The Problem of the Meaning of Death in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Part II. Endless and Mortal World of Tolkien

Abstract

This article deals with the theme of death in Tolkien’s trilogy “The Lord of the Rings”, which both the author himself and numerous researchers of his texts rec­ognized as the key to understanding of the entire religious and philosophical content of his work. Here this topic is analyzed within the framework of the se­mantic opposition formulated by the concepts of “being towards death” and “es­caping from death”. The article attempts to compare how the theme of death is revealed in a new literary genre which developed during and shortly after the Second World War – the author’s fairy tale (intended primarily for adults) – and how this theme is presented in the concepts of post-war existentialism, espe­cially by Sartre and Heidegger. As a methodology for this comparison this article uses the theory of P. Ricoeur – according to which both literature and philosophy can be considered as two different and partly opposite strategies for “taming time” (by turning it into human time, the time of culture). In the context of this theory, the article also analyzes another problem related to the first one, namely the problem of the mutual influence of the “real world” of human history and the “fictional world” of a literary work. The article confirms the idea expressed by Ricoeur that large-scale events of history can be reflected in a literary work indi­rectly (namely by using complication of the spatio-temporal structure that forms the artistic world of the work). In particular, events such as world wars, which sharply raise the questions of the meaning of history and the meaning of human life, can find interpretation in literary works that “recreate” the space of life and meaning with their own narrative means, both in relation to the individual – and the world as a whole.