page_title: Valinor
section_title: Paradise
hierarchical_section_title: Valinor / Reception / Paradise
caption_attribution_description: Gawain Poet (fl. c.1375–1400), manuscript painting [as the father in Pearl]
context_page_description: Valinor is a fictional location in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the realm of the Valar on the continent of Aman, far to the west of Middle-earth; he used the name Aman mainly to mean Valinor. It included Eldamar, the land of the Elves, who as immortals had been permitted to live in Valinor.
  Aman was known somewhat misleadingly as "the Undying Lands", but the land itself, while blessed, did not cause mortals to live forever. However, only immortal beings were generally allowed to reside there. Exceptionally, the surviving bearers of the One Ring, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee, were allowed to dwell there for a time.
  Scholars have described the similarity of Tolkien's myth of the attempt of Númenor to capture Aman to the biblical Tower of Babel and the ancient Greek Atlantis, and the resulting destruction in both cases. They note, too, that a mortal's stay in Valinor is only temporary, not conferring immortality, just as in Dante's Paradiso, the Earthly Paradise is only a preparation for the Celestial Paradise that is above.
context_section_description: Keith Kelly and Michael Livingston, writing in Mythlore, note that Frodo's final destination is Aman, the Undying Lands. In Tolkien's mythology, they write, the islands of Aman were initially just the dwelling-places of the Valar (in the Ages of the Trees, while the rest of the world lay in darkness) who helped The One, Eru Iluvatar, to create the world, but gradually some of the immortal and ageless Elves were allowed to live there as well, sailing across the ocean to the West. After the fall of Númenor and the reshaping of the world, Aman becomes the place "between (sic) Over-heaven and Middle-earth", accessible only in special circumstances like Frodo's, allowed to come to Aman through the offices of the Valar and of Gandalf, one of the Valar's emissaries, the Maiar. However, Aman is not, they write, exactly paradise: firstly, being there does not confer immortality, contrary to what the Númenoreans supposed; and secondly, those mortals like Frodo who are allowed to go there will eventually choose to die. They note that in another of Tolkien's writings, Leaf by Niggle, understood to be a journey through Purgatory (the Catholic precursor stage to paradise), Tolkien avoids describing paradise at all; they suggest that to Tolkien, it is impossible to describe Heaven, and it might be sacrilege to make the attempt. The Tolkien scholar Michael D. C. Drout comments that Tolkien's accounts of Eldamar "give us a good idea of his conceptions of absolute beauty," and notes that these resemble the paradise described in the Middle English poem Pearl. The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey adds that in 1927 Tolkien wrote a poem, The Nameless Land, in the complex stanza-form of Pearl which spoke of a land further away than paradise, and more beautiful than the Irish Tir nan Og, the deathless otherworld. Kelly and Livingston similarly draw on Pearl, noting that it states that "fair as was the hither shore, far lovelier was the further land" where the Dreamer could not pass. So, they write, each stage looks like paradise, until the traveller realises that beyond it lies something even more parasisiacal, glimpsed and beyond description. The Earthly Paradise can be described; Aman, the Undying Lands, can thus be compared to the Garden of Eden, the paradise that the Bible says once existed upon Earth before the Fall of Man, while the Celestial Paradise lies "beyond (or above)", as it does, they note, in Dante's Paradiso.
caption: Earthly Paradise: Eldamar has been compared to the place dreamed of in the Middle English poem Pearl.[7] Miniature from Cotton Nero A.x shows the Dreamer on the other side of the stream from the Pearl-maiden.
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