Elves, the righteous ringmakers: Taking Tolkien seriously

Tolkien's trilogy deserves a more serious consideration than many are willing to give. Through Tolkien's fantasy it is possible to discover how we come to know what we know about the metaphysical world so that we can experience the proper cosmic pattern that gives us, as Mircea Eliade writes in Cosmos And History, "the nostalgia for eternity" because its patterns "can never be uprooted: it can only be debased" (122). If we are to understand Tolkien, we must discuss Tolkien's ideas such as power, the nature of good and evil, and free will and individual responsibility. The virtue of the elves becomes the focal point for those ideas since the elves are the structural force that gives the work its power and meaning. To further explain the virtue of the elves, Tolkien plunges into basic human emotions and a symbolic structure that can surmount cultural boundaries. He thus creates a world through the ancient device of exemplifying morals in unfamiliar personalities in order to bring home truths in which modern man can believe.