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.

Bibliography

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