How Does Death Work in Middle-earth?

Q: How Does Death Work in Middle-earth?

ANSWER: This question summarizes questions raised by many people through the years, some while discussing J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and some while discussing how I answer questions on this blog (or elsewhere). A few people have sent me thoughtful comments respectfully disagreeing with me when I write things such as “Sauron died …”, “the Nazgûl were dead (or ‘not living’)”, “faded elves were dead (or ‘disembodied spirits’)”, etc.

It’s very difficult to do justice to this subject, especially in the time I allot myself for writing blog posts. But across the years I have tried many ways to make the same point, which is only implied by Tolkien (in many ways) in his letters and notes, and even a bit of narrative text. The point is easily summed up this way:

The Body Dies, the Spirit Exists

In other words, everyone but Ilúvatar himself – in J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories – who is in any way a part of Arda, Imbar, Ambar, the world, Middle-earth, or Eä (“Time and Space”) is subject to the same laws of physical life and death regardless of what order of being they are.

All the Valar can die if (and only if) they are self-incarnated in physical, living bodies, which are slain. We know this to be true because Melkor (Morgoth) died. Some people try to equivocate on the point by arguing that Morgoth was “cut off” from the Valar, no longer considered one of their number. But his true nature, his “order”, was that of an Ainu. Vala was just a title assumed or conferred upon the few most powerful of the Ainur who entered Eä.

All physical bodies, whether self-incarnated or resulting from some natural or Ilúvatarian cause, were corporeal forms that not only existed but lived. And being living bodies, even if the bodies of Valar (or their servants, the Maiar), they could die completely, totally, and exactly as a mortal man dies: the body ceased to live. That is the meaning of death.

There is no special kind of death in Tolkien’s stories. Everyone who dies dies, including Gandalf, Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman. They all die physical deaths, meaning their bodies are dead, no longer living, not functioning as living things.

But their spirits persist because they are indestructible. Morgoth’s spirit was so weakened by his own corruption and self-diminishment and death that he was unable to return to corporeal form any time soon after his death. Although he had begun as the mightiest of the Ainur and might, in that primeval state, have been capable of overcoming the mental turmoil that being slain inflicted upon him, at the end of the First Age he was too weak to do so. Tolkien originally conceived of a “Last Battle” when Morgoth would return, but he changed so many of the details of the legends that he removed that Dagor Dagorath from the mythology of Middle-earth. At best all we can say is that he left open the possibility that Melkor might one day return (probably at the end of Time and Space).

What Did J.R.R. Tolkien Actually Write about Death?

We’ll begin with Gandalf’s death.

156 To Robert Murray, SJ. (draft)
4 November 1954

…Gandalf really ‘died’, and was changed: for that seems to me the only real cheating, to represent anything that can be called ‘death’ as making no difference. ‘I am G. the White, who has returned from death’. Probably he should rather have said to Wormtongue: ‘I have not passed through death (not ‘fire and flood’) to bandy crooked words with a serving-man’. And so on. I might say much more, but it would only be in (perhaps tedious) elucidation of the ‘mythological’ ideas in my mind; it would not, I fear, get rid of the fact that the return of G. is as presented in this book a ‘defect’, and one I was aware of, and probably did not work hard enough to mend. But G. is not, of course, a human being (Man or Hobbit). There are naturally no precise modern terms to say what he was. I wd. venture to say that he was an incarnate ‘angel’– strictly an γγελος:2 that is, with the other Istari, wizards, ‘those who know’, an emissary from the Lords of the West, sent to Middle-earth, as the great crisis of Sauron loomed on the horizon. By ‘incarnate’ I mean they were embodied in physical bodies capable of pain, and weariness, and of afflicting the spirit with physical fear, and of being ‘killed’, though supported by the angelic spirit they might endure long, and only show slowly the wearing of care and labour.

There is no more definitive statement on the Ainur’s susceptibility to “death” when in a self-incarnated form than the preceding passage from the letter. And in my opinion we shouldn’t need more than that, for everything else only agrees with it. Tolkien was not in any way ambiguous about who was subject to death in Middle-earth: everyone was subject to it, with the exception (as I noted above) of Ilúvatar.

Some people would argue that even Ilúvatar, if he took a living form, would be subject to death. After all, Jesus died and so was resurrected again, and it is the Christian belief that Jesus is not merely “the son of God” but God Incarnated. All of which is true enough, but in Tolkien’s fiction all that remains in the untold future. It hasn’t happened yet (despite some people’s arguments that Bombadil may be Ilúvatar, but he’s not).

Gandalf himself says he died in The Lord of the Rings when he confronts Wormtongue (as Tolkien quoted above):

Thus Gandalf softly sang, and then suddenly he changed. Casting his tattered cloak aside, he stood up and leaned no longer on his staff; and he spoke in a clear cold voice. ‘The wise speak only of what they know, Gríma son of Gálmód. A witless worm have you become. Therefore be silent, and keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a servingman till the lightning falls.’ He raised his staff. There was a roll of thunder. The sunlight was blotted out from the eastern windows; the whole hall became suddenly dark as night. The fire faded to sullen embers. Only Gandalf could be seen, standing white and tall before the blackened hearth.

Gandalf’s death is not questioned as often as, say, Sarumnan’s death. Some people are confused about whether Saruman really dies because we see his spirit rise from his body (in the narrative text), whereas Gandalf’s death (and the passing of his spirit) occurs “off stage”. Some readers use Gandalf’s ambiguous description of what happened when he told his story to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli in Fangorn what happened as an argument that Gandalf “didn’t really die”:

…I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin. Then darkness took me; and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell…

This is perfectly consistent with both Gandalf and Tolkien’s statements that Gandalf died. From his perspective his spirit remained aware of itself in some way, even if he may have struggled to remember some details of his past life. Death (in Middle-earth) doesn’t mean your consciousness ceases to exist.

Regarding Sauron’s various deaths. Tolkien only confirms one as a “death” but Sauron died twice in the Second Age and once at the end of the Third Age. Some readers suggest he may also have died in the First Age after his fight with Huan on the island of Minas Tirith in Sirion, but I’m not convinced of that. Sauron was weaker in the First Age than Morgoth was and Morgoth was incapable of returning himself to life. Sauron only became stronger than Morgoth had been at the end of the First Age by forging the One Ring. In Letter No. 211, which Tolkien wrote to Rhona Beare in October 1958, he said:

Sauron was first defeated by a ‘miracle’: a direct action of God the Creator, changing the fashion of the world, when appealed to by Manwë: see III p. 317. Though reduced to ‘a spirit of hatred borne on a dark wind’, I do not think one need boggle at this spirit carrying off the One Ring, upon which his power of dominating minds now largely depended. That Sauron was not himself destroyed in the anger of the One is not my fault: the problem of evil, and its apparent toleration, is a permanent one for all who concern themselves with our world. The indestructibility of spirits with free wills, even by the Creator of them, is also an inevitable feature, if one either believes in their existence, or feigns it in a story.

Sauron was, of course, ‘confounded’ by the disaster, and diminished (having expended enormous energy in the corruption of Númenor). He needed time for his own bodily rehabilitation, and for gaining control over his former subjects. He was attacked by Gil-galad and Elendil before his new domination was fully established.

Although Tolkien doesn’t say here that Sauron was dead, in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings Tolkien writes:

…Sauron was indeed caught in the wreck of Númenor, so that the bodily form in which he long had walked perished; but he fled back to Middle-earth, a spirit of hatred borne upon the dark wind…

This is an unequivocable statement: Sauron’s body perished. The body died but, as with all things, the spirit endured. As Tolkien explained in the letter citation above, the spirit was indestructible.

When the One Ring was destroyed Sauron died a third and final time. His spirit survived but it was rendered too weak to ever again be able to re-incarnate itself in a physical, living shape. He was reduced to being “a ghost” for all intents and purposes.

Regarding Morgoth’s death, this is also an event that occurs “off stage”. Establishing the canonicity of this event is more challenging because some readers (for their own convenience, in my opinion) simply choose to ignore the “Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion” essay published in Morgoth’s Ring because it contradicts what they believe is the “true” canonical story (that is, it doesn’t support their ideas so they don’t agree with it). Tolkien private musings were not intended for the people who read his stories. They were his attempts to answer some of the difficult questions readers were submitting to him, or which he arrived at by himself, with a possible intention of somehow injecting his final decisions (when made) into future stories, including the then as-yet unfinished, unpublished Silmarillion. And regrettably Tolkien died before he could put The Silmarillion into a final form. It fell to his son Christopher to synthesize a Silmarillion text that was compatible with The Lord of the Rings – but by Christopher’s own admission that Silmarillion was neither internally consistent with itself nor with everything given in The Lord of the Rings. It was the best he could do on such short notice and he devoted 20 years to explaining his choices and his regrets in the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth.

There are two passages of interest to this discussion in the “Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion” essay. The first is the opening paragraph from section (i):

Sauron was ‘greater’, effectively, in the Second Age than Morgoth at the end of the First. Why? Because, though he was far smaller by natural stature, he had not yet fallen so low. Eventually he also squandered his power (of being) in the endeavour to gain control of others. But he was not obliged to expend so much of himself. To gain domination over Arda, Morgoth had let most of his being pass into the physical constituents of the Earth – hence all things that were born on Earth and lived on and by it, beasts or plants or incarnate spirits, were liable to be ‘stained’. Morgoth at the time of the War of the Jewels had become permanently ‘incarnate’: for this reason he was afraid, and waged the war almost entirely by means of devices, or of subordinates and dominated creatures. Sauron, however, inherited the ‘corruption’ of Arda, and only spent his (much more limited) power on the Rings; for it was the creatures of earth, in their minds and wills, that he desired to dominate. In this way Sauron was also wiser than Melkor-Morgoth. Sauron was not a beginner of discord; and he probably knew more of the ‘Music’ than did Melkor, whose mind had always been filled with his own plans and devices, and gave little attention to other things. The time of Melkor’s greatest power, therefore, was in the physical beginnings of the World; a vast demiurgic lust for power and the achievement of his own will and designs, on a great scale. And later after things had become more stable, Melkor was more interested in and capable of dealing with a volcanic eruption, for example, than with (say) a tree. It is indeed probable that he was simply unaware of the minor or more delicate productions of Yavanna: such as small flowers.

The second passage describes Morgoth’s death. This is, so far as I know, the only full explanation of how Morgoth died.

The war was successful, and ruin was limited to the small (if beautiful) region of Beleriand. Morgoth was thus actually made captive in physical form,(9) and in that form taken as a mere criminal to Aman and delivered to Namo Mandos as judge – and executioner. He was judged, and eventually taken out of the Blessed Realm and executed: that is killed like one of the Incarnates. It was then made plain (though it must have been understood beforehand by Manwe and Namo) that, though he had ‘disseminated’ his power (his evil and possessive and rebellious will) far and wide into the matter of Arda, he had lost direct control of this, and all that ‘he’, as a surviving remnant of integral being, retained as ‘himself’ and under control was the terribly shrunken and reduced spirit that inhabited his selfimposed (but now beloved) body. When that body was destroyed he was weak and utterly ‘houseless’, and for that time at a loss and ‘unanchored’ as it were. We read that he was then thrust out into the Void.(10) That should mean that he was put outside Time and Space, outside Ea altogether; but if that were so this would imply a direct intervention of Eru (with or without supplication of the Valar). It may however refer inaccurately to the extrusion or flight of his spirit from Arda.

This part of the essay goes on to say that Morgoth’s spirit, having been so mighty in its beginning, would probably heal over time and gather enough strength to reincarnate itself – but that is not an affirmation that the by-this-time abandoned “Second Prophecy of Mandos” was still in effect.

What are Readers Actually Asking of Me?

I can’t include every email here. Some are quite adamant, even argumentative or condescending. The following message was submitted in January 2018 and is one of the more thoughtful and polite inquiries I’ve received about death in Middle-earth:

There is one point that you make repeatedly that I’d like to offer a different take on. I’d be interested in your thoughts: If I understand correctly, you are saying that the inhabitants of Arda are permanently diminished by suffering violent death and, eventually, can’t come back to life. That’s certainly broadly consistent with the evidence, but it feels to me to be inconsistent with Tolkien’s general approach. (It also smacks of a bit of a D&D rules-based approach to life which Tolkien never had. It’s a bit too cut and dried.)

I’d like to suggest that what diminishes a being is *doing* evil. This is 100%-consistent with Christian thought from the earliest of recorded theological writing and would be what Tolkien had been taught as a Catholic. (And you’ll note that C. S. Lewis makes this point pretty clearly, also, though that isn’t strong evidence of what Tolkien thought.)

So Saruman falls into evil and when he dies he has spent his spirit and seemingly is dispersed entirely. Each time Morgoth is defeated, he is diminished. (Your emphasis that Sauron at his peak of power was more powerful than Morgoth at the end of the First Age is on point.) The Ringwraiths are humans (who were much weaker spirits to start with) fade to nothing except the borrowed power of their master. Sauron, like Morgoth, re-embodies himself a couple times, diminished each time, until his career of evil leaves him “maimed for ever, becoming a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows, but cannot again grow or take shape.”

Yet Gollum, Bilbo and Frodo largely escape that fate. Why? Because their sins were minor. Even Gollum was a piker in evil, mostly focusing on food! None of them took the Ring to extend their lives — a great sin for humans in Arda — like the Ringwraiths did, so they did not fade as quickly. Gandalf even says as much, that Bilbo suffered few ill effects because he took the Ring without ill intentions and never used it for evil.

The other point that strikes me is that Gandalf also dies violently, but returns more powerful than ever. As I recall, while he says he was sent back, he doesn’t say that he was given more power or anything like that. His own violent death did not diminish him. Is it possible that his heroic and self-sacrificing death in fact increased him?

I think there is much to be said for the point of view that evil corrupts and/or weakens the spirit; Tolkien seems to imply as much in the texts I cite above. But you’re still conflating multiple ideas into a single cause. The death of a self-incarnated being’s body weakened it. Tolkien described the process as being a state of mind where the slain Ainu was unable to concentrate and focus his (or her) thoughts. They were more-or-less trapped in a highly charged emotional state, becoming “spirits of malice” indeed. They were consumed by the rage because they were forcibly removed from their self-incarnated bodies.

It’s interesting that you used Gollum as an example. In The Lord of the Rings Sam is given the ability to perceive things of a spiritual nature between Frodo, Gollum, and the Ring on two occasions. The first occasion is when they are just outside the Morannon. The second time is when Gollum attacks Frodo on the slope of Mount Doom (before Frodo enters the Sammath Naur). Sam realizes in the second scene that Frodo has grown spiritually whereas Gollum has become diminished. Tolkien even comments on these changes in one of his letters. So you’re right, doing evil diminishes you spiritually. But any physical death of a self-incarnated being’s body also diminishes them, even if in a different way.

In March someone wrote the following comment in a Facebook discussion concerning my article about what Gil-galad and Elendil could have done had they captured Sauron: “I don’t understand ‘because we know that Sauron feared death Gil-galad probably stood a good chance of killing him’.” A couple of people replied with some details about how death works in Middle-earth. But I think the confusion arises from the fact that I conflated a lengthy logical deduction into a simple sentence. Let me see if I can explain.

Given what I have written above about who was subject to death in Middle-earth (everyone), it follows that Sauron was always vulnerable to being slain. But how do we know that he feared death? I did not prove that point at all, so you’re not missing anything in my answer. I didn’t explain myself adequately.

We can infer that Sauron feared death at the very end of the Third Age. When Frodo claimed the Ring for himself Sauron realized that he had been tricked by Aragorn’s gambit. He summoned the Nazgûl and abandoned all thought about the battle occurring before the Morannon. At that moment, Sauron was afraid the Ring would be destroyed. He had already died twice. He knew he wasn’t going to survive the Ring’s destruction. He foresaw his impending doom (reduced to a harmless shadow of malice and all).

But did Sauron fear death at the end of the Second Age? That’s not so easily proven but I stand by my logical deduction. Sauron refused to engage in direct physical combat with anyone during the siege of Barad-dur until he had no choice. Like Morgoth before him, who had governed his armies from deep inside Angband, Sauron sent his servants out to be slain while he remained safe in his fortress. When he did come out he attacked Gil-galad when he was still somewhat isolated from his army. Elrond says that only he, Cirdan, Elendil, and Isildur were close by. Poor Gil-galad apparently never had a chance. Elendil struck the mortal blow but Sauron managed to kill him, too.

I think, given the fact that Sauron led his armies in battle during the War of the Elves and Sauron in the middle of the Second Age, and that he had quickly come out from Mordor to surrender to Ar-Pharazôn, Sauron had previously been more willing to risk himself in battle. So what changed after he went to Númenor? He died there. Having died once, Sauron knew he could die again – and the second time he probably knew he would be even weaker than he had been after the Downfall. Also, Tolkien says he struck too soon. He wasn’t fully restored when the war began. He may not have been fully restored by the time his armies were depleted.

Finally, Gandalf’s strategy all along was to take advantage of Sauron’s assumption that anyone possessing the One Ring would want to use it, not destroy it. It never occurred to him that anyone would literally try to throw away all that power. He knew the Ring would do everything it could to save itself. Sauron was inherently self-preserving, just as we all are. Had he remained incorporeal he would have nothing to fear. But apparently he was unable to govern his slaves as effectively (or perhaps could not do so at all) if he was a disembodied spirit (not slain, but simply not “housed” in a “raiment” by choice, as Tolkien put it). To be a lord governing living creatures, Sauron himself had to take the form of a living creature, and that meant he could be slain.

He probably knew Morgoth’s fate. He surely knew that all the Umaiar who had been slain in the First Age had failed to return. I remain convinced that Sauron understood his corporeal form was mortal in the sense that it could be slain.

And therefore our knowledge that Sauron could be slain is confirmed by Sauron’s own actions. His reluctance to lead his own forces in battle or to challenge Gil-galad openly strongly implies that he believed Gil-galad could kill him. Sauron did everything he could to protect himself from a potential death. It’s a circular argument and I could have supported my conclusion that Gil-galad had a good chance of killing Sauron by a less circuitous but more tedious explanation.

See Also

What Could Gil-galad and Elendil Have Done If They Captured Sauron

Did the Elves Fear Death at All?

Did Sauron Die When the One Ring was Destroyed?

Did Gandalf Really Die after Killing the Balrog?

What Is Tom Bombadil?

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