[Child of the 7th Age]

Fordim -

There's some awfully interesting ideas here. I like your description of geneologies as "tombs on paper" and as a way to keep the dead around as part of the living society....also, your reference to Bag-end as a "living tomb" and the idea that Merry and Pippin's unique burial emphasizes the way in which these two Hobbits have separated from the community.

It's strange to think of Merry and Pippin's wives buried safely back in the Shire, while their husbands' bodies were laid to rest so far away. Tolkien was so intent on keeping wives and husbands together throughout the entire Legendarium. Characters like Luthien and Arwen had to give up their very nature to cling to their spouse, Aragorn had to wait to marry till his wandering was over, and other characters like Bilbo and Frodo could not marry at all because, as Tolkien implies in Unfinished Tales, they had to be free to journey on their own and carry out their great responsibilities in terms of the Ring. Having Pippin and Merry buried so far away does represent a break from this theme of responsibility of husband to wife. He must have had a good reason for depicting Merry and Pippin's burial as being so separate from their wives and the Shire as a whole.

And it isn't only Merry and Pippin who had a "unique burial" that emphasized their separateness from other Hobbit kin. So too did Frodo and even Sam. Both of them were buried far outside the Shire in a tiny tomb in the West. (I love Mithadan's description of the Hobbits' resting place in his fanfiction. ) Like Merry and Pippin, Sam's burial involves separation from his own wife. So the mere fact of being a Hobbit who participated in the Ring quest requires you to be buried "separately" from the Shire and your normal kinfolk, even down to splitting the natural husband/wife bond.

But there's one part of your equation I'm wondering about: that of the nature of Elves.

Elves, for example, don't have graveyards -- at least, there is no mention made anywhere. Arwen, of course, gets buried after her death, but she's mortal then so gets treated like a human. It makes sense that Elves don't have tombs or graves or anything, since they are immortal. Seems to me that they would be rather ill-equipped to deal with death, or even to understand it really. This has always struck me as a particularly limited aspect to Elvish nature: to go on for centuries never having to face death. I am sure that there was plenty of death in the First Age but the wars of the Second and Third Age were relatively sparse and the casualties among the Elves well below the numbers of those departing for the West. Besides, death in war is a special case: there simply is no part or place for 'natural' deaths in Elvish society. They're almost like children insofar as they never have to think about their mortality or face the loss of a loved one.

Actually, I've usually thought of Elves as being very preoccupied with death, just as much as Men if not more so. They were so preoccupied with the need to stave off any change that they "embalmed" their own world. That word "embalmed" that Tolkien consistently used to describe Elven culture is laden with meaning. Maybe most Elves didn't die individually, but they turned life itself into a kind of living death because they feared the death of that which was around them. How hard it must have been to live for thousands of years and see death constantly taking away the people who were close to you. Finrod makes this clear in his discussion with Andreth:

"Sad to me, Andreth," he said, "is the swift passing of your people. For now Boron your father's father is gone; and though he was old, you say, as ages go among Men, yet I had known him too briefly. Little while indeed it seems to me since I first saw Beor in the east of this land, yet now he is gone, and his son's, and his son's sons also."

This type of loss would have been common in the First and even the Second Age when Men and Elves came in contact with some regularity. By the Third Age, Elves had purposely secluded themselves from Men and other mortals so they wouldn't have to deal with this distressing reality of death.

Many Elves met individual bodily death: this was common in the early ages. Finrod's response to Andreth on this subject was very strong, and suggests that Elves feared death greatly and and that this fear of death was uppermost in their minds:

What do ye know of death? Ye do not fear it, because ye do not know it," said Andreth.

We have seen it and we fear it ," answered Finrod. "We too may die, Andreth; and we have died. My father's father was cruelly slain, and many have followed him, exiles in the night, in the cruel ice, in the insatiable sea. And in Middle-earth we have died, by fire and by smoke, by venom and the cruel blades of battle. Feanor is dead, and Fingolphin was trodden under the feet of Morgoth."

When Andreth responds to him, she argues that Elves do not really know death, since they go out for only a limited time, but then return to the world and life. Finrod's response to that was very swift and worded even more strongly, stressing the fact that Elves have no idea what will occur at the end of Arda, when they will seemingly die forever.

Thus far, then, I perceive that the great difference between Men and Elves is in the speed of the end. In this only. For if you deem that for the Quendi there is no death ineluctable, you err.

.....You see us, the Quendi, still in the first ages of our being, and the end is far off. As may be among you death may seem to a young man in his strength...But the end will come. That we all know. And then we must die' we must perish utterly, it seems, for we belong to Arda... And beyond that what? "the going out to no return," as you say; "the uttermost end, the irredemable loss."

"Our hunter is slow footed, but he never loses the trail."

How sad this is! My feeling is that Elves, as much or more than the men of Numenor, were preocupied with images of death and demise: the death of the mortals around them, their own individual slayings and, most of all, the prospect of annihilation when the final chapter of Arda came. There was no way out of this cycle, no way to go "beyond the circles of the world" that had at least been promised to Men.

So I see the equation differently in terms of Hobbits. Rather than a balance with the Hobbits in the middle, the Elves on one end (unconcerned with death) and the Men on the other (preoccupied with death), I see a teeter totter: Elves and Men equally concerned by death, and Hobbits at the other end. I guess with their "tomb" burrows and their geneologies that pulled the dead back into their lives, they somehow incorporated death in life rather than being so ruled by it.