My recent post on Tolkien got me thinking about some more current issues. There are others who are better guides to Tolkien’s moral philosophy than I. However, the person who finally convinced me, many years ago, that capital punishment was wrong, was not a politician or religious leader, but a fictional character — Gandalf.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo declares to Gandalf that it was a pity that Bilbo had not killed the treacherous creature Gollum when he’d had the chance. ‘He deserves death’, Frodo says. ‘Deserves it!’ I daresay he does,’ replies Gandalf:
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
That was then.
More recently, the British Parliament has been asked to consider a bill that would legalise assisted dying. It has this debate every few years. However, an increasing number of people are in favour of the idea that people who are terminally ill should be allowed to end their own lives at a time of their choice. The current bill introduces safeguards that are meant to prevent terminally ill people being subject to coercion. Safeguards include independent reviews by two clinicians and a high-court judge. Whatever the safeguards, however, there is an argument that people should be allowed to die with dignity.
Tolkien puts it very well in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, a kind of coda to The Lord of the Rings in which the hero, Aragorn, now more than two hundred years old, decides that the time has come for him to die. As a Númenórean — that is, a human, but of exalted lineage — he has been granted the grace to be able to do this. His wife, Arwen, is full of regret. She is an immortal elf who has traded her immortality for a mortal life, if a long one. ‘Take counsel with yourself, beloved’, Aragorn says,
and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless.
Aragorn knows he will have to die, someday, but it will be at a time of his choosing, when he still has the capacity to do so. The passage also highlights the grief of those left behind, suggesting that although such grief is inevitable, it might be made worse when friends and relations are forced to watch a person die slowly and possibly in agony, losing first one facility and then another, and the greatest loss is dignity.
Aragorn’s words seem to me very wise and, in the end, compassionate. It is notable, though, that Tolkien puts such a speech in the mouth of the hero of his epic tale. Tolkien was a Catholic, and as such would probably be horrified by the idea of assisted suicide. Aragorn, though, has a kind of special license. As a Númenórean, he is also, in a sense, prelapsarian, the descendant of people who were never corrupted by the forces of evil in the world.
My own personal view is that we should not accept our fallen condition. Instead we should strive to regain that prelapsarian state. To that end, it should be a fundamental human right — perhaps the most fundamental — that a person has absolute and final governance over their own body. To be sure, we cannot choose whether to be born, or when. However, as if in compensation, we should have the absolute right to, say, have an abortion, change gender, or indeed, die, without the interference of religious leaders, judges or politicians.
I accept that you might not agree with me. And that’s your right, too.
