A recurring theme or motif throughout Tolkien's writing is a longing for the sea (the "sea-heart" ). <BR><BR>This is felt in LOTR by Elves (Legolas), and Elf-friends (Frodo) who feel the call to <i>pass over</i> the Sea to Valinor. It is clear that this is not (literally) death, but just a passage to a different place in Arda. Yet going to Elvenhome <i>seems</i> like a symbolic death of sorts, and while some Men are called by the Sea, most sensible Dwarves and Hobbits shun it:<OL>And as the days of the Shire lengthened they spoke less and less with the Elves, and grew afraid of them, and distrustful of those that had dealings with them; and the Sea became a word of fear among them, and a token of death, and they turned their faces away from the hills in the west.<BR>-LOTR Prologue</OL>It is the Sea itself that stirs Legolas' heart and troubles Frodo's dreams, more than what lies beyond it. Why does it so call them? The Silmarillion tells us that water retains an echo of the Music of the Ainur, and the Sea carries messages to mortals from the Valar through Ulmo <i>"But they have not skill in such matters, and still less had they in those days before they had mingled with the Elves. Therefore they loved the waters, and their hearts were stirred, but they understood not the messages."</i> <BR>These appear to be good reasons why the Sea affects the heart of Men as it does. But they are later explanations for a motif that goes back to the Book of Lost Tales, the earliest version of the Silmarillion told to a human mariner who sailed to the Lonely Isle (<i>"then sea-longing gripped Ottor Waefre: he was a son of Earendel, born under his beam. If a beam from Earendel fall on a child new-born he becomes 'a child of Earendel' and a wanderer."</i> - a Christopher Tolkien note from BoLT 1.)<BR><BR>The Elves had the greatest affinity with the Sea, and it seems (to me) that sea-longing could be in some ways a desire to aspire to "Elvishness". Along with the example of Frodo (and perhaps even the great Elf-friend Gimli, who overcame his natural antipathy to the Sea to sail it with Legolas), we also have Tuor:<OL>he came suddenly to the black brink of Middle-earth, and saw the Great Sea, Belegaer the Shoreless. And at that hour the sun went down beyond the rim of the world, as a mighty fire; and Tuor stood alone upon the cliff with outspread arms, and a great yearning filled his heart. It is said that he was the first of Men to reach the Great Sea, and that none, save the Eldar, have ever felt more deeply the longing that it brings.</OL>And Tuor, of course, eventually joined the Elven race when he sailed into the West.<BR><BR>The British (islanders) have traditionally thought of themselves as seafarers, but Tolkien may have been drawing on older sources for his ideas about the importance of the Sea. There must be an echo in the idea of sailing to the Elven Lonely Isle in the Western Ocean, with legends such as Avallone of the Arthurian myths, or Tir-na-n'Og of Celtic myths (the island of perpetual youth, existing within the world but outside time). <BR><BR>Sometimes they come back, too. The Atlantis myth was one with which Tolkien seemingly felt a personal connexion, and it, or similar stories of advanced people bearing corn and civilisation to Men of Middle-earth (eg Sheave, legendary first king of the Saxons who appeared among them in a boat from the west), inspired Tolkien's Numenoreans returning to Middle-earth, both as benevolent rulers of Numenore early in the Second Age then later fleeing from its downfall. In Letter #163 Tolkien says<BR><OL>a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation....his heart may remember, even if he has been cut off from all oral tradition, the rumour all along the coasts of the Men out of the Sea.<BR>I say this about the 'heart', for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex...</OL>and in letter #227<OL>The legends of Numenore are .... not based on special knowledge, but on a special personal concern with this tradition of the culture-bearing men of the Sea, which so profoundly affected the imagination of peoples of Europe with westward-shores.</OL><BR>This post has a lot of quototations, but I'm trying to convey a feeling as much as prove a point. I can't say just what the "sea-heart" represented to Tolkien, (wander-lust, Elvishness, escapism, death...), or even if he had any sort of consistent feelings associated with it at all. But it seems to me to be an idea always running through Tolkien's work that must have resonated with him in a personal way.<BR>Various strands of Tolkien's idea of "sea-longing" are brought together in this quote from Lowdham's dream in part 2 of the Notion Club Papers (<i>Sauron Defeated</i>, History of Middle-earth 9).<OL>'I had been in Iraland more than once; and wherever I went I sought tales of the Great Sea and what lay out upon it, or beyond, if haply it had any further shore. Folk had not much to tell for certain; but there was talk of one Maelduin who had sailed to new lands, and of the holy Brendan and others. And some there were who said that there had been a land of Men away west in long days of yore, but that it had been cast down and those that escaped had come to Eriu (so they called Iraland) in their ships, and their descendants lived on there, and in other lands about the shores of Garsecg. But they dwindled and forgot, and nought now was left of them but a wild strain in the blood of men of the West. "And you will know those that have it by the sea-longing that is on them," they said; "and it is many that it draws out west to their death or to come never back among living men."<BR><BR>'And I thought that maybe the blood of such men ran in my father's veins and my own, for our kin had long been settled at Glastonbury, where there was rumour of strange comers out of the sea in days of old. And the sound of the winds and seas on the west beaches was ever a restless music to me, at once a pain and a desire; and the pain was keener in Spring, and the desire stronger in Autumn. And now it was Autumn, and the desire was scarcely to be borne; for I was growing old. And the seas were wide. So I mused, forgetting once again where I was, but not sleeping.<BR><BR>'I heard the crash of waves on the black cliffs, and sea-birds wailing; snow fell. Then the sea opened before me, pale and boundless. And now the sun shone above me, and the land and the sound of it and the smell of it fell far behind. Treowine was beside me, and we were alone, going west. And the sun came down and sank towards the sea before us, and still we sailed west, on towards the setting sun, and the longing in my heart drew me on against my fear and land-bound will. And so I passed into night in the midst of the deep waters, and I thought that a sweet fragrance was borne on the air.'...</OL>Then the dream ends.<BR>