of Rohan we read: “… bitter was their parting that should
endure beyond the end of the world.” (LotR, Bk VI, Chapter VI)
In the ‘Athrabeth’, however, Finrod depicts an image of
Arda Renewed, the world remade after the end of Arda Marred, a
world where “the Eldar completed but not ended could abide in
the present for ever, and there walk, maybe, with the Children
of Men, their deliverers, and sing to them such songs as even
in the Bliss beyond bliss, should make the green valleys ring
and the everlasting mountain-tops to throb like harps.” He then
presents a variation on the Bible verse according to which the
first, or in this case the Firstborn, will be the last: “I
think that we should tell you tales of the Past and of Arda
that was Before (...). We were the Lordly ones then! But you,
ye would then be at home, looking at all things intently, as
your own. Ye would be the Lordly ones.” (MR, 319) This is
presented as a vision, not as a certainty, and Andreth has her
doubts. But Finrod’s estel, to use the story-internal term, is
rather compelling and when he tells her to wait for Aegnor and
him after death, it is also the last sentence of the Athrabeth
proper, and therefore probably a hint from the author himself
that it is a true vision. But regardless of whether the future
depicted here is a matter of fact or a matter of faith,
Tolkien’s own belief in a new Earth shines through more clearly
here than in his previous statements about the fates of Men and
Elves beyond the end of Arda.
The second of these quotes contains another key phrase for
Tolkien’s views about death and immortality: “Ye would then be
at home.” As a Christian, he firmly adhered to the belief that
this present world is not our true home and we`re only passing
through. It could even be that something like this also lies at
the root of the elvish desire to escape deathlessness; it is
probably no coincidence that in Quenya the words for Fate and
World, umbar and ambar, are closely related. To Tolkien, Death
is not an end but a new beginning. True immortality does not
exist in a world that will end one day, and when it does, even
the Elves will die. But they will be part of Arda Renewed, like
mortal Men. Therefore, even if the ‘Athrabeth’ was not
conceived as reaction or a commentary to Simone de Beauvoir’s
point of view, it still functions as such.
AMM stresses that unending life is worse than death.
Virtues lose their meaning: what is the value of courage and
sacrifice if you have nothing to fear because you cannot die?
Ultimately, such an existence creates monsters. It also brings
infinite boredom to those who suffer it. “Will I never wake up
in another world, a world where even the air tastes different?”
(AMM, Bk I) Fosca wonders at some point. The question is quite
obviously rhetorical. Elsewhere, he tells Regina that now he
knows that behind each mountain there is a valley, that every
gorge has an issue, every cavern walls. The world is round and
monotonous – four seasons, seven colours, a single sky, water,
plants, flat or hilly land. Everywhere, the same boredom.”
(AMM, Bk III)
Tolkien has something to say about this subject as well.
He puts it into Andreth’s mouth:
“Those among us who have known the Eldar, and maybe have
loved them, say on our side: ‘There is no weariness in the
eyes of the Elves.’ And we find that they do not
understand the saying that goes among Men: too often seen
is seen no longer. And they wonder much that in the
tongues of Men the same word may mean both ‘long-known’
and ‘stale’.” (MR, 316)
In other words, Men lack the capacity of Elves to keep seeing
anything in this world as new and interesting, however much
time they spend in it. Tolkien seems to agree with De Beauvoir
that human beings would find endless life on earth endlessly
boring, even though their fear of death sometimes leads them to
believe otherwise.
Going briefly off on a tangent here: once more the
Athrabeth appears to represent a shift away from earlier
notions, in this case the notion according to which Elves seek
escape from ever-continuing life and consider death a “gift”.
This late text firmly places the burden of world-weariness and
boredom on the shoulders of mortals and modifies elvish nature
to fit their longevity, But Appendix A to LotR contains an
earlier (in story external terms) example of elvish non-
weariness of the world: when Aragorn dies Arwen “is not yet
weary of her days”. Apparently, the elvish desire to escape
from deathlessness is somehow qualified. This might be worth
exploring - though not here.
In the end, the two authors end up leaving behind markedly
different messages. De Beauvoir’s character Regina thinks: “Let
me be resigned to be myself and one day, to die!” (AMM,
Prologue) No hope is offered of any kind of life after death -
not really surprising in an atheist - and the only time Fosca
spends any thoughts on the afterlife he decides it would be
better to die completely. If death is an “unjustifiable
violation”, to quote De Beauvoir writing about the loss of her
mother, this turns human existence into a very sad phenomenon,
Life progresses irrevocably towards a crime perpetrated by no
one and punishable by nothing - for who exactly commits the
violation and could be called to account? That immortality
would be unbearable, as AMM suggests, begins to sound
suspiciously like a case of sour grapes: presenting something
as unattractive because you can’t have it.
De Beauvoir only partially avoids this impression. She
does it by postulating that it is an illusion to believe that
flawed human beings could change the world for the better, if
only they wouldn’t die. And she does it by showing how people
can be their own worst enemies. However, in her novel the death
of love is tied too closely to the immortality of a single
individual who keeps losing his loved ones. Because of this, it
becomes a little difficult not to think of general immortality
as a possible solution to the problem. Therefore, Regina’s
resignation at the end remains as individual as Fosca’s plight
and does little to take away the sense of outrage at the
violation of death.
AMM was published eighteen years before A Very Easy Death,
shortly after World War II. Just like Tolkien’s preoccupation
with death and mortality has more than a little to do with the
directly experienced horrors of World War I, the French novel
could be read as an attempt to come to terms with the horrors
of World War II. But De Beauvoir’s later statement about death
as an unjustifiable violation, the one quoted by Tolkien, rings
a more genuine note. In fact, AMM functions better as a
metaphor of the mortality of love. Not only the loved ones die
one by one; love itself dies many deaths.
Interestingly, even the ‘Athrabeth’ contains this element:
Aegnor’s fear of Andreth’s decrepitude and death could serve as
a metaphor for the fearful awareness that romantic love is
fleeting and seldom lasts a lifetime. A variation on the theme
of Aldarion and Erendis (Unfinished Tales), so to speak. Unlike De
Beauvoir, Tolkien does offer an outlook beyond this world of
death. Mortal Man is not “for Arda”, as Finrod puts it, and
Tolkien elaborates this in the text Aman. It is in the nature
of Men that their fëa, their soul, “should not endure Arda for
long”, as he writes. If granted the blessing of Aman, the human
fëa, longing to leave the world, “would [soon] be as it were in
prison, becoming ever more weary of all the delights of the
hröa, until they were loathsome to it, longing ever more and
more to be gone. (...) The Man would not be blessed, but
accursed” (MR, ‘Aman’, 429) - just like Fosca, who calls his
fate a curse (AMM, Prologue). The correct term for this kind
of immortality would be hell. And hell is the death of all
love.
Ultimately, Tolkien even modifies the idea of death as an
“unjustifiable violation”. In a letter to Mr. Ouboter of the
Dutch bookshop Voorhoeve and Dietrich, written around the same
time as the ‘Athrabeth’, he declares: “Death is not an enemy. I
said, or I meant to say, that the ‘message’ was the hideous
peril of confusing true immortality’ with limitless serial
longevity. Freedom from time and clinging to time. The
confusion is the work of the Enemy, and one of the chief causes
of human disaster.” (Letters, 208)
Just like true immortality has often been confused with
serial longevity, there is a related concept that has often
been confused with never-ending time. I am referring to
eternity. Though Tolkien does not use the word, I would venture
to say that “eternity” is the state of existence where what he
calls true immortality has its proper place. Death may not be
the enemy, but Time surely is. Like the love of Fosca and
Marianne, the love of Andreth and Aegnor is doomed in this
world. To call them immortal lovers sounds good, but remains
confusing, despite Tolkien’s use of the term “true
immortality”. Therefore, I propose to call them eternal ones.
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