Farewell to Lórien
Memory as a Key to Connection in LOTR
My youngest brother recently graduated from college, and my family all gathered in the second greatest City of Seven Hills to celebrate with him. The weekend brought up many thoughts and emotions, as I know it did for everyone there in varying ways. College was a difficult time for me in some ways, but it was also a home that gave me comfort in those times. I cried the entire ride back to my parents’ house - my other home - the day of graduation, and my sister reminded me that I used to cry when we drove past my school’s exit on I-90 for a good amount of time after that too. It’s a tough loss. Graduating from a college that you’ve come to know as home can evoke a bittersweet experience of celebration commingled with this pain of loss, for in actualizing the great achievement of receiving a college degree, you in turn lose the spirit of what it meant to be a student in that particular time, place and company.
Graduation, stepping forth into the next phase of life for each of the degree recipients, can give birth to a sense of nostalgia as well. Nostalgia - from the Greek nostos for homecoming and algea, the personification of both physical and mental pain - is that ache that arises in us at longing for a return home. The pain lies not so much in our longing to revisit a specific place, but to recover the spirit created by that sacred trio of space, time and community that only existed just so in a past time. When we come to know something as a home, we create space for this ache in our hearts, because we inevitably lose the immediate experience of anything in which time is a factor. A college campus or even the homes in which we grew up serve as evidence of this loss every day. There is something lost when we leave or grow older that we cannot replicate with tangible means no matter how hard we try. We miss something. Even if you assemble the same people in the same place ten years later for a reunion, you occupy a much different time and therefore still miss the home you knew a decade ago.
I think a key element in the pain part of nostalgia is the failure to understand that homecoming doesn’t require recovery of the full triad of factors we’ve lost. This kind of return is impossible, and in turn it causes us pain to wish for it. The Greek nostos may have referred largely to a hero’s return to his homeland, but the word isn’t limited to a physical return. Nostos encompasses a much wider sense of recovery and the achievement of greatness involved in returning home from a journey. However the hero returns: in person, via song or in spirit - the nostos is a recovery achieved through triumphing over the circumstances that led the hero away from home and kept him from home for however long he journeyed.
Recovery of our innate sense of conscious connection is a form of homecoming in itself; it’s a return to our first home whose loss can grow ever more severe as we experience the traumas of loss, pain, addiction, isolation and other worldly sorrows. Though we fall from this initial state, we can access pieces of this connection in the people and places we come to know as home. We don’t always perceive this connection as the source of our feeling of being home, and so when we lose these people and places, we struggle to maintain living in the conscious connection we experienced while with them.
Graduations bring to mind a particular piece of literature for me. In my final semester of college, I had the incredible fortune to be enrolled in a senior English elective course on the works of Tolkien. Life changing is an understatement. When we read the chapter in The Lord of the Rings in which the Fellowship departs Lothlórien (or Lórien), fairest of the Elven realms, my professor opened a discussion on the similarities between this farewell and our imminent departure from our college on the hill. To this day, I find it one of the most beautiful chapters in LOTR and one of the saddest. In the simple narrative of eight travelers bidding farewell to a place they’ve come to know as safe and beautiful, we receive insight into the experience of loss and its place in our everyday recovery.
“Farewell to Lorien” is the eighth chapter of Book Two of The Lord of the Rings, the book widely known as The Two Towers if you’re taking the trilogy approach to the work. It begins with Celeborn, the Elf Lord of Lothlórien, summoning the Company (the Fellowship) to his chamber. At this point in their journey, the Company has been reduced to eight, having already experienced the loss of their leader, Gandalf, in Moria. They now face the loss of the first place in which they have felt truly safe since this tragedy if they are to continue with their mission. Celeborn presents the choice open to them, saying, “Now is the time…when those who wish to continue the Quest must harden their hearts to leave this land” (II.8). Celeborn’s words do not intend that they abandon empathy, but rather that they summon the strength to take the hard right step over the easy choice to remain in a space that has served its purpose in their journey. He doesn't assure them that making this choice will be easy, and I appreciate that. He knows that leaving will bring grief, but he also knows that they need to move forward with this grief. Seeing their indecision over which direction to go, Celeborn offers what consolation he can: “I see that you do not yet know what to do…It is not my part to choose for you, but I will help you as I may.” He recognizes that the Company bears the responsibility of deciding how to move forward. We need to choose for ourselves how to continue on the path of recovery when faced with challenges such as loss or uncertainty. I know that my brother and his peers experience a similar uncertainty here. We all do to varying degrees at different points in life, but especially in times of change. Celeborn’s words remind us that while we’re the ones responsible for making our own life decisions, we have mentors available to guide us if we choose to listen.
I also love what Galadriel has to say on the matter. Before the Company heads to bed before their morning departure, she tells them, “Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.” Galadriel’s assurance doesn’t erase the uncertainty they face, but she does suggest that they accept this uncertainty and trust in something they cannot now see. Her words echo what our program of recovery urges us to do: surrender to and trust in a higher power at work in our lives. The words of Celeborn and Galadriel reflect the balance we strive to achieve as we move forward in a world of uncertainty. We must take responsibility for our own recovery, but we must also accept a milieu of unknown factors and trust in the divine providence of a God who is looking out for us every step of the way. There is a higher power orchestrating circumstances beyond our capacity to see or understand, and trusting in this power can give us courage to step from something known onto a path we can believe leads to greatness even through darkness. That kind of trust can sustain us through the worst experiences of loss, the days when depression just won’t go away, injuries that cause their share of pain and inconvenience, or just passing periods of loneliness that threaten to last forever. It’s hard to remember in the moment when the pain is all too present, but Galadriel is right. Maybe our paths are already laid before us and we just fail to see them. At least hoping in that truth is something.
In addition to this hope, Galadriel gives each member of the Company a gift at their departure. These gifts are unique to each of them, based on her insight into his character and his future path as it leads away from Lothlórien. Her insight seems prophetic, since it implies her knowledge of what each traveler will need on his unknown path ahead, but it’s also just a simple reflection of her understanding of the nature and desires of each member of the Company as she has come to know them. She sees the values each one holds deepest in his heart, and she gives accordingly, both so that he might remember her and the home into which she welcomed them, but also so that he will use this gift to recover the sense of security and love he felt while with her in this home.
The gifts have a twofold function: they serve the destiny of each member of the Company, providing a function whose value will be appreciated at a future time; and they serve as symbolic memory of the Company’s time in Lothlórien, a reminder of the home they found there among the Elves. These gifts are the little things we hold onto from past places, relationships and experiences. Letters, sweatshirts, photos, ticket stubs, friendship bracelets and other such mementos. They are something we have to keep from a time past, but they are also things that we bring with us into another part of life in the same way we can bring memory with us: to inform, to cultivate gratitude, and to experience a spark of that feeling we wanted to hold onto. Galadriel’s gifts are meant to facilitate these kinds of memory, the one that benefits our continued progress in recovery rather than pulling us back or tempting us to numb the pain that surfaces at living in our loss.
As they watch the vision of Lothlórien slip away, Gimli laments that he has at once experienced the greatest love and loss in his life. Legolas consoles him that he is blessed to have even had this experience and to now have the memory of such a place. Gimli thanks his friend for his words, but in his grief he replies, “Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror…Elves may see things otherwise. Indeed, I have heard that for them memory is more like to the waking world than to a dream. Not so for Dwarves.”
I hadn’t really put too much thought into Gimli’s observation on Elves until now, and it’s so beautifully put. Of course the Elves access memory as another mode of living. Memory for them is more real than a dream because it doesn’t just remind them of a lost past; it holds a key to access the spirit of a connection rooted in the past and still alive in the present. This relationship with memory comes easily to Elves because they are not as invested in the material world whose nature necessitates loss on a daily basis. Memory is “more like to the waking world” because the waking world is the one in which we live in awareness of the conscious connection that ever truly fades with the passing of time, the distance that grows between us and our homes, or the loss of material modes of being. Because we are so tied to our physical bodies and are born into this world, it’s incredibly hard for us to live in memory in the way that Elves do. For us memory often arrives with nostalgia because we don’t see that home isn’t ever truly lost in the same way that the physical embodiment of it has been.
Because we have this human perspective shared by Gimli, loss of home in any sense is painful, and rightfully so. It doesn’t make us any less to mourn the loss of a person, place or experience. Even Jesus wept when he learned of his friend Lazarus’s death. Grief is part of the human experience, and memory is not what the heart desires in those periods of mourning. Too often we indulge the pain that comes with memory, because most of us are familiar with the sense of discontent with our present. In this state of discontent, we can believe that the only way to recover the home of our memories is by numbing the pain from nostalgia. This temptation to erase that pain and give our minds the illusion of the home we’ve lost can be especially strong and seemingly harmless. We romanticize numbing nostalgia when we could be channeling memory to cultivate gratitude and a greater sense of connection in our now. We want the home without the pain of loss, but the pain deserves attention and acceptance too. The pain reminds us of some lack, of something we need to do differently to access that connection in our present day even with the always looming loss of living in a mortal world.
The reality is that we’re not Elves. Though we were born into a perfect state of conscious connection, our nature as mortal beings in a material world inevitably brings about experiences that draw us from that state as time goes on. We become more like the rest of the Company whose birthrights include the trauma of living in an imperfect world. I love Legolas, but I’m with Gimli on this one. I struggle to live in a constant state of conscious connection because I’m weighed down again and again by loss, fear and other difficulties. I don’t cry every time I pass the exit to my college anymore, but being on campus for my brother’s graduation brought a small tinge of sadness. I cried today because I missed the dog I used to have in my life and even had the thought that if I’d never got her in the first place, I could have avoided the grief that’s come with giving her up. Sometimes I mourn the life I had before I started my life in recovery - not the worst of those times, but the times I felt fleetingly happy or was with someone I no longer have in my life. I find that those times when I burst into tears over a dog or past life almost always arrive when I’m alone. Something as simple as calling one of my people or sharing honestly in a meeting doesn’t take away the pain of the loss, but it gives me access to that state of being that Legolas and the other Elves live in, in which memory contributes to the fullness of the now rather than detracting from it.
The truth is, we’re all more like dwarves, hobbits and Tolkien’s race of men than we are like elves. We experience grief when we lose a loved one or a good place. It’s in our nature. We’re born of this temporary earth, and we suffer from the transient nature of the circumstances that facilitate the joy we feel in true connection. Elves are immortal, and even though they fade away and pass on from Middle Earth, they have the capacity to recognize the immortality of the true connection ever present to them despite the loss of physical things such as bodies and spaces.
Loss arrives with many faces, and we meet them every day, some greater than others. We make loss out to be something terrible when it’s really as natural as life itself. Legolas speaks of this experience in his words to Gimli, and he gives us the key to persevering through the pain of loss as well: “For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream….the memory of Lothlórien shall remain ever clear and unstained in your heart, and shall neither fade nor grow stale.” This memory, this key to connection that we take from every one of the people and places we love and are pained to lose - this is our answer to moving forward. Tolkien describes the Company in their moment of departure: “The travellers now turned their faces to the journey; the sun was before them, and their eyes were dazed, for they all were filled with tears.” Though it’s a moment of sadness, it’s also a vision of hope as they face the sun, looking toward the light even through eyes blurred by tears.
