Channels, Spring 2019

Page 18 Lanning • The Long Defeat mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”1 But while these immortal elves know how desperate the struggle has been in Middle-Earth, they are entirely aware of their destiny and “what shall be.” It is only by knowing this and holding true to it, as Galadriel later makes clear to the Fellowship, that she is able to serve them in their perilous Quest against the evil embodied by the Dark Lord Sauron: “For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be.”2 This great Lady of Light is herself a symbol to their cause. Though she possesses wisdom and powers of foresight and clairvoyance that would enable her to provide very wise counsel as to the path ahead, she tells the Fellowship any choice instruction from her does not compare to the guidance she provides through the greater knowledge of eternal truths. Thus, the idea of the “long defeat” is not without hope. The Elves know that someday, when the time comes, they will sail west from the Grey Havens to Valinor, the Blessed Realm. This land of peace and rest where the Blessed dwell is protected from all wars and afflictions of Middle-Earth. The perfection they so distantly recall will once again appear after thousands of years of fighting evil in Middle-Earth. Nevertheless, the Elves are destined to inhabit the decaying environs of Middle-Earth literally for ages. They long for the way things were, as they remember them, and for the world to remain as such forever. Deathlessness makes the constantly changing cycles of Middle-Earth – and the endless chain of death – too much for the Elves to bear. Quite dissimilar from Men, Elves are designed for a static world of perfection. Because of their immortality, they are not impassioned with the same urgency as Men to make a mark on the world of Middle-Earth. The story of the Elves is as much a tragedy for them as it is for the humans of Middle-Earth, perhaps more so. Indeed, their immortality is as much a curse as it is a blessing. By contrast, it is mankind’s fate to experience the diminishing world for a short time before passing out of the Circles of the World after death. Though Elves and Men possess differing paths of destiny, they share the burden of Middle-Earth’s chaos and evils. But along the way, there are certain shared lights of victory. However short and however small they may be, they all point to a definite and final victory, at least that seems to have been Tolkien’s purpose. “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic,” he states in one of his letters, “so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” 3 Accordingly, his depiction of the “long defeat” and the glimpses of “final victory” to come in the Middle-Earth fantasy epic were concepts just as applicable to this real earth from Tolkien’s perspective. The prelude to WWII and the first year of its devastation was surely a great example of this outlook. Though as a Christian, Tolkien no doubt considered this earth’s final victory to be the Second Coming of Christ, on a more basic level one might draw a parallel between the dramatic events of the Second World War and Tolkien’s conception of history in general. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder how much of Tolkien’s work was influenced by the political events of that time, given that he wrote The Lord of the Rings over the course of twelve years, beginning in 1937. 4 Interestingly, Tolkien fought in the First World War and participated in one of its most devastating battles—the Battle of the Somme. Like one other notable participant of the Great War, Winston 1 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 347-8; italics mine. 2 Ibid., 348. 3 J.R.R. Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 195. 4 “Timeline,” The Tolkien Society, January 7, 2017, accessed March 15, 2018, https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/timeline/#top .