"This gift of freedom": The Gift of Ilúvatar, from Mythological Solution to Theological Problem

Among the many themes present in his writings, J.R.R. Tolkien himself on several occasions emphasized death and deathlessness as being particularly important to him. Thus in his reply to one reader's attempt at interpreting The Lord of the Rings:

I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of [The Lord of the Rings]. … The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race 'doomed' not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.

(Letters 246)

Exploration of mortality and deathlessness, and their effect on the involved races, runs through most of Tolkien's writings about Middleearth, exposed mainly in the contrast between mortal Men and apparently immortal Elves. The origin of this crucial difference between these otherwise closely related races is explained in the creation myth of Tolkien's secondary world: God the Creator, Ilúvatar, has willed it and has intentionally given the two races different "gifts" fundamentally affecting not only their life span but also their relation to the created world.

This concept forms a continuous backdrop to the legendarium's internal history, from the world's creation to the Fourth Age, as well as to most of Tolkien's creative period, from before 1920 to at least 1958.

A Close Reading

The Creator's plan for Men, forming their life and destiny, is called "the Gift of Ilúvatar." It is presented this way in The Silmarillion:

The Elves die not till the world dies, unless they are slain or waste in grief (and to both these seeming deaths they are subject)… But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the Gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.

(S 42)

In contrast to the Elves, who live (if they escape fatal injury or grief) as long as the world exists, the members of the human race are made mortal by the grace of their creator, escaping the mounting weariness of life in this world.

The text goes on to say that Men do not always accept that death is a gift. They have been known to fear death and consider it unnatural. This is because the evil spirit Melkor has tarnished their view of the Gift; he "has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope" (S 42). There is no doubt, however, that this is a perversion. Death originally and really is a gift—a relief, envied by the immortal races.

Many readers and critics of Tolkien's work leave it at this and equate the Gift of Ilúvatar with mortality.¹ But a closer reading of the relevant paragraphs shows that death is only a part of, or more precisely a side effect of the Gift of Ilúvatar.

Thus, in the paragraph preceding the one just cited, the fate of Men is explained with a different approach:

'To the Atani [= Men] I will give a new gift.' Therefore [Ilúvatar] willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest.

(S 41–42)

Here the Gift's main aspect is not death, but Men's "virtue to shape their [lives], amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur." So what does this really imply?

As readers of The Silmarillion know, the world was...