[davem]

Is it possible that Tolkien gives us a text which invites us to fall into the elvish habit of nostalgia, to enjoy it and revere it and be inspired by it, but in the end he provides subtle suggestions that such nostalgia is a false or misplaced longing? Does Tolkien undercut the major response he seems to create in his readers? Are we to repent of our reading?

We wonders.... Was this diichotomy set up deliberately by Tolkien, or was it a reflection of his own inner conflict.

(Sorry for the long quote - this is from Verlyn Flieger's 'A Question of Time' pps 111 - 112)

But its just here that Tolkien falls foul of his own ambivalence about the passage of time. For all his stated philosophical position, he cannot help imbuing his narrative with a mixed message, a rueful rationale for change covering a deep nostalgia for what has passed and is passing, in spite of all its Hobbit jollity, its mushroom and pipeweed, its victories and celebrations, The Lord of the Rings is suffused with a sense of transience and loss. The Shire changes, the Ents never find the Entwives, Frodo loses his Ring, his finger, and himself and cannot really go home. “However the fortunes of war go," Theoden says to Gandalf, "may it not so end that many fair things pass from the earth?" (Two Towers 155). It does so end, and all the renewal and rejoicing do not put back what was lost. Theoden speaks for Tolkien, but so does Gandalf, when he replies to Theoden: "To such days we are doomed,"
The fact is that like his Elves, Tolkien hoarded memory, He, too regretted the past; he, too, was unwilling to face change and wanted to arrest history, to keep hold of the past in the present. He, too, wanted escape from what he called "the Robot Age," escape from the 'grim Assyrian' absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories" (“On Fairy-Stories" 148, 150). And so, in a sense, he subverts his own message, surrounding his Elves and their lands with an aura of such golden nostalgia that their appeal is almost impossible to resist. But he also knew that real escape is impossible. We are where we are, and we cannot go back to where we were; we can only long to. Tolkien is susceptible to the Elven impulse and yet capable of seeing its fallacy, subject to the confusion of the heart that feels one thing and the head that knows another. And so there is a concealed sting in Lorien's beauty. Its timelessness is not the unspoiled perfection it seems. Rather, that very perfection is its flaw. It is a cautionary picture, closer in kind to the Ring than we'd like to think, shown to us in all its beauty to test if we can let it go.
The Lord of the Rings is, among many other things, a story about the ability to let go. The Ring is the obvious example, the clearest picture of the possessiveness engendered by possessions, and the corruption that grows with the desire to keep. It is easy to see the Ring as evil, and while Frodo's inability to give it up is both unexpected and inevitable, what happens to him appears to be an extraordinary tragedy, not something the reader can readily identify with. The timeless beauty of Lorien is the deeper example. It is more difficult to recognize as such, because, unlike the Ring, Lorien and everything about it in the narrative make us want to keep it, make us want, like Frodo, to stay there. We love Lorien, as, quite clearly, its author loved it. The beauty of Tolkien's Elves and their Elven lands blinds us to their significance in his world and his narrative.
Nonetheless, this very sense of passing and loss that on one level Tolkien mourned, on another level he celebrated. For to be capable of living is also to be capable of dying, and without death there can be no rebirth. Elves preserve. Men grow and die and grow again. It is in this respect that the Contrast between Elves and Men is of such importance to Tolkien's vision. But while the contrast itself is apparent to any reader of Tolkien's work, it is a safe bet that many readers mistake its overt purpose and consequently ap. predate the wrong values in each culture, valuing immortality above mortality and Elves above Men.