With this may be contrasted what he wrote at the end of his account of
The Lord of the Rings in his letter to Milton Waldman of 1951 (a passage omitted in Letters but printed in IX.132):
To
Bilbo and
Frodo the special grace is granted to go with the
Elves
they loved - an Arthurian ending, in which it is, of course, not made
explicit whether this is an 'allegory' of death, or a mode of healing
and restoration leading to a return.
In his letter to Naomi Mitchison of September 1954 (Letters no.154),
however, he said:
... the mythical idea underlying is that for mortals, since their 'kind'
cannot be changed for ever, this is strictly only a temporary reward:
a healing and redress of suffering. They cannot abide for ever, and
though they cannot return to mortal earth, they can and will 'die' -
of free will, and leave the world. (In this setting the return of Arthur
would be quite impossible, a vain imagining.)
And much later, in a draft letter of 1963 (Letters no.246), he wrote:
Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal him - if that
could be done, before he died. He would have eventually to 'pass
away': no mortal could, or can, abide for ever on earth, or within
Time. So he went both to a purgatory and to a reward, for a while: a
period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding
of his position in littleness and in greatness, spent still in Time
amid the natural beauty of '
Arda Unmarred', the Earth unspoiled by
evil.
