J.R.R. Tolkien Said This Simone de Beauvoir Quote Is the 'Key Spring' of Lord of the Rings
'There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question.'
I recently shared a list of J.R.R. Tolkien quotes on life and death.
Only days later, I happened to see Tolkien utter one of these very lines in a 1968 BBC interview: “Human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.”
I was obviously aware of the quote and its source, but I had never seen any of the footage of the BBC documentary on Tolkien until recently, when Ben Carlson shared a clip of it on Twitter.
Interestingly, in this interview Tolkien shares another quote—from French author and noted feminist Simone de Beauvoir—that he said reveals “the key spring” to Lord of the Rings. Here is the quote:
“There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
I’ve been puzzling over these words and have some thoughts on what Tolkien was getting at. But I’m going to refrain from sharing them right away, and instead just chew on it a few more days.
In the meantime, please let me know in the comments if you have some thoughts on Simone de Beauvoir’s quote and Tolkien’s reflections on them.
From a Christian perspective, all death carries an odour of false to it. We sense inherently that this is not how things were meant to be. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him FOREVER, not just for these scant 80 years or so. I’ve long suspected that Tolkien’s elves tap into this sense on some level.