It is for this reason that Tolkien and Galadriel can both talk about the “long defeat” of history. For Tolkien, as a Christian, history cannot be anything but a long defeat because man is a fallen creature in a fallen cosmos. In such a cosmos, death is woven into the very fabric of everything, from the mortality of men to the entropic death of the energy system of the cosmos itself. More importantly, on the spiritual plane, death is present in the corrosive and corrupting effect of evil, as made manifest in sin, so that history is characterized by an endless battle between virtue and vice in
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