I think it is stretching Tolkien's intent to compare the World of Men in the
Fourth Age (Elessar's Gondor and Arnor) as it appears to the adventuring
Hobbits, to the world of Faerie. It is a bit of a put-up to call Elessar and
Arwen the "King and Queen of Faerie," and Gondor "what remains of Faerie in
Middle-earth."
Inside the story, Faerie is distinctly and explicitly the world of the Elves,
as embodied in Lorien and Rivendell, and even in the Elves' own presence in
Middle-earth wherever they go, as with Gildor's traveling company in the Shire.
Merry and Pippin have seen the real Faerie on their journeys. They do not go
there at the end of their lives, but not because it is gone: Elves still linger
in Rivendell; Lorien is fading and its inhabitants dwindling. Merry and Pippin
do not go there to die, they go to the center of the mundane world in the Age
of Men, the Fourth Age: Gondor.
The Shire IS mundane -- that is its function in the story for the Hobbits who
as the story's heroes stand in for us mundane modern readers. But much of the
rest of Middle-earth is mundane too, as we see throughout the epic -- and
Edoras and Minas Tirith are mundane. Bergil and Beregond and Theoden and Eomer
get their eyes opened during Lord of the Rings as much as the hobbits do. But
Gondor and Rohan, compared to the Shire, are Heroic, not Faerie-like. Heroism
is something mortals can do without Faerie being involved, and I think Heroism
is what Merry and Pippin miss in their old age, and what they seek when they
leave their families and retire to Gondor.
Merry and Pippin are more in the position of fleeing a children's nursery to
regain the world of grown-ups, as Gandalf correctly calls them at the end of
the epic. The Shire is child-like and simple. Gondor is mature and
sophisticated and in touch with the currents of the world, past, present and
future. Gondor honors courage and deeds and wisdom and art; evidently, in the
Fourth Age, the Shire continues to ignore these things, despite the return of
the Travelers and their lifetimes of leadership there.
Tolkien's description of a mortal seeking and settling in the land of Faerie is
always one of an adult trying to shed an adult sensibility and regain a
child-like wonder and interest in the spiritual and fantastical and
imaginative. Merry and Pippin are doing the opposite at the end of their lives.
I regret it, as I said in my earlier post, because I wish they could be happy
with where they come from; I wish that they had had a more maturing effect on
the Shire, so that they could be comfortable with dying there.
(Of course, from outside the story, all of Middle-earth is Faerie in Tolkien's
scheme, a secondary world of fantasy and escape for 20th-century readers. But
by that standard, I would rank even the Shire, with its Little People living in
holes and leading child-like, trouble-free lives, as an integral, magical part
of that Faerie
land.)
"Admittedly, Aragorn is rather more difficult to know truly than any other important person in the story. The fault is partly Tolkien's. As noted...when he first brought Aragorn and the hobbits together at Bree he 'had then no more notion than they had of who Strider was...' Consequently, Tolkien had not put into the narrative before then any preparatory allusions to Strider's real identity, his present reasons for interest in the Ring, and his many past years of travel and labor connected with it in the Wild...Even at Rivendell we may well miss the bare hints which are all that Tolkien finds space for about Aragorn's love for Arwen since youth. Yet this, along with his concurrent planning to recover the throne of Gondor, is basic motivation without a knowledge of which Aragorn remains a mystery. Unless a reader is very alert...he can easily wake up somewhere in Volume III with a shock of total suprise at Aragorn's approaching marriage to the lady." -Paul Kocher, Chapter VI, "Aragorn" in "Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien", 1972.
