By James Mahoney

“Elf mage Frieren and her courageous fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. But Frieren will long outlive the rest of her former party. How will she come to understand what life means to the people around her?” That is the back-cover synopsis for the popular fantasy manga series Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. The main character, the titular Frieren, is a thousand-year-old elven mage. As the story begins, she is accompanying her fellow adventurers on a victory parade after they successfully defeated the Demon King. A frequent premise in Japanese fantasy manga is that the ultimate goal of the protagonists’ quest is to defeat a great evil; Frieren subverts this particular premise by starting the story after the protagonists have completed their epic quest. Instead of a great send-off as the heroes embark on their epic journey, the story begins with a heroes’ welcome and asks, in essence, ‘What next?’ As human beings with finite lives, ‘what next?’ is a question that consumes much of our attention. What do we do with the time we have? And what would happen if we had abnormally more of it than anyone else? How would that affect who we are, and how we relate to the world around us? What if we were immortal?

For Frieren’s companions, the humans Himmel and Heiter, and the dwarf Eisen, the intent is to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Frieren’s perspective is remarkably different than a human’s perspective, given that her lifespan as an elf is measured in millenia rather than a few mere decades. She and her companions watch a meteor shower called the Era Meteors, which occur every fifty years, and she tells them that she will watch the next meteor shower with them as well. In the meantime, she goes off into the world again to continue her search for interesting magical spells and spellbooks.

The story picks up fifty years later as Frieren sees the Era Meteors with her companions again; shortly thereafter, Himmel the hero passes away of natural causes. The other human, the priest Heiter, is likewise advanced in years by this point, but he asks Frieren to take on a young human girl named Fern as her apprentice. Frieren spends several years teaching Fern how to use magic, which seems like a blink of an eye to the long-lived elf, but she resists the idea of taking on an apprentice. Only when Heiter himself dies does Frieren concede to the man’s request and take Fern as her apprentice. At this point, she makes it her quest to reach “Heaven,” which is a place hidden under the fallen Demon King’s castle, a place where she may be able to communicate with the dead and say her final farewells to Himmel, whom she has come to regret not getting to know better during her time adventuring with him (this despite spending a full ten years of her life on their quest to defeat the Demon King). She recruits her former companion Eisen’s own apprentice, the warrior Stark, to accompany her on her journey as well. Eisen, however, is too old to make the trip and refuses. Even as a dwarf, a fantasy race that is still much longer-lived than a human, his lifespan is much shorter than her own. Throughout the story, Frieren’s perspective is shown to be very alien to her human companions. She thinks nothing of spending months or even years on side-quests and detours from their primary goal. Her human companions must keep her on-task to make sure that they don’t end up whiling away their whole lives on what Frieren considers a momentary diversion.

In Frieren’s world, elves seem to be a race in decline, which is a common fantasy trope. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End exhibits a world in which that decline has almost become terminal. Another elf, a monk named Kraft whom Frieren and her companions encounter during their journey remarks that he had not seen another elf in three or four hundred years. Frieren herself even comments to her companions that she thinks that elves as a race are on the verge of extinction: they have hardly any desire to reproduce, and even if they did, there are so few of them left that it is hard to even find another of their own kind. Strangely, this does not bother her. The only other two elves that show up in the story, the great elven mage Serie and the elven monk Kraft, seem to be of similar views. Neither seem to be concerned that they can go centuries without seeing another elf. The whole tenor of the story is poignant and melancholic, which is fitting for its subject matter. It is a story of nostalgia and loss, sorrow and regret.

The biblical book of Genesis likewise tells a tale of the griefs born by long lives in a sin-stained world. From the beginning, human lifespans were measured in centuries: Adam, the first human being, lived 930 years before he died (Genesis 5:5). During that time, he saw the great sorrow of his and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden, and it was compounded by his son Cain murdering his son Abel. In the expulsion from Eden, he was told, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life….By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground for dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (3:17, 19 NIV). Sorrow and painful toil and insignificance would mark Adam’s life, and the lives of all of his descendants.

After Adam, his son Seth lived 912 years (5:8), his son Enosh lived 905 (5:11), then his son Kenan lived 910 years (5:14). Others in Adam’s genealogy lived similarly long lives, with Methuselah living the longest at 969 years (5:27). Methuselah’s son Lamech would live only 777 years (5:31), and Lamech’s son Noah would himself live 950 years (9:29). During Noah’s time would come the great Flood (Genesis 6-9), which came about because “the LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5 NIV).

After the Flood, the decline in lifespans would become more evident. Noah’s son Shem would live only 600 years (Genesis 11:10-11); Shem’s son Arphaxad would live 438 years (11:12-13); Arphaxad’s son Shelah would live 433 years (11:14-15). A few generations later, Noah’s descendant Serug would live 230 years (11:22-23). Abraham’s father, Terah, would live 205 years (11:32). Abraham’s wife, Sarah, would live to be only 127 years old (23:1), and Abraham himself would live 175 years (25:7). Even then, these may have been exceptions rather than the norm of human lifespans. As far back as Noah’s day, the LORD said of humans “their days will be a hundred and twenty years” (Genesis 6:3b NIV), because humanity was ‘corrupt’ (margin reading of 6:3a in the NIV). (Even if one were not to take these lifespans literally, the drastic decline in recorded years from one generation to the next surely speaks to the biblical writers’ belief that the effects of sin severely degraded both the quality and quantity of human life.)

By the time of the writing of Psalm 90, Moses (to whom it is attributed in the header of the Psalm) writes, “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures” (90:10a NIV). Moses himself may have been an exception in his day, as Deuteronomy 34:7 says that Moses died at 120 years old. (It may also be a commentary on Moses’ strength that the Psalm declares someone may live 80 years ‘if they are strong,’ and yet that same verse in Deuteronomy notes that Moses died at 120 years old, “yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone.”)

The Psalms declare, “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away” (90:10 NIV). It seems that the consequences of sin are felt more keenly the further down Adam’s line one moves, with the first generations enjoying longer lives than later generations. And yet, if “the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,” is it truly a blessing to have a long life? Nine hundred years of sorrow and trouble is a greater burden than 120 or even 433. It seems fair to say that both the gradual, if drastic, decline in human lifespans after the first few generations of Adam’s descendants, and the longer lives of those first few generations, were alike consequences of sin. Shorter lives definitely seem to be a consequence of the Fall, and yet those longer lives of Adam, Seth, and Methuselah were likewise filled with far more sorrow than Terah, Sarah, Abraham, or Moses’ lives.

The book of Ecclesiastes itself echoes this refrain over and over again: everything is meaningless. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,” as the King James Version poetically renders Ecclesiastes 1:2, “All is vanity”. The value of hard labor and work is questioned (1:3-11). Solomon in his wisdom declares, “the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun” (4:2-3 NIV). Even in its conclusion, Ecclesiastes concludes somberly: “Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind” (11:13b NIV). There is no joy in Solomon’s conclusion, but only marked resignation. Its constant refrain is “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” (11:8 NIV).

Immortality demands the resurrection. A one-thousand-year life full of sorrow and trouble is a life aching all the more for redemption. For Frieren, that meant the deaths of all her elven village early in her life, the loss of her mentor, the loss of her friends, and centuries of solitude. For us, it would likely mean the same—the sorrow of constant loss, of departed companions and family, of increasing alienation as the world around us seems to pass us by. A man may think he wants to unlock the secret of eternal youth, but if he is the only one (or even one of only a few) who lives double or triple the lives of all people he knows, including family, then what exactly is the benefit to him? Soon enough, such a person would be achingly lonely and increasingly detached from the world around him (or her). Like the elven mage Frieren, a centuries-old human being would watch as all of his or her friends and family grew old before his or her very eyes, and just like her they would see sorrow and melancholy and grief piled up higher and higher as long as they lived. For Frieren, the hope is that at the end of her journey, she will be able to see her deceased, departed friends again in a place of spiritual communion. For us, our hope is that at the end of the journey, there is a resurrection.

Immortality demands the resurrection, because this fallen, sin-stained world weighs heavily on all life. All of creation groans for redemption, and the ultimate end of all things is that “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21 NIV). As St John reveals in his Revelation, when the new heaven and the new earth come, the Lord will dwell in much more intimate communion with his people. Only then, God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4 NIV). Only in such conditions does immortality make sense.

James Mahoney is a librarian, chaplain, and ordained clergyperson in the Global Methodist Church, with a Master in Library Science from Indiana University and a Master of Divinity from Asbury Theological Seminary.