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Originally Posted by Eönwë
I actually can't believe this. I was just about to post that, because when I was reading it, one of my first thoughts was of this thread.
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I have to add to my previous contribution because... well, I am a dunce apparently--or at least an absent-minded professor. I completely glided over the fact that these lines have a footnote in my text:
Quote:
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432. The line harks back to the Sibyl's warning to Aeneas (Aen. VI, 126-9) that the descent to Avernus is easy, and perhaps also to Virgil's warning to Dante (Inf. XXXIV, 95) as they prepare to ascend from the center of the earth toward Purgatory, that the way is hard. Cf. III, 21
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Since it told me to check "III, 21", I did just that. It's part of a block of lines:
Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe
--Paradise Lost Book III, 19-21
Now... I'm still wary of reading too much into the possibility of a connection between Tolkien's use of "hard life and long" and Milton's "long is the way, and hard," but it *is* tempting... especially since Aragorn's entire life can easily be read as a hard journey, and long, through "hell" while he waits to win to paradise: wedding to Arwen and the attendant kingship of the Reunited Kingdoms.
In any case, it reads like very possible literary leafmould...