[Mithalwen]

Very true Esty, when people have accepted their death as inevitable, coping with life can seem very hard, and that in itself can be alienating since everyone expects them to be jsut happy to be alive.

Kath, I didn't mean you personally regarding seeing the survival of major characters as a weakness ... it is a muchmore general phenomenon - but I would revise the comment that it is a modern one - I think it is more cyclical. I think current literary/ media critics are often very much of the gritty realism school and like their endings bleak. At the other point in the cycle you have such travesties as Nahum Tate rewriting the end of Lear so that Cordelia doesn't die because it was so contrary to the worldview of the time.

I also realise I forget to state why Eowyn's rebirth is important - simply because she chooses life and with it to be a healer, gardener and mother. All are important functions for the health of her new homeland. One of the reasons Gondor fell into decline was that its ruler became more concerned with their ancestors than their progeny. Minas Tirith is a stone city in the Stoningland, it needs gardens and life. Given that Denethor, for all his fine qualities, ultimately failed and in his own despair tried to kill Faramir which would have guaranteed the end of his line - which in the light of the importance that Tolkien puts on bloodlines is a final denial of hope - I think it is important that Faramir marries and although Eowyn wears his mother's mantle, unlike poor Finduilas she has not been crushed by the shadow. It is as much a reaffirmation of hope as the finding of the white tree.

So while I think these characters survive for a reason, and to get back closer to the topic, I think that the whole end of the story would have had to be changed if Frodo and Sam had died - imagine the return to the Shire without them . And like others, I think that the ending as it stands is much more poignant - for Frodo to be saved from certain death to be returned to a home he so loves but can no longer live in would be too cruel were it not for the opprotunity for a kind of healing in West. However that boon is not itself without its cost. Tolkien gives few straightforward happy endings ....