The passing of Arwen

[Michael Martinez]

Originally Posted by Raynor

What baggage of choices are you reffering to? Any pre-Third Age elf, still lingering in Middle-Earth, would have more and heavier memories to ponder on that Arwen did (esspecially if we are talking about an exiled elf). And I thought you were reffering to _her_ choice.

Well, what I wrote initially was: "I think Tolkien used regret as a key motivation for the Elvish psyche, but Arwen was too young to fully appreciate the regret her people had burdened themselves with." So, I agree that Arwen would not personally recall the rebellious acts that her predecessors had participated in.

When I said, "Where Arwen differs from her Elvish peers is that she and she alone had to confront the consquences of her choice." I was thinking of how the Elves still lingering in Middle-earth (particularly the Noldor, her kin) could eventually seek some form of release in Aman. They chose to create the Rings of Power, but were free to sail over Sea, essentially passing from one world to the next.

They had an escape route.

Arwen, on the other hand, had no escape route from her elective mortality. The choice was not only irrevocable, she had to live through it completely until the end.

As for the "baggage of choices" Arwen was "too young to fully appreciate", they were still part of her cultural heritage -- a cultural heritage which did not yet exist when Luthien made her choice.

Luthien did not live to see her father's own fall -- at least not as an Elf. She was still alive when he was slain, but she had by then become mortal. Her grief should have been amplified by the knowledge that she would not see Elwe again, not within the confines of the world, but her grief would not be the same as the regret that the later Elves experienced.

Arwen lived under the shadow of two dooms: the foreknowledge that the Rings would one day betray the Elves, either by revealing all their secrets to Sauron or by failing when the One Ring was finally destroyed. She, like all the Elves, was living on borrowed time.

Tolkien implies strongly (particularly in Saruman's words to Galadriel about trading her status in Middle-earth for a "ship filled with ghosts") that the Elves who had depended most upon the Rings of Power suffered an immediate or very rapid onset of the weight of all the years whose effects had been held back by the Rings.

The Elves had created the Rings to defer or delay the inevitable fading, a doom which the Valar conferred or conveyed upon the Elves because of the rebellion of the Noldor. Arwen, living in the house of Elrond and in Lorien, would have benefitted from the Rings' effects as well.

In one place, Tolkien wrote that the Elves aged somewhat like Men but much more slowly, but that the Rings of Power slowed that aging process even more, to a factor of 1 in 100 years. So for the Elves 1000 years was like 10 years. Arwen thus felt the effect of about 30 years' time by the end of the Third Age, so with the failing of the Rings she would have aged (in the manner of the Elves) by almost 3,000 years very rapidly.

For the (nearly) immortal Elves, what is the weight of 3,000 years? I don't know. But before Arwen became mortal, she had to know that the way she experienced time would not last forever. The war with Sauron made the Rings' power a devastating trap for the Elves.

They had created the Rings for the purpose of maintaining Middle-earth in a state they could enjoy for an unnaturally long period of time, but that very act of creation was also an act of rebellion and every Elf was in some fashion tainted by it, if only because in the end they failed to destroy their Rings.

In a way, Arwen jumped ship or changed horses in the middle of the stream when she married Aragorn. She became mortal, so she no longer had to feel the Elvish burden, however one might characterize it. Hence, it was only in the final year of her life, when Aragorn accepted death freely and left her to find her own path, that Arwen had to confront the true consequences of her choice.

There was no turning back and there was nothing in her heritage or her experience which could have prepared her for it, except the knowlege that Luthien had accepted that fate freely as well.

[Raynor]

Nice points .

I was thinking of how the Elves still lingering in Middle-earth (particularly the Noldor, her kin) could eventually seek some form of release in Aman. They chose to create the Rings of Power, but were free to sail over Sea, essentially passing from one world to the next.

I think that the release for the elves was on Middle-Earth, rather than the other way around; as we learn from Dangweth Pengolod, there is pretty much stagnation in Tol Eressea (at least in the matters of language, on which the noldor delighted a lot). I think it would be more correct to say that even though they weren't forced to sail over the sea, they were strongly advised to do so; their time was up. I would say that they avoided this step almost as much as the mortals avoided death, but on another scale.

Arwen, on the other hand, had no escape route from her elective mortality. The choice was not only irrevocable, she had to live through it completely until the end.

True enough; but mortals such as Eowyn (or even Eomer/Theoden) could still seek a noble end, in battle, should they so desire. I am sure there still were plenty of opportunities to do so, even in the fourth age (without resorting to Denethor's heathen-like ending).

The Elves had created the Rings to defer or delay the inevitable fading, a doom which the Valar conferred or conveyed upon the Elves because of the rebellion of the Noldor.

It is worth noting that the fading was first and foremost decided by Eru (seeing that Manwe tells Yavanna that the ents will abide only as late as the begining of the dominion of Men). This fading is also built-in, considering the consumation of the body by the fire of the fea and it is also accelerated by the marring of Melkor.