It is thus that those who are cursed with deathlessness view with envy the gift of death, and thus that Tolkien, through the medium of fairy story, provokes in his readers a profound meditation on the “permanent and difficult” theme of death and immortality. Most important is the crucial difference that emerges between immortality and eternal life. The former is being imprisoned in time and space and unable ever to get home; the latter is the escape from the long defeat into either the final victory of heaven or the final defeat of hell.
