Arda Healed, not Arda Unmarred
By Jack Keoseyan
Many, if not most, people are well aware of the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien was a Christian, specifically a devout Roman Catholic. While some Christians may remain suspicious of fantasy as such for religious reasons and many secular fans may try to pretend that Tolkien’s legendarium is a book haunted by the spirits of the old gods, most folks that know anything about Tolkien seem to know that he was a devout Christian. If they know a little more, then they might know of his friendship with the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. If they’ve really begun to wade into the waters of Tolkien nerd-dom, then they might have read some of his letters, or perhaps an essay or two. If you’re one of these people, then you do not need me to convince you of his Christianity - and I’m not here to do that. However, I do hope to introduce you to a rather obscure work of Tolkien’s and help you understand not only that Tolkien’s work is Christian, but how and why exactly the legendarium is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”1, using a short little philosophical dialogue by Tolkien (and published posthumously by his son) called the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.
Some time in the early sixties (Christopher has a hard time dating it exactly), Tolkien penned this work seemingly in an effort to explain some of the philosophical problems he created for himself in the lore surrounding the elves and men in Middle Earth2. It takes the shape of a philosophical dialogue, in much the same tradition as those of Plato, Cicero, Berkeley, and others, though the drama of the dialogue is distinctly Tolkienian. Athrabeth translates to “converse” or “debate”, and so the title is “The Debate of Finrod and Andreth”. It is set very early in the history of Arda, prior to the Battle of Sudden Flame in the First Age of the world; and the debate is between a high elven lord, Finrod Felagund, and a human wise-woman named Andreth, of the House of Beor. Finrod, who is one of the elven lords most friendly with the men, opens the dialogue mourning the “swift passing” of men. Finrod is grieved by this brevity; but Andreth observes that their “passing was swifter before we found this land.” Finrod, surprised, then asks “Then are you content here?”. “‘Content?’ said Andreth. ‘No heart of Man is content. All passing and dying is a grief to it; but if the withering is less soon then that is some amendment, a little lifting of the Shadow.’” Thus begins the dialogue.
Tolkien created a world in which death is no less a tragedy than it is in the primary world and yet, according to the lore of the Eldar, death is Eru’s “Gift” to men. In his famous 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien explains that “the doom of the Elves is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world… to last while it lasts, never leaving it even when ‘slain’... The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world.” This creates a tension in Tolkien’s lore: if Death is a Gift of Eru to Men, then why do men fear it so? If Death means “freedom from the circles of the world”, why does it strike them (and us) as unnatural and abominable? On the other hand, if the elves’ immortality is so wonderful and enviable, then why does Tolkien (via the lore of the Eldar) frame Death as a gift from the Creator? Tolkien, by creating these two peoples who are essentially kin and yet essentially estranged because of the problem of mortality, sets the background and creates opportunity for a poignant and rich reflection on Christian anthropology. A highly sophisticated and deeply Christian anthropology, rooted in Patristic theology, is woven into the fabric of Tolkien’s Arda. Tolkien’s Athrabeth reveals a theology in which the Fall is seen primarily as ontological and cosmological, not merely as a breach of command and punishment. Tolkien’s theology therefore necessitates, within the secondary world of Arda, the Resurrection of the Body and the Incarnation of the Son of God.
In the midst of his grief, Finrod attempts to account for the lore of his people concerning the children of men: “we proclaim that ye are our kin, in a kinship far closer… than that which binds together all other creatures of Arda…. If we consider the briefness of life in all Middle-earth, must we not believe that your brevity is also part of your nature?” In typical high elvish fashion, he completely fails to understand the weight of the fear and hatred of death which men experience. For him, it is easy to see death as a gift. Ages of life bound to the earth in which elves witness the marring of Arda have yielded a kind of grief in memory of things past. For the elves, being bound to the circles of the world is a problem and death is seen as something of an escape not allotted to them. But Andreth, for whom the human experience of death is all too near, maintains that “Men are not now as they were, nor as their true nature was in their beginning. … [The Wise] say plainly that men are not by nature short-lived, but have become so through the malice of the Lord of the Darkness”. In response to this, Finrod assumes that must mean that, if this be so, then men shared a fate more akin to the elves: i.e., life which endures as long as the world, but no longer, but that the Shadow took that from them. He asks: “You say: ‘we were not made for death, nor born ever to die.’ What do you mean: that ye were as we are, or otherwise?”. Andreth is surprised by this: “We considered only dying and not-dying. Of life as long as the world but no longer we had not heard”. Tolkien thus introduces two types of immortality. The immortality of the elves is such that they last as long as Arda; and as Arda will have an end, so will the elves. But Andreth speaks of another kind of immortality: “we knew that in our beginning we had been born never to die. And by that, my lord, we meant: born to life everlasting, without any shadow of any end.” Finrod disputes this: “You claim… to have had imperishable bodies, not bounded by the limits of Arda, and yet derived from its matter and sustained by it. And you claim also (though this you may not have perceived) to have had hröar and fëar3 that were from the beginning out of harmony. Yet harmony of the hröa and fëa is, we believe, essential to the true nature unmarred of all the Incarnate.” From Finrod’s perspective, death represents the separation of the soul from the body; and therefore true immortality would necessitate the immortality of the body, not only of the soul. This is inconsistent with the lore of the Eldar which states on one hand that Arda will have an end and on the other that the gift of men lies in their not being bound to Arda’s fate. But if the true fate of men is to have life which is truly everlasting, then this would necessitate Arda being everlasting. Therefore, the fate and nature of men is bound up with the fate of Arda. This is where we begin to see Tolkien’s Christian theology really come to the forefront.
In the early fourth century AD, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a treatise entitled On the Incarnation of the Word. I have chosen to focus on this text as the voice of Patristic theology in this essay for a few reasons. For one, it is vastly influential on Christian theology, both East and West, and is widely respected as one of the great defenses of Christian orthodoxy related to the Incarnation of the Son of God. For another, as will be seen, its themes of death as an ontological enemy of human nature and the restoration of that corrupted nature resonate deeply with Tolkien’s themes as expounded on explicitly in the Athrabeth. It is certainly the case that Tolkien was deeply acquainted with Patristic (and, of course, Medieval) theology, especially that of the West, and my central claim is that Tolkien weaves this theology into the very fabric of his legendarium.
At the beginning of On the Incarnation, Saint Athanasius makes an interesting claim. He explains that, by virtue of being created, humans are brought from non-existence into being. This initial state of non-being means that “by the principle of its own coming to being it would not be able to endure eternally”4. And so Athanasius seems to be saying that men are, by nature, mortal. He even states this explicitly: “For the human being is by nature mortal, having come into being from nothing.”5 However, Athanasius emphasizes that “because of his likeness to the One who Is, … he would have remained incorruptible.”6 That is, the grace of being in the Image of the Creator makes man incorruptible in spite of his mortal nature. Athanasius then makes clear that the cause of Death, then, is sin: “But human beings, turning away from things eternal and by the counsel of the devil turning us towards things of corruption, were themselves the cause of corruption in death.”7 And so Athanasius has presented the Fall as a consequence of sin; but he clarifies that repentance and moral purity are not enough to rectify our nature. He writes: “What should God do? Demand repentance for human beings for their transgression? One might say that this is worthy of God, claiming that just as they were set towards corruption by the transgression, so by repentance they might again be set towards incorruptibility. But… repentance [does not] recall human beings from what is natural, but merely halts sins. If then there were only offence and not the consequence of corruption, repentance would have been fine.”8 And so, much like Tolkien, Athanasius has presented a philosophical problem that is not limited to a transgression-and-penalty, but rather is concerned with Death as an ontological infection of human nature. Andreth and Athanasius agree that “we had been born never to die.” But the Evil One (call him Melkor or Satan) has changed “the doom of a whole people” and robbed them of their inheritance.
In the Athrabeth, then, Tolkien offers further philosophical explanation of this problem. Finrod argues that, due to the nature of man and his intended fate, eternal life is something of an ontological necessity. Speaking of the hröa (body) and fëa (soul), he says that “to divide them is a grievous hurt, and yet each must fulfil its right nature without tyranny of the other. Then this must surely follow: the fëa when it departs must take with it the hröa, as its eternal spouse and companion, into an endurance everlasting beyond Eä, and beyond Time… This then, I propound, was the errand of Men, not the followers, but the heirs and fulfillers of all: to heal the Marring of Arda, … for that Arda Healed shall not be Arda Unmarred, but a third thing and a greater, and yet the same”9. If this be so, then grievous was the wounding of Man’s nature! Tolkien, in the voices of Finrod and Andreth, meditates on the calamity of the Fall. Finrod says “mighty indeed under Eru were Men made in their beginning; and dreadful beyond all other calamities was the change in their state.”10 This is not a matter of mere transgression and penalty, but a calamity affecting the whole cosmos.
Thus Finrod and Andreth are left to speculate how the nature of men might be restored, forced to rely on hope, or Estel, that Christian virtue which does not rely on uncertain expectation of good, but rather trust in Him who “will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves.”11 Athanasius, writing from the other side of the great Eucatastrophe12, can give us the answer; and yet, Andreth speaks of a rumor, an inkling13 of the salvation to come, espoused by those of the “Old Hope”. When asked of this, Andreth says that “it was not in the might of Men, or in any of the peoples of Arda, that the old hope was grounded…. They say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end.”14 Enter Athanasius.
Tolkien has thus explicated the central problem of the human condition and how it affects the cosmos and implied the solution. Man, whose nature contains both hröa and fëa, body and soul, was created to be immortal, but Death has brought us unto corruptibility. The Death inflicted upon us is bound up with the fate of the world, and marred our nature and all of creation. Therefore, the solution must come from without, from outside Eä itself, from the One who must enter His creation in order to heal it. And Athanasius teaches us about this: “Being the Word of the Father and above all, he alone consequently was both able to recreate the universe and was worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to intercede for all before the Father. For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes into our realm.”15 By taking on our corruptible nature, “delivering it over to death on behalf of all, he offered it to the Father”. He gave “them life from death, by making the body his own and by the grace of the resurrection banishing death from them as straw from a fire.”16 For Athanasius, the very purpose of the Incarnation of the Word is to heal His own creation and heal our nature because He “will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own”. The Resurrection of the body, by defeating Death undoes the marring of Arda and restores the grace bestowed upon our nature of being in the Image, true Children of Ilúvatar.
In this essay, I hoped to use this text of the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth to demonstrate the degree to which Tolkien’s fantasy is foundationally Christian and points to the mysteries of our salvation. Tolkien’s project of the escape and consolation of fantasy is not meant to deprive us of reality nor to distract us from the Truth. Rather, through the medium of stories told of a secondary world, Tolkien points to the True Story of the primary world. If I have convinced you of nothing else, reader, I hope I have convinced you: tolle lege! Take up and read these works of Tolkien and of Saint Athanasius. I have only scratched the surface of these works. They bear reading and re-reading.
Jack Keoseyan is an Orthodox Christian lover of literature and philosophy. He is a software developer by trade and enjoys reading, fly-fishing for trout, and attending his local Orthodox parish. This is his first article on for Mythic Mind, and you can follow his perssonal Substack here.
1 J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 142 to Robert Murray, S.J., 2 December 1953, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
2 Hereafter, I will refer to Arda, not Middle Earth, as Middle Earth refers only to part of the created world in Tolkien.
3 These terms are defined in a footnote of Tolkien’s. Hröa (pl. hröar) corresponds roughly to the “body” of one of the Incarnates in which is housed the fëa (pl. fëar), which corresponds roughly to the soul. Tolkien explicitly and importantly states that the elvish conception of the “self” includes both.
4 St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, trans. and ed. John Behr, Popular Patristics Series 44 (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011). All subsequent quotes from Athanasius are from this edition.
5 ibid.
6 ibid.
7 ibid.
8 ibid.
9 Athrabeth
10 ibid.
11 ibid.
12 Cf. On Fairy Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien
13 Pun fully intended.
14 Athrabeth
15 On the Incarnation, emphasis mine.
16 ibid.
