Gift of Men - Avoidance of The Gift of Men

Avoidance of The Gift of Men

The shadow of the first Dark Lord brought with it a perversion of the original intent of the Gift of Ilúvatar, and brought fear out of hope, and tainted the Gift. Men began to fear and despise the gift, and began to view it not as liberation, but as damnation. It brought about in the race of Men a kind of self-loathing, and a denial of the basic nature of their being as the children of the All-Father Eru Ilúvatar. Instead they viewed themselves as flawed in some way and sought to resist this very intrinsic nature of their creation. The result of such actions brought about much anguish on the race of Men through the centuries of the history of Arda.

At least four characters in The Lord of the Rings are examples of the dangers of either deliberately or unintentionally trying to avoid the Gift of Men. Three of them are transformed into "monsters" by being denied the Gift of Men by sins that they have committed: the Lord of the Nazgûl (and all of the Nazgûl), the King of the Dead, and Sméagol. (Since Sméagol is a Hobbit-like creature, he is numbered among the Younger Children of Ilúvatar, and as such is entitled to the Gift of Men.) The Nazgûl are made immortal, but also doomed, by the Nine Rings. The King of the Dead is transformed into a ghost or monster by the curse of Isildur, because he and his subjects had broken an oath to fight against Sauron. Long after his natural death, he fulfils his oath, and is released from his condition by Aragorn. (This presumably also applies to the other Dead.) Sméagol is consumed by the Ring; over the years, its influence transforms him from a Hobbit-like creature into the freakish Gollum.

Bilbo Baggins, like Sméagol, is a Hobbit rather than a Man. Bilbo encounters Gollum in his cave and escapes with the Ring. Being a Hobbit of much better character than Sméagol, Bilbo better resists the negative effects of possessing the One Ring. He does not age, but has a sense of becoming "thin and stretched." Toward the end of his possession of the Ring, Bilbo begins to show some of the obsessive tendencies of Gollum — calling the Ring "my precious," and showing flashes of dark hostility when asked by Gandalf to give the Ring to his heir, Frodo.

Those Men with the greatest understanding treated death as the Gift it was originally intended to be, and when their time came gladly gave themselves up to it. We see this, for example, in the earlier Kings of Númenor, and Aragorn also accepted the Gift at the natural end of his life. For most Men, though, the Gift was tainted by Morgoth, and they came to fear it rather than embrace it. This fear reached its peak in the later years of Númenor, where even the long life given to the Númenóreans was not enough, and wise men did all they could to try to escape death altogether. In the end, this desperation led to Númenor's destruction when Ar-Pharazôn led a battle fleet to the Undying Lands, having been convinced by Sauron's lies that they held the key to the immortality of the Elves.