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#the real value of the tale of beren and luthien is its essential anti death message
rohirric-hunter · 3 years
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Here’s the thing. I’m gonna tell a story. It’s the story of Beren and Lúthien, which you’ve probably heard before, but I’m gonna tell it in a way you likely haven’t heard before.
Once upon a time there was a human being named Beren, and he died, as humans are wont to do. That’s the beginning of the story, really.
He did not die a natural death; he fell in battle, but in those days that was common enough to be considered natural, among Men, and if news of his death traveled across the lands and reached the ears of any living kin of his that yet dwelt in the world, then doubtlessly they mourned, and named his end honorable, and celebrated his life, and then moved on, and he would eventually have faded into the annals of time, one more song of grief amid a world shaped by unnumbered tears, but for one thing.
That one thing was his fiancé, Lúthien, who was not a human being, but one of the Eldar, and therefore considered, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Diseases of the body would not prey upon her, and old age would never visit her, but it is the lot of those people that the evils of trauma and of grief weigh more heavily than they do upon the race of Men, and the loss of her love bore her down, and darkened her days, until at last she, too, died for the pain of it; as natural a death as might be had for one of her blood.
This is the point where I set the book down, and I assure you that this is not a story about death. There are many stories about death, stories that find their ends in tragedy and grief, in walls of fire and stone-hard defiance, in bold warriors who gave their all (but it was not enough), who burned themselves out in a defiant end or who were beaten down and went quietly into the dark, and even triumphant stories about death, where a hero’s death served a great purpose, and perhaps saved lives and allowed the light to shine on this world a day longer. Those stories are good stories, worthy of remembrance, and they have their place, even in happy times amid good company, but the story that I am telling today is not one of them: this story is about life.
For Lúthien died, and she went after to the Halls of Waiting, and there she stood before the Vala who rules over Death, and she wept, for death itself had not brought an end to her grief. And she did that which no one else dared: she begged a boon from the Lord of Death himself, and she asked him -- she did not threaten, or bargain, or lay down an ultimatum, but merely asked -- for the life that she had not been able to live, a joyous and long life with the man she would call husband. Such was her love, and the sincerity and heart with which she made her request, that Mandos himself granted her that life, with the understanding that it would end, and both she and Beren eagerly agreed, for would it not be death again, to deny themselves the joy they longed for simply because it could not be forever?
A life half-lived is existence only.
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