the cold empty void beneath Tolkien's romantic ideal

[Odola]

Yes, I agree with you about Arwen. But what about Aragorn? And why even include this story in the appendix?

Well, it seems to be assumed that a 20-year-young man falling mostly for appearances is plausible enough, and later he remained bound by his honour, so the perceived damage to his character might have been considered minor: he fell in love with a highest nobly born, famed beauty and, through his inborn valour and sustained effort, managed to win commitment even from this lofty, withdrawn, generally uninvolved, and cold person. This appears to enhance his own manly stature.

Love in Tolkien generally seems depicted in a fatalistic way, more a matter of fate and happenstance than of will and choice, but once self-committed, an honourable person remains bound; with some leniency shown towards female characters, who are sometimes allowed a change of heart, whereas Tolkien’s men are not.

Still, in the reader’s eyes, Aragorn’s choosing as Queen a figure who, as Arwen is depicted, seems so completely ill-suited to mortal queenship in almost every respect calls into question his sound judgement, reason, and commitment towards the welfare of his realm and people. What he might have been forgiven for overlooking at twenty seems impossible to pass over at eighty-seven. Thus, this union slightly diminishes him in the eyes of many readers, leaving many uneasy. This may not have been Tolkien’s intention, yet the effect remains.

Why include the story in the appendix? Well, it contains the "20-year-old man fall(s) mostly for appearances [...], and later he remain(s) bound by his honour" excuse.

 

[Odola]

If we compare Aragorn and Arwen's ending to Beren and Lúthien we see that the details of Beren and Lúthien’s retirement explicitly remove all external, political obligations, which Aragorn and Arwen did not do:

Beren and Lúthien chose to settle in Tol Galen in Ossiriand, a remote location outside of the immediate political struggles. They did not attempt to govern or maintain the crown of Doriath.

Their son, Dior Eluchíl, was an adult who was already married and had children (Eluréd, Elurín, and Elwing). Dior was sent with his family to take up the mantle as Thingol's Heir and the new King of Doriath before Beren and Lúthien died (they died shortly after he left).

When Beren and Lúthien met their second death, they had successfully transferred all royal and social responsibility to the next generation, freeing them to face their mortal fate purely as a couple. They had no obligations left but to themselves.

The Failure of Aragorn and Arwen's Parallel is shown in Aragorn and Arwen's ending not managing to achieve the same clean resolution of duty:

Aragorn, the King, decides to yield the gift of life on his own timetable, treating his death as a personal and royal act rather than a shared, marital one.

Arwen's son, Eldarion, is left to rule as the new King. Arwen, the Queen-Mother and matriarch, immediately abandons the capital and her already aged son, aged daughters, and implied very much aged grandchildren along with further descendants for the empty ruins of Lothlórien.

Unlike Beren and Lúthien, who ensured their heir was settled before they died, Arwen's actions create a political and familial void. She forfeits her chance to be the wise, long-lived Queen-Mother and advisor to the new King, a role critical in a but a generation ago newly re-established realm. She chooses private grief over public duty and family loyalty.

This sharp difference demonstrates that Arwen's retreat is not a successful echo of Beren and Lúthien retirement but a failure of character to sustain the responsibilities inherent in the mortal, public life she had chosen. The story is therefore read less as an inevitable romantic tragedy and more as the tragic consequence of Arwen's personal inability to integrate her Elven heart with her Queenly duties.

Had Aragorn and Arwen truly wished for a Beren-and-Lúthien-like ending, they could have chosen to retire together to Lothlórien after several decades of reign, like after thirty to sixty years. That Aragorn instead avoided such withdrawal and busied himself with affairs of state until his final day suggests that his appreciation of “spending time” with Arwen was more theoretical than practical. He seems far more comfortable longing for her from afar and cherishing her as an ideal than sharing the daily realities of life with her, which seems a curiously modern arrangement. In the end, Aragorn seems to be far more committed to the idea of Arwen as muse and justification, than to her as an actual person and a partner, just as she seem far more invested in him as a personification of glorious nobility and mighty kingship that as a mortal man.
He is indeed “faithful to the idea of her,” and she, correspondingly, to the "ideal of him". They seem far more in love with what each other symbolises, than with each other’s as a real-life individual.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this dynamic is that, while the tension between those two perspectives may have been unintended, it nevertheless feels authentic. Many real marriages do end in such asymmetry. In this sense, Tolkien may have captured something truer to life than he ever meant to. Yet in doing so, he undermines the very mythic ideal he sought to uphold, unsettling readers with an abrupt intrusion of real-world realism into what was seemingly meant to be a timeless, fairy-tale romance.

That’s seems to be why this ending is unsettling: it’s too honest. It shows that even the greatest king and the fairest queen cannot transcend the ordinary failures of understanding that mark a real marriage. The myth buckles under the pressure of human truth, it reveals the very "cold empty void beneath Tolkien's romantic ideal" this thread is titled as.

In the end, the story Aragorn and Arwen falters not because Tolkien lost control of the myth, but because he let too much of real-life dynamic flow into it = the very same problem that crept into his LOTR depiction of orcs, actually.

 

[Odola]

The functional sterility of the romantic ideal of Aragorn and Arwen is further unmasked when contrasted with Sam and Rosie Cotton's relationship, which is said to produce thirteen children whose names are all meticulously preserved: Elanor the Fair, Frodo, Rose, Merry, Pippin, Goldilocks, Hamfast, Daisy, Primrose, Bilbo, Ruby, Robin, and Tolman. The Red Book records not just their names but in some cases their careers, marriages, and descendants.

More significantly, Tolkien himself declared Sam and Rosie's love "absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero's) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting)." [Tolkien's letter to Milton Waldman from 1951] This "rustic" love was central to Tolkien's understanding of how genuine fertility manifests in both literal and cultural terms.

The narrative significance of this depiction is obvious: Elanor Fairbairn served as Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Arwen, meaning she had intimate daily contact with the royal family's domestic life for a year, and then repeatedly on various occasions. She would have known the names, dates, personalities, and stories of Eldarion and his sisters. She would have witnessed the family dynamics, the children's responses to their parents' romantic absorption, which would ultimately lead to Arwen's eventual abandonment of them and their families. Yet somehow, in the copy of the Red Book that was edited and supplemented by Sam and Elanor and then edited further in Gondor by Findegil the King's Writer, all these details about Aragorn's and Arwen's royal children and grandchildren, still available from living contemporary witnesses, were systematically omitted, while the details of Sam's family tree were lovingly preserved!

This cannot be dismissed as a byproduct of mythic distance. Findegil wrote in Minas Tirith itself, within the very halls where Eldarion and his sisters walked and their children walked, their laughter and steps heard behind the very doors and windows of his study. Their omission, then, is not the result of forgetfulness or abstraction, but of narrative self-preservation. The myth of Aragorn and Arwen required the silencing of its own witnesses, lest the romance’s idealized perfection be disrupted by the mundane realities of its continuation. The myth demanded the erasure of the living evidence of its own cost.

This contrast exposes the fundamental difference between romantic idealization and actual mortal fertility. Sam's marriage to Rosie was never mythologized; it was simply lived, day by day, producing children who grew up to have their own meaningful lives and relationships and were recorded to have done so.

The "grand romance" of Aragorn and Arwen, by contrast, required such narrative energy to maintain its mythic status that it narratively consumed its own offspring. Their children had to be rendered politically and narratively irrelevant because their actual experiences would have revealed the romance's human cost. Eldarion is named as the necessary heir and plot device at his father's deathbed, but nothing beyond his existence and name is mentioned - with no birthdate, no details. His sisters remain unnamed and even uncounted! His wife and children (which he must have had, being 119 years old at Aragorn's death) receive the same treatment.

Sam the gardener produced a family so culturally fertile that his descendants took the surname Gardner in his honor and continued to flourish for generations. His "simple rustic love" created genuine abundance that could withstand documentary scrutiny and be narratively celebrated.

Meanwhile, the royal romance that was supposed to herald the dominion of Men and a new golden age produced children so redundant and irrelevant to their parents' story and their depicted romantic self-absorption that they had to be textually erased to preserve the very myth that created them!

This proves that the "grand romance" is actually sterile: not because it failed to produce biological children, but because it failed to produce children whose lives could be mentioned in detail without destroying the romantic mythology.

Sam's ordinary love story could afford to be documented in such detail because it had nothing to hide. The grand royal romance required systematic silence because examination would reveal its fundamental emptiness as a foundation for human flourishing. Which again proves my initial premise.