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originally posted by Bêthberry:
Something in me makes me cautious about a people who seem to want to preserve things unchanged. That inability--if this is not too strong a word--spells a veritable doom in itself I think. In this aspect, I guess I am unable to see Lorien as representative of a dreamlike state outside time. I see it more as a lost world, one which has great value and worth, but one which nonetheless must be let go as it has been unable to meld itself with mundanity. This could be an ideological perspective where Tolkien and I differ, however much I enjoy his work.
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Tolkien and you don't differ so much in your views, since he himself described this as the elves' flaw, in several of his letters explaining the nature of elves:
from letter #154
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...But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron, as because with or without his assistance they were "embalmers". They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superiour caste), and so tried to stop its changes and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be "artists" - and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret.
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and from letter 131:
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They thus became obsessed with "fading", the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming - even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts.
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But in this chapter I think Lothlorien is presented to the reader as it appears to the eyes of the hobbits in this moment: they would only see the wonder and the beauty.
About Boromir: I agree that many readers sympathize with him, just because he has flaws. He is more human than Aragorn. Most people in the real world would probably follow his line of thought, I guess!
At my first reading, the last sentence of the chapter gave me a fright:
"And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man." I thought this meant that Aragorn would not survive the quest!