[HerenIstarion]

I am chastised, cribbed and confounded

um, may I suggest "embraced" m'lady (m'lord?)? Thanks for the compliment, nevertheless

outrageous advantages the 'Gods' and Elves have

have they? They both are bound by the world and its history, while humans go free.

for is it not written :

[Death is their fate]the gift of Iluvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.But Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope.'

Athrabeth Finrod (elda) ah Andreth (human)

[Andreth]I hold that in this [state of being on earth, i.e. fea (spirit) and hroa (body) united - H-I]we are as ye are, truly Incarnates, and that we do not live in our right being and its fullness save in a union of love and peace between the House and the Dweller. Wherefore death, which
divides them, is a disaster to both.'

'Ever more you amaze my thought, Andreth,' said Finrod.
'For if your claim is true, then lo! a fea which is here but a traveller is wedded indissolubly to a hroa of Arda; to divide
them is a grievous hurt, and yet each must fulfil its right nature
without tyranny of the other. Then this must surely follow: the fea when it departs must take with it the hroa. And what can this mean unless it be that the fea shall have the power to uplift the hroa, as its eternal spouse and companion, into an endurance everlasting beyond Ea, and beyond Time? Thus would Arda, or part thereof, be healed not only of the taint of Melkor, but released even from the limits that were set for it in the "Vision of Eru" of which the Valar speak. 'Therefore I say that if this can be believed, then mighty indeed under Eru were Men made in their beginning; and dreadful beyond all other calamities was the change in their state.
'Is it, then, a vision of what was designed to be when Arda
was complete - of living things and even of the very lands and seas of Arda made eternal and indestructible, for ever beautiful and new - with which the fear of Men compare what they see here? Or is there somewhere else a world of which all things which we see, all things that either Elves or Men know, are only tokens or reminders?'

'If so it resides in the mind of Eru, I deem,' said Andreth. 'To
such questions how can we find the answers, here in the mists of Arda Marred? Otherwise it might have been, had we not been changed; but being as we are, even the Wise among us have given too little thought to Arda itself, or to other things that dwell here. We have thought most of ourselves: of how our hroar and fear should have dwelt together for ever in joy, and of the darkness impenetrable that now awaits us.'

'Then not only the High Eldar are forgetful of their kin!' said
Finrod. 'But this is strange to me, and even as did your heart
when I spoke of your unrest, so now mine leaps up as at the
hearing of good news.
'This then, I propound, was the errand of Men, not the followers, but the heirs and fulfillers of all: to heal the marring of Arda, already foreshadowed before their devising; and to do more, as agents of the magnificence of Eru: to enlarge the Music and surpass the Vision of the World!
[...] I was thinking that by the Second Children we might have been delivered from death. For ever as we spoke of death being a division of the united, I thought in my heart of a death that is not so: but the ending together of both. For that is what lies before us, so far as our reason could see: the completion of Arda and its end, and therefore also of us children of Arda; the end when all the long lives of the Elves shall be wholly in the past.
'And then suddenly I beheld as a vision Arda Remade; and there the Eldar completed but not ended could abide in the present for ever, and there walk, maybe, with the Children of Men, their deliverers, and sing to them such songs as, even in the Bliss beyond bliss, should make the green valleys ring and the everlasting mountain-tops to throb like harps.'