A Happy Ending... or is it?

[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

What the post-LotR writings by JRRT have done is make his sojourn in the West a temporary thing for us, a transition period before he dies.

I think that Guinevere is right in arguing that Frodo's journey to the West remains very much a reward. I would only like to add that, whatever the experience of readers may have been, it seems to me unlikely in the extreme that Tolkien ever saw Frodo's sojourn in Aman as eternal. Though he turned to the metaphysical framework of Middle-earth with greater attention in the post-LotR years, the broadest elements of that framework (which makes eternal earthly life impossible for any mortal) pre-date LotR. Indeed, the necessity of mortality for humans was a crucial point in both the QS version of Earendil's story and the developing legend of Numenor.