writes Verlyn Flieger. Tolkien's extensive use of duality and parallelism, contrast and opposition is found throughout the novel, in pairings such as hope and despair, knowledge and enlightenment, death and immortality, fate and free will, good and evil. Death and immortality Tolkien stated in his Letters that the core theme of The Lord of the Rings is death and the human desire to escape it: He commented further: An appendix tells The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, in which the immortal elf Arwen chooses mortality so that she can marry the mortal man Aragorn. After more than two hundred years of life, Aragorn chooses the time of his death, leaving behind a heartbroken and now-mortal Arwen. She travels to the faded remains of Lothlórien, where she was once blissfully happy, to die on a flat stone next to the river Nimrodel. This theme recurs throughout the book, and in specific sayings and poems such as Gilraen's linnod and the Lament of the Rohirrim. Good and evil The Lord of the Rings presents a sharp polarity between good and evil. Orcs, the most maligned of races, are in one interpretation a corruption of the mystically exalted race of the Elves. Minas Morgul, the Tower of Sorcery, home of the Lord of the Nazgûl, the most corrupted King of Men, directly opposes Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard and the capital of Gondor, the last visible remnant of the ancient kingdom of Men in the Third Age. Mordor, the land of the Dark Lord Sauron, is opposed to Gondor and to all free peoples. These antitheses, though pronounced and prolific, are sometimes considered to be too polarizing, but they have also been argued to be at the heart of the structure of the entire story. Tolkien's technique has been seen to "confer literality on what would in the primary world be called metaphor and then to illustrate [in his secondary world] the process by which the literal becomes metaphoric". The theologian Fleming Rutledge argues, on the other hand, that Tolkien aims instead to show that no definite line can be drawn between good and evil, because "'good' people can be and are capable of evil under certain circumstances". Fate and free will In the chapter "The Shadow of the Past", Gandalf discusses the possibility that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and that Gollum has an important part to play, the