Themes of The Lord of The Rings - Loss and Farewell

Loss and Farewell

From the beginning of Tolkien's mythos, there has been a consistent theme of great beauty and joy failing and disappearing before the passage of time and the onslaught of the powers of evil. In The Silmarillion, Melkor uses his powers first to destroy the works of his fellow Valar and as this ultimately fails he uses his ally Ungoliant to destroy the Two Trees that gave the blessed land of Aman its light.

Fëanor, prince of the Noldor, first loses his father and then his greatest creations, the Silmarils, through the machinations of the evil Morgoth. By his fault Elven blood is for the first time spilled on the ground of Eldamar and the Noldor give away both their home and their innocence. Mandos, the Doomsayer himself, proclaims judgement over the Noldor and reveals to them that none of them shall find peace or rest until their oath has been fulfilled or their souls come to the House of Spirits.

Finally, in one of the appendices to The Return of the King, after more than two hundred years of life Aragorn dies in his deathbed, leaving behind a lonely and now-mortal Arwen, who travels to what is left of Lothlórien to herself die on a flat stone next to the river Nimrodel, having returned to one of the few places of true happiness she knew in her life.

This theme is seen in the weight of the past borne in the language of the whole novel and in specific portions, such as Gilraen's linnod and the Lament of the Rohirrim.

Tolkien insisted that The Lord of the Rings was not to be seen as a parallel to World War II and that the key chapter had been written long before 1939. He wrote however in the preface to The Fellowship of the Ring that witnessing the onset of World War I in 1914 was "no less hideous an experience" than being involved in the second great war of 1939, and mentions that he had lost all but one of his close friends by 1918.