I say this is beautiful, I think you are strange

I really hope someone has written some good papers on the theme of outsiderness in Middle-Earth. For all his meticulous classification of Stoors and Fallohides and Vanyar and Teleri and cetrer, more often than not Tolkien's protagonists are outliers in their own cultures. "Still it is probable that Bilbo . . . although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father, got something a bit queer in his make-up from the Took side, something that only waited for a chance to come out"—which is the entire emotional arc of The Hobbit, as Bilbo realizes this unsuspected flair for riddles and adventures and all sorts of heroic, disreputable πολυτροπία (The Annotated Hobbit: look at these Norse and Germanic inspirations! My brain: look at these Odyssean motifs! I fail critical study forever) that will characterize him for the rest of his days.¹ Frodo never even passes for ordinary; upon coming of age, "he at once began to carry on Bilbo's reputation for oddity," studying maps and visiting Elves and dreaming of far-off mountains, "and to the amazement of sensible folk he was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight." A king's niece of Rohan, Éowyn would die in battle before she would consent "to stay behind bars, until use or old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire"; so it is appropriate that the man she marries is "gentle in bearing . . . a lover of lore and of music" whose heart is not in warfare, the reluctant Captain of Gondor, Faramir. Arwen relinquishes not only immortality, but all her kindred and their world in choosing Aragorn over Valinor.² And Sam, the steadfast gardener? "Crazy about stories of the old days he is"—and a storyteller himself: "I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?" There's not a farmboy with a destiny in the lot. The vaguely closest we get is Aragorn, as Elrond's fosterling and Isildur's heir, but he's frankly too complex for a die-stamped Campbellian archetype. And somehow out of this model we get David Eddings' Belgariad and Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, whose character development I can barely contemplate without bleeding from the ears? It's very strange. Tolkien's imitators seem to have taken his maps, but very little of his atmosphere.

1. And beyond, immortalized by his eccentricity and his disappearance as "a fireside-story for young hobbits . . . Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold."

2. And not even their spirits will meet in the afterlife, something that did not quite register the first time I read the books: "None saw her last meeting with Elrond her father, for they went up into the hills and there spoke long together, and bitter was their parting that should endure beyond the ends of the world." There is familial precedent in the choices of Lúthien and Elros, but that does not make Arwen's decision any less grave.