The Fate of.....
What happens to the individuals who defy orders or are responsible for some great tragedy after they die? Do they get re-embodied?
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As it happens, I have The Peoples of Middle-earth to hand (I know! The first time anyone's ever admitted to Having The Books Right Now), and it contains a very pertinent quote:
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But. Tolkien goes on to hint at a more complicated view, in the continuation of the same passage: Quote:
This can actually be perfectly reconciled with the main description by reading 'if the fea while alive had done evil deeds and refused to repent of them' as indicating that they had to repent of them while alive, but I don't know how I feel about that idea. It's a very Christian notion, so it might be what Tolkien was aiming at... perhaps the best resolution is that 'evil deeds' means more than just 'anything bad': it means seriously bad stuff. And indeed, the first version of this passage says that they would be restored 'unless for some grave (and rare) reason: such as deeds of great evil, or any works of malice of which they remained obdurately unrepentant.' Combining all the above, I think we get a pretty clear picture: if you did malicious (but not capital-Evil) things in life, you stay in until you repent. If you still feel malice towards anyone, you stay in until you get over it. And if you did a Great Evil, and didn't repent in life, you don't get out (and might be referred to the One). 'Repent', in the last instance (as in at least some branches of Christianity), refers not just to feeling sorry about it, but making amends - in the case of the Ban, that means actively progressing the plans of the Valar. Glorfindel did this by helping Earendil escape; Finrod did it by protecting Beren and thus enabling the rescue of the Silmaril. And Galadriel, while not dead, seems to have overcome the Ban by not taking the Ring, but sending it on its way to destruction. So to answer your question: was it a Great Evil? If not, they probably get to repent in the Halls. If so, they'd better have tried to fix it while they were alive - or hope Mandos is feeling merciful today. hS |
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As for Maiar? Saruman, once he died at the hands of Wormtongue, was not even allowed to return to Valinor. His spirit as Shippey notes, "dissolved into nothing". But Tolkien seemed more specific than that: "Whereas Curunir was cast down, and utterly humbled, and perished at last by the hand of an oppressed slave; and his spirit went whithersoever it was doomed to go, and to Middle-earth, whether naked or embodied, came never back." Sauron, too, was not allowed to reincarnate after the destruction of the One Ring. His spirit rose above Mordor, "a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, ...terrible but impotent," only to be blown away by a great wind. Tolkien notes in Letter 200: "The impossibility of re-building after the destruction of the Ring, is sufficiently clear ‘mythologically’ in the present book." Interesting that both the spirits of Sauron and Saruman were blown away by the wind. Although the direction of the wind is not implied as it blew away Sauron's spirit, it is very specific in the case of Saruman's spirit as it loomed above the Hobbits: "For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with sigh dissolved to nothing." The implication is that it was blown away from the Blessed Realm. But back to your original query, Tolkien is quite specific about "wicked" spirits and fea: Quote:
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But Morlin will come back. In fact, he already has.
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Since we have a Mandos thread, I was wondering what, exactly, the Halls of Mandos were like. HoME XII gives a good overview of what elves are there for, but to find out what they actually looked like I went clear back to HoME I:
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There's a few really interesting points I want to draw out, quite aside from all the changing-around of names: -The Eldar are described here as 'dreaming', and it's not clear how well that meshes with the later interpretation of the Halls as a place of healing and repentance. If we want to merge the two, we could imagine that their dreams are the way they go through that process - by reliving events over and over, they can come to terms with them, good or bad. It seems they're 'awake' on their first arrival, when Mandos speaks their doom (and in the case of Luthien, gets persuaded otherwise), but then they 'sleep'. The counterpoint to this is that Feanor is mentioned in the published Silm as sitting in the Halls, where 'sleeping' would fit just as easily; and Finwe thinks about how he might see Elwe 'in the halls of Mandos'. So if 'sleep' is still in play, it would have to be a sort of waking sleep. -The Halls of Mandos, in this original incarnation, are exactly that: multiple Halls in the region known as Mandos. Ve, the hall of Mandos himself, is one of them, but Fui Nienna also has a hall (its roof is made of bat wings), and there are other 'shadowy folk' who may have their own. This concept, at least, is explicitly rejected by the published Silm: it's said of Vaire's weavings that 'the halls of Mandos that ever widen as the ages pass are clothed with them', which indicates that the Halls, plural, are the abode of the dead elves. -The fate of Men is wildly different in this text: they go to Nienna's hall in Mandos, where she judges them: Quote:
But I daresay it holds special significance for you, Urwen, because it's the setting for the final tragedy and triumph of the House of Hurin: Quote:
Also Turin, now a god, will not only get to stab Melkor, but also to take out his anger on as many dragons as he can lay his hands on. Which, honestly, I can't blame him for. hS |
With the caveat that the BoLT was very early and in a LOT of areas superseded. In particular, its Valar owe a lot more to RW pagan pantheons, including the bloodthirsty war-Valar Makar and Measse; while Mandos in this early period fit in well with the "gloomy caverns" of Hades or Hel, later descriptions of them lined with Vaire's tapestries invoke, for me, something more like a monastic rest home than a subterranean dungeon.
Also, the concept of the Second Prophecy is fraught, especially given his later flat statement that the Valar were forbidden to take away the Gift of Men. In the BoLT phase, Men as well as Elves went to Mandos, in segregated accommodations. |
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I'm also wondering about the fate of Tuor; the tradition that he's counted among the Elves comes from the published Silm, right? Of course it could be wrong, but it's still there. For that matter, Ar-Pharazon 'sleeping' until the End is in there, too; does that just count as a deferment of the Gift, rather than a removal? hS |
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