"The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" is a story within the Appendices of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It narrates the love of the mortal Man Aragorn and the immortal Elf-maiden Arwen, telling the story of their first meeting, their eventual betrothal and marriage, and the circumstances of their deaths. Tolkien called the tale "really essential to the story". In contrast to the non-narrative appendices, it extends the main story of the book to cover events both before and after it, one reason it would not fit in the main text. Tolkien gave another reason for its exclusion: that the main text is told from the hobbits' point of view.
The tale to some extent mirrors the "Tale of Beren and Lúthien", set in an earlier age of Middle-earth. This creates a feeling of historical depth, in what scholars note is an approach similar to that of Dante in his Inferno.
Aspects of the tale discussed by scholars include the nature of love and death; the question of why the tale, if so important, was relegated to an appendix; Tolkien's blurring of the line between story and history; the balance Tolkien strikes between open Christianity and his treatment of his characters as pagan; and the resulting paradox that although Tolkien was a Roman Catholic and considered the book fundamentally Catholic, Middle-earth societies lack religions of their own. It has been noted that the tale's relegation deprives the main story of much of its love-interest, shifting the book's emphasis towards action.
Context
The tale is set in the Third and Fourth Ages of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional universe, Middle-earth, and was published in 1955 in The Return of the King as the fifth part of the first section of Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings. In the main text of the book, Aragorn is presented almost without detail of his relationships, other than a brief interaction with Éowyn, the lady of Rohan, while Arwen barely speaks and hardly features until her marriage at the end of the book. In a letter dated 6 April 1956 to his publisher Rayner Unwin, Tolkien stated that the tale was the only part of the Appendices that was "really essential to the story." The publishers wanted to omit the Appendices entirely for the first Swedish edition, the 1959-1961 Sagan om ringen; Tolkien insisted on keeping the tale, stating that it was "essential to the understanding of the main text in many places", and it and Appendix D formed the only appendices to that edition. The first one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings that appeared in 1968 omitted all the Appendices "except for The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen".
The process of the composition of the tale was explored by Tolkien's son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien in the 12th and final volume of The History of Middle-earth. Working from his father's unpublished manuscripts and drafts, he traces the evolution of the tale through several versions and framing devices, including an "abandoned experiment at inserting it into [a] history of the North Kingdom", concluding that "the original design of the tale of Aragorn and Arwen had been lost". The original manuscript pages of the deathbed exchange between Aragorn and Arwen show that this key scene was almost unchanged from the published version, and had been written at great speed.
Frame story
In Tolkien's fictional universe, the frame story is that the tale was written after Aragorn's death by Barahir, grandson of Faramir and Éowyn, and that an abbreviated version of the tale was included in the copy of the Thain's Book made by Findegil. The Tolkien scholar Giuseppe Pezzini writes that the "meta-textual frame ... is duly harmonised in the text through the use of formal features; the appendixes are indeed full of scribal glosses, later notes, and editorial references that are meant to match the elaborate textual history detailed in the Note on the Shire Records." The narrative voice and the point of view from which the story is told is examined by the scholar of English, literature, and film Christine Barkley, who considers the main part of the tale to have been narrated by Aragorn.
Plot
Aragorn, visiting Rivendell, sings the Lay of Lúthien, an immortal Elf-maiden in the First Age who marries a man, Beren, thereby choosing a mortal life. As he does so, "Lúthien walked before his eyes": he sees Arwen in the woods, and calls out to her "Tinúviel! Tinúviel!" as Beren had done; she reveals that although she seems no older than he, she is of great age, having "the [immortal] life of the Eldar". He falls in love with her. Arwen's father, Elrond the Half-elven, sees without being told what has happened, and tells Aragorn that a "great doom awaits" him, either to be the greatest of his line since Elendil, or to fall into darkness; and that he "shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in troth" until he is found worthy. In reply, with "the foresight of his kindred", Aragorn prophesies that Elrond's time in Middle-earth is coming to an end, and that Arwen will have to choose between her father and staying in Middle-earth.
Aragorn and Arwen meet again in Lothlórien, nearly thirty years later. Galadriel dresses Aragorn in "silver and white, with a cloak of elven-grey and a bright gem on his brow", so that he seems to be an elf-lord. Arwen sees him and makes her choice. They climb the hill of Cerin Amroth, from where they can see the Shadow (Mordor) in the East, and the Twilight (the fading of the Elves) in the West, and they "plighted their troth". Elrond tells Aragorn that they may marry only when he is King of both Gondor and Arnor, the ancient southern and northern Kingdoms of Middle-earth.
Some years later, Aragorn helps the Fellowship and the forces of the West to victory in the War of the Ring against the forces of Mordor. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, he unfurls the standard made by Arwen and is hailed as King by the people of Gondor. The One Ring is destroyed, taking the power of the three Elven-rings, including Elrond's, with it. Aragorn becomes King of Gondor and Arnor, and at midsummer, he and Arwen are married in Minas Tirith. The Third Age ends as Elrond departs Middle-earth never to return, and he and Arwen are "sundered by the Sea and by a doom beyond the end of the world".
Aragorn and Arwen live together as King and Queen of Gondor and Arnor for "six-score years in great glory and bliss". Then, aged 210 and feeling the onset of old age, Aragorn chooses to lay down his life before he falls from his "high seat unmanned and witless". In the scenes that follow, Aragorn and a grief-stricken Arwen converse on the nature of death and the consequences of the choice she had made. Aragorn lies down in "the House of the Kings in the Silent Street" and, giving the crown of Gondor and the sceptre of Arnor to his son Eldarion, he says his final farewell to Arwen and dies, his body remaining "in glory undimmed". Arwen was "not yet weary of her days and thus tasted the bitterness of the mortality that she had taken upon her". The elf-light in her eyes goes out, and she leaves Gondor for Lorien, itself now dimmed as the elf-rulers Galadriel and Celeborn and their people had left Middle-earth. She wanders under the mallorn trees, their leaves falling, and becomes the only living Elf in Middle-earth since Lúthien to die of old age.
Analysis
Inspiration
Elena Capra writes that Tolkien made use of the medieval poem Sir Orfeo, based on the classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, both for The Hobbits Elvish kingdom, and for his story in The Silmarillion of Beren and Lúthien. That in turn influenced "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen". In Capra's view, Sir Orfeos key ingredient was the political connection "between the recovery of the main character's beloved and the return to royal responsibility".
Missing religion
The medievalist and scholar of Old English literature and its use in fantasy, Tom Shippey, analyses the tale for what it says about Tolkien's delicate balance between open Christianity and his treatment of his characters as heathens, a word that Shippey observes Tolkien uses very sparingly. Shippey notes that both Aragorn and Arwen are pagan, though Aragorn is "remarkably virtuous ... without even the faults of Theoden, and he foreknows his death like a [Christian] saint". Shippey notes that Arwen is inconsolable, seeing nothing after death, rejecting Aragorn's "we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!"; as Shippey says, "Arwen is not comforted" by this; none of the traditional consolations of religion are present. He observes that Tolkien stated in a letter to a Jesuit priest that he had cut religion out of The Lord of the Rings because it "is absorbed into the story and the symbolism".
Shippey explains that Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, "thought, or hoped, that God had a plan for [virtuous pagan] pre-Catholics too", so that heroes like Aragorn would go to Limbo rather than to Hell. He notes that the tale contains another death-scene, that of Gilraen, Aragorn's mother; she too is not comforted by Aragorn's mention of "a light beyond the darkness", a phrase that Shippey writes could be a hope of salvation, or simply a hope of winning the War of the Ring. Whatever the case, Shippey considers the tale to give "the deepest sense of religious belief mentioned explicitly in Middle-earth", but that the result is an "only-slightly-qualified absence of religion", creating a "paradox of a 'fundamentally Catholic' work which never once mentions God."
In her study of death and dying in The Lord of the Rings, Amy Amendt-Raduege states that Aragorn's death "follows the step-by-step process outlined by the ", the Christian precepts on how to die well, namely "the acceptance of death, the refusal of temptation, the dispensation of worldly goods and the last farewell to the family, and the final affirmation of faith". Amendt-Raduege describes the death of Aragorn as "one of the most deeply moving scenes in the story".
Relegated ending
The scholar of English literature Chris Walsh describes "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" as an alternative ending to The Lord of the Rings, with Aragorn's sombre last words to Arwen in place of the hobbit Sam Gamgee's cheery "Well, I'm back". Walsh notes that in a letter, Tolkien wrote "The passage over Sea [to Elvenhome in the West] is not Death ... I am only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees. That is why I regard the tale of Arwen and Aragorn as the most important of the appendices; it is part of the essential story". Sarah Workman writes that the relegation of the tale to an appendix "does not subordinate its importance", citing the same letter. Walsh states that he is interested to find that while Tolkien had "reluctantly relegated" the tale to an appendix, it is part of the main story in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, "strategically placed almost exactly half-way through". The film's depiction of the tale differs from the book's, combining Arwen's arrival, the presentation of the banner, the coronation, and the wedding; in the tale, Aragorn "unfurled the standard of Arwen in the battle of the Fields of Pelennor". Walsh notes that Jackson includes a flash forward to Elrond's vision of Arwen as the King's widow, with the phrase "There is nothing for you here: only death" used both in the film of The Two Towers and again in The Return of the King: in Walsh's view, death is the story's focus.