Was Tolkien Depressed?

[Kuruharan]

He was not what I would call a particularly joyous soul. He was certainly rather pessimistic, but it is impossible for us to speculate on whether he was any more depressed than your average human being. I really don't think so though. He had a tremendous outlet in his writings (as we can all clearly see).

Everybody dies!

Indeed. Probably one of the things that makes his writings so true, since very few people in the world don't die.

And this sort of thing is typical of the mythos that he was borrowing from.

(And besides, the Elves didn't die. They just went West and fell out of the story. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] )