THEOLOGICAL RETICENCE AND MORAL RADIANCE: NOTES ON TOLKIEN, LEVINAS, AND INUIT COSMOLOGY

There was also an accepted tradition of suicide, assisted by one's family on request, among elders who saw that their infirmities endangered the family's survival and that "life was [now] heavier than death" (Freudien 149).2 Arctic travelers Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freudien both report the terrible choices made during famines, which only began by having to eat your dogs and then your clothing; Rasmussen, on one of his journeys in the 1920s, was told of the rescue of a starving woman who in her extremity had eaten the bodies of her husband and children (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 7.1.29-32). The economy of means imposed by severely limited resources led to astonishing ingenuities: blocks of snow as building materials, seal oil as food and fuel, urine as cleaning agent, sled runners made of driftwood or even of fish rolled in animal skins and frozen (and edible, at least by the dogs, at the end of the journey). In terms of The Lord of the Rings, we may note that Gollum is always on the edge of starvation-and besides eating worms, raw fish, and other things that revolt Frodo and Sam, has attempted in desperate hunger to reach the bodies in the Dead Marshes, the casualties of the Battle of Dagorlad, preserved like the bog people of Denmark for thousands of years (unless they are mere illusions). Aragom may be Isildur's heir and the potential King Elessar, but he is first of all Strider, who earns his authority by protecting others, at the repeated risk of his life and his future.