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So I wanna come back to this post because finals just ended last week
and shawty hasn't chirped back and I've spent the ensuing free time working through some of Tolkien's letters, which wound this interpretation (but not fatally, imo). The leitmotif throughout this (brief) investigation has been the reframing of the legendarium within Tolkien's own religiosity. As he himself wrote to his son in Letter 172:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.
Pace the above Word of God, Middle-Earth is not entirely reducible to tolkiens catholicism, but it was undoubtedly informed by it. At any rate, here's what I've come up with.
The West is a promise after death.
This is untenable, per Letter 237:
The passage over Sea is not Death. The 'mythology' is Elf-centered. According to it there was at first an actual Earthly Paradise, home and realm of the Valar, as a physical part of the earth.
From this and the 2 articles from the literature I looked at, Aman, or the 'Undying Lands', is closer to Eden after the expulsion than Celestial Paradise as such. So, a real, physical place on Arda,
not a transcendent afterlife. The emendation "there was at first" is important here, Aman/Valinor was submerged after the numenoreans tried to reach it in the Silmarillion. It still exists, and is what Frodo and Bilbo sail towards, it's just been in occultation since the Second (I think?) Age. From letter 325:
The ‘immortals’ who were permitted to leave Middle-earth and seek Aman — the undying lands of Valinor and Eressëa, an island assigned to the Eldar — set sail in ships specially made and hallowed for this voyage, and steered due West towards the ancient site of these lands. They only set out after sundown; but if any keen-eyed observer from that shore had watched one of these ships he might have seen that it never became hull-down but dwindled only by distance until it vanished in the twilight: it followed the straight road to the true West and not the bent road of the earth’s surface. As it vanished it left the physical world. There was no return. The Elves who took this road and those few ‘mortals’ who by special grace went with them, had abandoned the ‘History of the world’ and could play no further part in it.
The angelic immortals (incarnate only at their own will), the Valar or regents under God, and others of the same order but less power and majesty (such as Olórin = Gandalf) needed no transport, unless they for a time remained incarnate, and they could, if allowed or commanded, return.
As for Frodo or other mortals, they could only dwell in Aman for a limited time — whether brief or long. The Valar had neither the power nor the right to confer ‘immortality’ upon them. Their sojourn was a ‘purgatory’, but one of peace and healing and they would eventually pass away (die at their own desire and of free will) to destinations of which the Elves knew nothing.
So what I said here:
It's why "The West" works as arc words: you're not literally going in a cardinal direction -iirc, he explicitly laid out that if you did, you still wouldn't reach Aman- you're passing a threshold from this world to a far green country with white shores and a swift sunrise.
Is also not true. You
are actually going due west, it's just that this isn't physically possible for mortals who haven't been beknighted with divine favor. Whether that's an actually meaningful distinction I'll leave for the reader to decide. You are still passing a threshold though. Once you've gone, you exit history, which makes that last paragraph interesting: if Frodos not dead yet, and still mortal, the only thing left for him to do is willingly kill himself to reach a "destination of which the Elves know nothing." Whether that undiscovered country is the same thing as Celestial Paradise? Who knows.
The Silmarillion feels like the Bible in that there are a bunch of alien geometries and spatial/temporal ambiguities you just can't square away if you go in with the attitude that everything on the map in the appendix is a 1 for 1 representation of the proverbial thing-in-the-world...You can do that in fantasy, you can imagine time and space differently. I think that's one of the strongest points in favor of it as a genre and it's why I feel confident in drawing a lineage between Tolkien and works like Beowulf which, for obvious reasons, don't share our modernist sympathies.
So, this is the rub and I think it's still broadly defensible. Tolkien
always hedges his remarks in these letters. Lines like "The 'mythology' is Elf-centered" are symptomatic and 100% deliberate. I initially had a tough time squaring away that kind of language with this new insight on Aman/Valinor but what I think he's doing here is creating a space for competing interpretations in-universe. Whether Iluvatar sunk the undying lands in moral retribution for the numenoreans hubris or a cataclysmic physical event ocurred that profoundly changed the geography of middle earth isn't the point. The point is to imitate the texts that run these distinctions together. The legendarium is misty in the same way the Beowulf we've inherited is.
**I have never read Heidegger either 
The allusion to Heidegger's in-der-Welt-sein, or, being-in-the-world, doesn't work here. You could've picked literally any other writer in the continental phenomenological tradition to make this joke. But you didn't. And that's ok. We learn, we grow, we special fellow
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