Death stalked JRR Tolkien through his childhood and his youth. Nowadays, we are most of us blessed with parents who live on to our own middle age, and friends who grow up alongside us. In Tolkien’s case, his father died when he was four and his mother when he was 12; enlisting in the army as a young man, as he remarks in the preface to The Lord of the Rings, by 1918 when he was 26, all but one of his closest friends were dead, killed in the First World War. So, yes, Tolkien knew death, personally and all too intimately.

This is a poem about death as indeed much of The Lord of the Rings is too. But where does that ship take us?

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

That’s how Philip Larkin describes it. But Tolkien, it seems, keeps faith with his characters, when faced with that final, definitive choice: “let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!”

Is death catastrophe or Eucatastrophe? Believing, hoping, despite all the evidence of his life, the latter, Tolkien produced The Lord of the Rings and all the wide realms of Middle-earth. Pascal’s Wager and Puddleglum’s vow hold true: better to live as a Narnian, even if there is no Narnia, for the black-sailed ship has no waters in its wake.