is elven remarriage having two spouses?
 

i've often wondered why the high king finwe of all the quendi remarried after the life of his first wife miriel(? don't have my silm with me right now to check) was virtually drained off by the birth of fiery feanor. what happens when miriel and finwe are both eventually released from the halls of mandos? finwe's second wife indis the vanyar must surely still be alive, and so, shall they all live together as husband and wives? are there any other instances in the silmarillion or in any of tolkien's works where an elf had remarried?

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every man's life is a path to the truth -- hesse

Uhmm...

You know, that's a really good question. Not to be answerd by my, then [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img].

Excellent question, thought about that myself.

I guess I always assumed that Miriel was never "healed" and therefore never released from the Halls. Just a guess though.

Per Morgoth's Ring, the Valar ruled that if a spouse dies and decides to never emerge from Mandos, the surviving spouse may remarry. In the case of Finwe and Miriel, Miriel initially so elected. However, after Finwe's death, it was Finwe who elected to remain in Mandos and Miriel emerged. It is hinted that Finwe wanted to be with Feanor.

This comes from a series of heavily philosophical writings by JRRT and is not as simple as set forth above.

Good question. Elves are so confussing.

I am glad I was not the only one who wondered about that! Thanks for enlightening us, Mithadan! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

thanks too, mithadan, that's really interesting to know [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. is morgoth's ring a publication? see, where i come from, we don't get it; you'd be lucky to chance a good copy of the silm in the bookstores.

anyway, it must have been a matter of foresight for the valar to have granted a second marriage to finwe, that is, to introduce some balance, mitigating factor if you will, to the eventual upheavals caused by feanor...

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every man's life is a path to the truth -- hesse

Morgoth's Ring is Volume 10 of the History of Middle Earth series. Try our bookstore linked to our main page. It and Peoples of Middle Earth (HoME 12) are the 2 best volumes of the series.

I'm on BoLT 2 Mithadan, does it matter if I read the HoME sereis out of order?

Probably not. There's a lot of repetition in HoME 4 and 5 though there's interesting stuff in both. You can safely skip around and still enjoy the books.

Yeah, you don't have to read HoME in order. I skip around to different books in the series all the time to find out what I need to know.