The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen

• 1. Introduction

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  "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" begins with a moment of misrecognition. A young man named Aragorn is singing in the woods of Rivendell. He sees a dark-haired woman walking among the trees and calls out a name that is not hers: "Tinúviel! Tinúviel!" She turns and reveals herself as Arwen. Though she looks no older than he, she carries within her the immortal life of the Eldar. J. R. R. Tolkien placed this story not in the main text of The Lord of the Rings, but in the Appendices. He called it "really essential to the story," yet tucked it where many readers never find it. Published in 1955 in The Return of the King, it sits as the fifth part of the first section of Appendix A. When publishers proposed dropping the Appendices entirely for the first Swedish edition in 1959-1961, Tolkien refused. He insisted the tale was "essential to the understanding of the main text in many places." It and Appendix D alone survived that edition. The one-volume edition in 1968 dropped every appendix "except for The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen." A story its author considered indispensable was the very one he could not fit in the main text. The questions that follow are why it ended up where it did. What does it carry about love, mortality, and faith that the rest of the novel cannot hold?

• 2. The Mirror of Ages

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  The medieval English poem Sir Orfeo lies somewhere at the origin of "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen." The scholar Elena Capra writes that Tolkien drew on Sir Orfeo for his earlier story of Beren and Lúthien. Sir Orfeo itself reworks the classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Capra identifies Sir Orfeo's key ingredient as the political connection "between the recovery of the main character's beloved and the return to royal responsibility." The same dynamic runs through Aragorn's story: until he is King, he cannot have Arwen.

  The earlier "Tale of Beren and Lúthien" is set in the First Age of Middle-earth. It functions as the template the tale of Aragorn and Arwen deliberately mirrors. In the tale, Aragorn makes his comparison with Beren explicit. He tells Arwen: "I have turned my eyes to a treasure no less dear than the treasure of Thingol that Beren once desired." Tolkien, like Dante in his Inferno, placed a story behind a story, with each set of characters imitating a heroic precedent. Dante's Paolo and Francesca fell in love while imitating Lancelot and Guinevere. Tolkien's Aragorn and Arwen live out a second version of Beren and Lúthien. The scholar Mary R. Bowman notes that Tolkien much preferred history that was "true or feigned" over mere fiction. This layering of tale upon tale achieves exactly that effect.

  The tale's fictional provenance deepens that layering further. In Tolkien's invented history, the tale was written not by Tolkien himself but by Barahir, grandson of Faramir and Éowyn, after Aragorn's death. An abbreviated version was later included in the copy of the Thain's Book made by a scribe named Findegil. The scholar Giuseppe Pezzini describes the appendices' meta-textual frame as "duly harmonised in the text" through scribal glosses, later notes, and editorial references. Christopher Tolkien explored the tale's composition history in the 12th and final volume of The History of Middle-earth. Working from unpublished manuscripts and drafts, he traced the tale through several versions. One early approach was "an abandoned experiment at inserting it into a history of the North Kingdom." He concluded that "the original design of the tale of Aragorn and Arwen had been lost." Yet the manuscript pages of the deathbed exchange were nearly unchanged from first draft to published text. They had been written at great speed.

  The scholar John D. Rateliff notes that the tale closes with a formal sealing of the historical record. It ends with a statement that Arwen's very name will eventually be "utterly forgotten by men that come after." Rateliff sees this as pointing to something unusual about The Lord of the Rings among modern fantasy. It is set in the real world but in an imagined prehistory. Tolkien could build whatever he liked in that distant past. He had to tear it all down before the modern world could begin. Paul H. Kocher described the outcome as the start of a long retreat. All other intelligent species withdraw from the world, leaving man effectively alone. Marjorie Burns notes that Tolkien "cleverly" manages to include an element of rising amid this decline. As the Elves leave, men can take their place. Burns adds that Aragorn's marriage to Arwen infuses his royal line with fresh Elven blood.

• 3. Love and Death

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  Nearly thirty years pass before Aragorn and Arwen meet again, this time in Lothlórien. Galadriel dresses Aragorn in "silver and white, with a cloak of elven-grey and a bright gem on his brow." Arwen sees him and makes her choice. They climb the hill of Cerin Amroth, where Mordor lies to the East and the fading of the Elves to the West. There they pledge themselves to each other. Elrond sets his condition: Aragorn may marry Arwen only when he is King of both Gondor and Arnor. At midsummer, once the One Ring is destroyed and the war is won, Aragorn becomes King. He and Arwen are married in Minas Tirith.

  After 120 years of shared rule, Aragorn chooses the moment of his death. Aged 210 and sensing old age arriving, he decides to lay down his life. He will not wait until he falls, in his own words, "unmanned and witless." The scholar Amy Amendt-Raduege argues that Aragorn's death follows "the step-by-step process outlined by the Ars moriendi," the Christian precepts on dying well. The process involves accepting death, refusing temptation, dispensing worldly goods, a final farewell to family, and a last affirmation of faith. Aragorn gives the crown of Gondor and the sceptre of Arnor to his son Eldarion. He says his farewell to Arwen and dies in "the House of the Kings in the Silent Street." Amendt-Raduege calls this "one of the most deeply moving scenes in the story."

  The political philosopher Germaine Paulo Walsh compares Tolkien's model for facing death to Plato's reading of Homer. Plato held that Homer took Achilles as the model for death, the "only sound response" being despair. Tolkien's model is Aragorn, who exercises what Walsh calls "the ancient prerogative of the Númenórean rulers" and chooses death freely. When Arwen begs him to hold off, he concedes that death is cause for "sorrow" but not for "despair." At that moment Arwen calls him by his childhood name, Estel, which means "Hope" or "Trust." She must trust his wisdom and her own earlier choice of love over immortality. Walsh argues that Aragorn's wisdom is confirmed by what follows. His body becomes permanently beautiful, reflecting "the essential goodness of his soul." Walsh contrasts this with the death of the wizard Saruman, who had turned to evil.

  Arwen survives Aragorn, but the full cost of her choice is now apparent. She is "not yet weary of her days and thus tasted the bitterness of the mortality that she had taken upon her." The elf-light in her eyes goes out. She leaves Gondor for Lothlórien, but Galadriel and Celeborn have already departed Middle-earth, and Lothlórien has dimmed. She wanders beneath the mallorn trees, their leaves falling, and she dies. The scholar Richard C. West calls "the lonely death of Arwen the most moving tragedy within The Lord of the Rings." Verlyn Flieger frames the event differently. An Elf's death is, in her reading, an "escape from deathlessness," the mirror image of a mortal's escape from death. Tom Shippey confirms that "the themes of the Escape from Death, and the Escape from Deathlessness, are vital parts of Tolkien's entire mythology."

  In a 1968 broadcast on BBC2, Tolkien quoted the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. He described the inevitability of death as the "key-spring of The Lord of the Rings." In a letter written in 1956, he named the work's real theme as Death and Immortality. He described the love Men have for a world they are "doomed" to leave. Elves, he added, face the inverse anguish: "doomed" not to leave it until its whole story is complete. Sarah Workman draws on the literary theorist Peter Brooks, who stated that "all narration is obituary." It is Arwen's "mourning gaze," Workman writes, "that allows for the transmission of Aragorn's memory." The tale's most pressing question, however, is not how Arwen mourns but what, if anything, she believes. That question has no easy answer in Middle-earth.

• 4. A Catholic Without a Church

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  The medievalist Tom Shippey notes that both Aragorn and Arwen are pagan. Yet Aragorn is "remarkably virtuous... without even the faults of Theoden, and he foreknows his death like a Christian saint." The difference appears in what follows death. At his deathbed, Aragorn tells Arwen: "we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory." Shippey observes: "Arwen is not comforted." None of the traditional consolations of religion are present. Tolkien addressed the absence in a letter to a Jesuit priest. He had cut religion from The Lord of the Rings because it "is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."

  Shippey explains that Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic who "thought, or hoped, that God had a plan for virtuous pagan pre-Catholics too." Heroes like Aragorn would go to Limbo rather than to Hell. A second death scene confirms how resistant Middle-earth is to consolation. Gilraen, Aragorn's mother, is also not comforted by her son's mention of "a light beyond the darkness." Shippey notes that phrase could mean a hope of salvation or simply a hope of winning the war. Either reading leaves Gilraen as unmoved as Arwen. Shippey considers the tale to give "the deepest sense of religious belief mentioned explicitly in Middle-earth." The result is still what he calls an "only-slightly-qualified absence of religion." The outcome is the "paradox of a 'fundamentally Catholic' work which never once mentions God."

  The scholar Christopher Garbowski centers his analysis on Ilúvatar, Tolkien's name for God. In Garbowski's view, the death-gift offered by Ilúvatar carries an "optimistic" charge. Arwen calls it "bitter to receive." Garbowski adds that Tolkien's posthumously published "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth" effectively undermines the status of that "gift." It comes close to the Christian position that body and soul cannot be separated. The more Tolkien wrote, the less settled his theology of death became.

  The scholar Catherine Madsen traces the problem further in the "fading" of Middle-earth. She writes that Aragorn is raised in hiding, bearing the name of Hope. Arwen, possessing the beauty of Lúthien, is born "in the twilight of her people" and bears the title Evenstar. Together, she writes, they "restore the original glories only for a little while, before the world is altered." The scholar Christina Scull notes one practical consequence of Arwen's near-absence from the main narrative. First-time readers can be "as surprised as the hobbits when Arwen and her escort arrive at Minas Tirith." That surprise points to a question scholars have turned over since: whether the tale's relegation diminished it, enriched it, or did something else entirely.

• 5. Reluctantly Relegated

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  The scholar Chris Walsh describes "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" as an alternative ending to The Lord of the Rings. The main text closes on Sam Gamgee's cheery words "Well, I'm back." The tale ends on Aragorn's sombre last words to Arwen. In a letter, Tolkien stated his view plainly. He was "only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees." He called the tale "the most important of the appendices" and "part of the essential story."

  Tolkien gave two reasons for placing it in an appendix. The first was that the main story was told through the hobbits' perspective, and the tale belongs to a different point of view. He explained that the tale was placed in an appendix because the whole story was told "more or less through 'hobbits.'" The second reason was structural: the tale extends the story both before and after the main events, so it could not be woven into the main narrative. The literary historian William Gray offers a third explanation. The tale does not contribute to the "interlacing" of the narrative, where the story jumps between parallel threads. Without that contribution, it could not be threaded in. Gray notes one consequence: the exclusion shifts the book's emphasis toward dramatic action, at the cost of "love-interest."

  Walsh finds it significant that Peter Jackson made the opposite choice. In The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Jackson placed the tale in the films themselves. Walsh notes it was "strategically placed almost exactly half-way through." The film's handling differs from the tale in the book. In Tolkien's version, Aragorn "unfurled the standard of Arwen in the battle of the Fields of Pelennor." Jackson condensed Arwen's arrival, the presentation of the banner, the coronation, and the wedding into a single sequence. Walsh notes that Jackson also adds a flash forward: Elrond's vision of Arwen as the King's widow. The phrase "There is nothing for you here: only death" appears in both The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Walsh reads death as the film's central focus, just as it is the tale's.

  Mary R. Bowman notes that the tale's placement in the appendices does not reduce its importance. Both the tale and the detailed timeline of Appendix B extend the main story's chronology by some 120 years beyond the final chapter. Sarah Workman agrees that the relegation "does not subordinate its importance." William Gray calls the tale "one of Tolkien's most moving pieces." He describes it as a story of enduring love triumphing over impossible odds. It is sealed, Gray writes, with Arwen's sacrifice of her immortality to live alongside Aragorn for "six score years of great glory and bliss." Richard C. West argues that the appendix makes something possible. References to Arwen scattered through the main text only become fully clear once the tale has been read.