No One Should Be Without Fellowship Tolkien on the Subject of Death

At the foot of burning Mount Doom, Samwise the gardener kneels beside his friend, Frodo, who can no longer walk. Frodo has been carrying a great weight– the One Ruling Ring, which grows heavier with every step. As Sam watches his friend press onward at a crawl, he knows he cannot carry the weight on his friend’s behalf, much as he yearns to. Then, remembering a promise he had once made to Frodo, he says, “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well.”

This scene comes from the third volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Frodo and Sam have endured a seemingly unending night. We, an educator-chaplain and a psychologist, both devoted readers, have spent weeks with them, following their trek from the idyllic Shire to volcanic, treacherous Mordor, where the fate of Middle-earth will be decided. We had come to the trilogy ready for a summer of second breakfasts and reading in the balmy evening air. Instead, we found ourselves drawn into places we hadn’t planned to go—scenes we recognize from very different rooms.

It is not Frodo’s suffering that strikes us, but Sam’s response to it: his refusal to leave a friend. We have seen that kind of devotion before: in hospital corridors, in school hallways gone quiet, at many bedsides in old age homes, and in counselling offices. What Tolkien understood, and what our work has taught us, is that mortality asks more of us than acceptance. It asks us to accompany one another through dying, grief and loss. Yet, in a culture that has grown increasingly uncomfortable with death, we have forgotten how to do that.

Between us, we have witnessed moments where people are brought to the edge of loss long before they are prepared for it. A teenage boy reading aloud to his grandfather, his voice steady until it was not; a woman braiding her dying mother’s hair in a hospital bed; holding the hand of someone taking their last breath, until the room fell quiet; wheelchairs pushed to the edge of a forest in autumn so their occupants could smell the leaves one last time.

We have seen how often there are no words for these moments. Children flinching at the word “dead” because no one had given them the language; parents who admitted, with genuine bewilderment, that their child had never encountered death before and they didn’t know what to tell them; and children and adults alike who insisted they were fine, boxing up tears and pasting on smiles.

None of the people who approach this cusp alongside those they love has the power to prevent the inevitable. But we can still hold each other up along the way. Because we have hidden from death, we have also lost the art of accompanying one another through dying, grief and loss. This ability to turn toward the reality of death in service of another is, in our view, incredibly rare.

Writing from different vantage points, we arrived at the same conclusion: People’s refusal to speak about death, our tendency to tiptoe around it or sweep it under the rug altogether, protects no one. We spend our days in places our culture works hardest to keep death away from: the counselling room, the classroom and the hospital room. The longer we do this work, the more convinced we become that a 70-year-old fantasy novel about an unlikely Fellowship of Elves, Dwarves, Men and Hobbits, travelling together toward an impossible task, not to mention ancient walking trees, is as good a meditation on grief and mortality as any. “The Lord of the Rings” shows just how extraordinary it can be to accompany the dying to the brink.

A Book About Death

Readers often assume that “The Lord of the Rings” is about power, war or the battle between good and evil—and for good reason. Yet, Tolkien himself described the central theme of his books as “death and immortality.” When pressed by a BBC interviewer later in life, he expanded: “Stories […] are always about one thing—death. The inevitability of death.” Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey has argued that this was personal: Tolkien lost both parents when he was a child and three of his closest friends in the trenches of the Somme, and spent the rest of his life building a mythology capacious enough to hold the grief he carried.

Read the book through this lens, and it might reorganize itself before your eyes. Or the story’s preoccupation with death may emerge organically, as it did for us. The Ring—the burden Frodo carries— is, at its core, an immortality device—yet it corrodes its bearer, leaving Frodo wilted and famished on the slopes of Mount Doom. The Elves are immortal, imprisoned by their own deathlessness, and doomed to watch what they cherish slip away across the centuries. Even in their woodland refuge of Lothlórien, the elf Haldir admits that love in the fading world is mingled with grief, and love is strengthened because of this. The Númenóreans, the greatest kingdom of mortal men, destroy themselves precisely because they cannot accept their own mortality. They build elaborate tombs and pour their wealth into preserving dead flesh. They let the fear of ending eat their living culture from the inside out.

We see our similarities with the Númenóreans in our work as a teacher and a psychologist, where students take in reports of school shootings and then have to step into their own classrooms come morning. Death is everywhere, laced into headlines, sliced through social feeds in the most distressing ways imaginable. Children today are among the most informed generations in history yet the least prepared for what they see.

They absorb news of death constantly. Video games amplify murder and death without consequence or pause, soundbites tell of lives lost to natural disasters, books, feeds, shows, videos, and all this sanitized by the absence of conversation and emotion. We, the adults meant to steady them, sweat our worries, wondering how much is too much if we dare to speak. And so, we stay silent or whisper “I’m sorry.”

We treat death as disgraceful, too perilous to bring into the light. In doing so, we abandon our children to handle it alone. We forget or willfully unknow that children have the capacity to learn about death. That they know grief and internalize loss without their parents being the wiser. Stomach aches, nausea, temper tantrums, nightmares and a sudden unwillingness to be left behind by parents or teachers (once-securely attached children demonstrating insecure or avoidant attachment) show up in classrooms and counselling offices alike. Yet rarely does anyone ask the simplest question: Could this child have experienced a recent loss?

Then there are the Hobbits: small, hungry and famously unambitious in the capitalist sense, quite content to tend their gardens and prepare six meals a day. They are the most mortal creatures in Middle-earth, thoroughly embedded in the cycles of growth and decay, and yet they are clear-eyed, merry and ravenous for life. They farm, they cook, they compost, they bury their dead and they plant trees over them. They are also the only creatures in the story who can carry the Ring without being consumed by it.

In Tolkien’s fantasy, the creatures most at peace with endings are also those who are the least corruptible by the promise of evading this end. The Ring offers a way to outlast one’s natural lifespan, but Tolkien is unambiguous regarding how cheating death will exact its toll.

In this mythology, death is called the “Gift of Ilúvatar.” This is the Creator’s gift to humankind and the envy of the immortal Elves. It is an avenue beyond the world’s borders, a passage into the unknown. Death is the root system from which the whole story grows.

We do not have to share Tolkien’s Catholic metaphysics to grasp what he shows us. Whether or not the theology holds, the insight remains: Mortality is not our enemy but a precondition, one that makes life more precious. In Hobbit terms, the season is short, so the garden is worth weeding. It is perhaps Aragorn, the rightful king, who puts it best on his deathbed, as he refuses to cling on beyond his final hour: “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! We are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”

A Crisis of Accompaniment

Today, we are living through what we might call a crisis of accompaniment. Loneliness is at epidemic levels, communities are fragmented, institutions burn out their inhabitants and the rituals that once allowed us to metabolize the hardest facts of being human have been discarded. It is harder than ever to be like Sam—to lift a suffering friend onto our backs.

The crisis of accompaniment is not a metaphor. Hospitals across North America have resorted to creating a formal volunteer program, No One Dies Alone (NODA), because people are dying without anyone present. Some individuals have outlived their friends and family; other loved ones just couldn’t make it to the healthcare facilities. At one hospital in Utah, two to three patients die unaccompanied every month.

In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a national epidemic, noting that the lack of social connection carries health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. One in five American adults now reports having no close friends. This share has doubled since the 1990s. We haven’t simply lost the rituals of accompaniment. We’ve lost the habit of showing up.

In contemporary Western culture, we tend to look away. We usher death behind hospital curtains, keep the doors of funeral homes firmly closed and reach for euphemisms like passed and lost, as though plain language were cruel. If we grieve, we do so in private. We take the day off work, send students home. We apologize for public tears, brushing them away awkwardly or slipping out to cry alone. We refuse to take up space, locking away our heartache and returning to routine to make everyone else comfortable. We increasingly pathologize sadness, even though grief is not a mental illness. While diagnoses such as “Prolonged Grief Disorder” have an important place for those whose suffering becomes overwhelming, they also risk narrowing our expectations of what grief should look like, especially in a culture that encourages people to grieve quietly and move on quickly.

It is possible that some of what we seek to treat is, at least in part, the consequence of grieving in isolation rather than community. What we call disordered grief may also be disordered accompaniment. Before asking how to shorten grief, we should ask whether the bereaved have enough people with whom to carry it.

Tolkien imagines another way. When Boromir falls, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, his closest companions, do not hide their tears. They grieve openly, together, before laying their friend to rest.

Both of us have spent many years teaching teenagers and are still astonished by how readily the topic of death is skirted in the classroom. Death may sit at the heart of all our stories, but the impulse to swerve it is visceral. Meanwhile, death is hardly missing from students’ lives. In the United States, over 1,000 children are newly bereaved every day. Estimates suggest that, by the end of high school, roughly one in 11 students will experience the death of a parent or sibling. In the UK, approximately one recently bereaved child sits in every classroom. The statistics are staggering and, when considered alongside the increasing isolation and absence of community, we see the price of silence.

Children learn to grieve through social connection. They are often far more open to death than the adults around them. They want to tell stories about the person who died: what they miss most, what they wish the person could see, and they cry without apology. Families with a grief vocabulary have securely attached kids who know they can rage about loss, cry about their pain, laugh about fond memories and trust their caregivers will listen. Whether those practices are grounded in faith, family tradition or a community of choice, shared rituals of remembrance remind children that grief is something to be carried together, not hidden alone. Children are also less likely to see grief as something that should be over within a prescribed time. Instead, they understand that sorrow returns in unexpected moments and unfamiliar places, and that there is room to keep loving and remembering those who have died.

As Tolkien says, human stories remain preoccupied with death. We need to urgently welcome death back: to our classrooms, our gardens, our dinner tables, our hospital rooms. Our silence around it hasn’t made us more content. Instead, it has left us more fragile, less held, more afraid. Like Tolkien’s Númenóreans, a civilization destroyed by its refusal to accept mortality, we risk impoverishing life itself when we refuse to make peace with its ending.

Talking about death won’t kill us; so says one of our favorite t-shirts. If anything, it only renders us braver, gentler, more alert to the improbable wonder of existing at all. As Gandalf says, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” Yet, recognizing time as a precious gift does us little good if we’re so frightened of its running out that we can’t feel its weight while it rests in our hands. Death is what gives life its urgency, and with it, its sweetness. Like Gandalf’s Elvish cordial, life is warming while it lasts, but worth sipping slowly, lest the flask run dry too soon.

Meals, Songs, Gardens, and the Importance of Ritual

Middle-earth is dense with practices of remembrance. Tolkien understood what modern society has largely forgotten, that care is sustained through ordinary ritual, through moments of pause, even when the plot has us wanting speed.

When Gandalf falls in Moria, for instance, the Fellowship cannot stop to rescue him, but those in Lothlórien can and do, once an eagle flies in to lift him up again. The Elves sing their laments while the Hobbits sit down and give grief its hour, weeping before they flee. When Boromir dies, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli place him in a boat with his sword and the weapons of his enemies, improvising a water funeral in wartime to give him his due. In Rohan, a vast, grassy kingdom of skilled horseman and farmers, the burial mounds of kings stand in a line outside the city walls, planted with simbelmynë, the white flower whose name means “Evermind” and which blooms in graves every season. Here, the dead are part of the earth, the landscape and the view. When Théoden, the 17th king of Rohan, dies, he dies without fear, saying, “I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now feel ashamed.”

There is also something to learn from the Hobbits’ dedication to their six meals a day, not just its endearing comedy, but what it stands for. The devotion to food and ritual echoes the way communal ceremony has long been our most life-affirming response to death and grief—at wakes and funerals, baked into the casseroles that appear on doorsteps in hours of need.

We have largely shelved these rituals. We’ve convinced ourselves the only fitting way to move through loss together is in silence, and so we mostly stand alone in our grief. Yet, when we sing, gather to cook (whether with an appetite or not), and settle into a grandparent’s living room to listen to a story, we draw death nearer to life, and life nearer to death.

The Enduring Magic of Grief’s Wild Garden

The last lines of “The Lord of the Rings” do not belong to a great king or wizard but rather to the humble gardener Sam. He stands at the Grey Havens, watching a ship carry Frodo to a shore he cannot reach. Frodo does not die in this moment, but he leaves Middle-earth for the Undying Lands – a place beyond the world of mortals, where the wounded are healed and the journey of ordinary life cannot follow. Sam goes right toward the cusp between this world and the next, and lingers there long enough to see his friend across. Then, he turns around and begins to ride home.

Coming up the hills as evening closes in, he spies a yellow light in the windows, which speaks to the promise of dinner waiting on the table, an expectant family ready to receive him. Once home again, sitting at the dinner table, he draws a breath and says, “Well, I’m back.”

Sam is not promised any reunion with Frodo beyond the veil. His anchor is the plain-and-steady prospect of a warm meal in a welcoming home, with people who were looking out for him all along. Tolkien, as devout as he was, chose to end his great meditation on death not at the gates of heaven, but approaching the dinner table in a home filled with life.

This is what we are asking for in our schools, homes, hospitals and across our often-fraying communities: a culture not afraid of death but at home with it, with classrooms that can hold more than 30 seconds of silence for a student’s dead parent or sibling, and curricula that can ask questions about what we might want our last conversations to look like. We need tables set deliberately, with food and song and terrible jokes and the names of the dead spoken freely.

Research bears this out. Some recent studies argue that schools should include education about death and grief in the curriculum so that children are better prepared to cope with bereavement. They find that most teachers lack the training to support grieving students, calling for better resources, safe spaces and room for children to express how loss feels.

Teaching about death needn’t amount to bleak assemblies decked out with gauche slideshows on the five stages of grief. It might look like storytime in a kindergarten class where a teacher reads a children’s story and invites students to talk together about grief or loss. It might look like a literature class staying with a death scene and asking, “What would you want your last conversation to be?”, or a geography lesson dwelling for a while on the soil, alive with microbial webs, and the abundance that springs up alongside decay. A philosophy class can hold the question “What makes a life meaningful?” with the seriousness required to let the answer account for the end of life.

Even when death isn’t our chosen topic, we can fight the reflex to look away from wherever it surfaces in the course of daily life. We might then begin to notice just how frequently it does. What if we normalize asking someone to tell us their favorite memory about someone who has died? What if we keep asking beyond a day or a week or a year? What if we welcome mortality into our stories along with shared tears and laughter and a collaborative understanding of how our stories interconnect?

We cannot carry the weight of death for each other. But we can carry each other, as Sam carries Frodo, when we need someone else’s company to forge onwards through the land of the living. We can light the fire at home and set the table, ready to catch our family members when they lose someone close to them.

No one should have to be on their journey without Fellowship.