themoonlily:

ohlurr:

I realize this is not new information to anyone, but what struck me so hard this time I read the Lord of the Rings was the sense of melancholy.  Like it’s painfully obvious to the reader that this world is Not As It Once Was.  All of the characters we meet reference this feeling of loss in one way or another.  

The elves are the most obvious – with their fading light and their ships sailing away.  Treebeard talks about how the woods aren’t as they once were, about the ents who are falling asleep and withering to nothing.  The dwarves lust after the glory of their forefathers, be it in mountain fortresses or caverns of mithril – now empty and echoing.  Old Tom Bombadil remembers a race of great men and women, reduced simply to trinkets in cold tombs.

And even men, the race set to inherit this new age, even they are experiencing this sense of melancholy, of losing hold of something great.  We see their great cities reduced to rubble on riverbanks, or possessed by evil.  Aragorn longs to return to his throne to restore the glory of ages past, to somehow rejuvenate that which is dying in the race of men. 

And hobbits?  At first we see them as living in the present, with no great glory of the past to tie them down.  Yet when Frodo returns to the Shire, it is…Not As It Once Was.  And I think while the other hobbits are able to shake off this feeling and return to their love of life and the present, maybe Frodo’s true burden is to inherit this sense of loss from the rest of Middle Earth.  

And what makes Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien) so extraordinary, at least to me, is how there is still so much hope in the story even with all its sadness. Hope is literally Aragorn’s childhood name, given to him at a time his House is all but finished. Hope is what drives Gandalf and leads his way when others of his order become distracted and give up their purpose. Hope appears to Sam when he and Frodo trudge towards what seems to be their end in the fires of Mount Doom. Hope is there at dawn when Rohirrim arrive at Minas Tirith and blow their horns, and they ride to defend the City of Kings, though they know what they are facing. In fact, for me some of the most brilliant moments in the story are those when hope appears in the middle of darkest despair. Tolkien writes like sadness and hope are merely the two sides of the same coin. 

One of the many things I love about the world Tolkien created is the exquisite beauty that rises from sadness; lesser stories would transform sorrow and grief into bitterness, but in Tolkien’s world, it becomes a force for pity and wisdom and love. Some of his best and wisest characters are those who have known great sorrow. Melancholy and sadness are a part of Arda Marred, but like Gandalf says: “not all tears are an evil.” 

Perhaps my favourite quote from Tolkien is Haldir’s line from the Fellowship of the Ring, when the company is nearing Lothlórien:

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”