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Originally Posted by jallanite
A post which solves the main difference between Orphalesion and myself.
The term complete opposite, when used in describing characters in fiction, is normally use to compare normal mortals and is really a short form for diametric opposite in many ways. Since Orphalesion was describing what could be described as two different versions in subsequent texts of the same character, an immortal who might be ascribed many characteristics not attributable to morals at all, I took the phrase complete opposite more literally than Orphalesion intended.
Orphalesion was not, I believe, even thinking of comparing beings like Varda, Manwë, Ulmo, Vána, Tom Bombadil, or Gandalf with either Fui Nienna or Nienna. Yet such comparisons immediately sprang to my mind. The number of beings comparable in some sense to both Fui Nienna and Nienna is far greater in Tolkien’s legendarium than would be so in most novels, in which characters comparable to Fui Nienna or Nienna don’t exist at all.
So when Orphalesion posted, “Sorry, but no..... no two characters could be further apart from each other than Fui Nienna from the BOLT and Nienna from the Silmarillion,” I immediately thought of various figures in Tolkien’s legendarium who were more different from each other than Fui Nienna and Nienna.
Similarly when Orphalesion posted, “Fui Nienna and ‘our’ Nienna are complete opposites!”, I immediately thought of other beings who could also be described as complete opposites of Fui Nienna, if one wished to think in such terms. For example, Vána and Tom Bombadil.
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Yes, perfectly worded. That was the crux of the discussion
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My identification was based on Vána being the chief goddess of what one might call female sexuality among Tolkien’s Valar, not on theories of the origins of the comparable characters. The Sumerian goddess Inanna, for example, is often imagined, I think rightly, to have earlier been mainly a granary goddess. I did not include the Egyptian Hathor because, although identified with Aphrodite and Venus in classical times, she originally seems to have been identified with the Semitic Asherah/Athirat rather than with Ashtarte/Athtart, which makes her originally closer to Hera/Juno.
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I don't know enough about Inanna to confirm or deny this, but Venus definitely is often thought to originally have been a goddess of fields and gardens.
Interesting that you would connect (at least primitive) Vana to feminine sexuality. I never saw that and actually always thought that a "Love Goddess" was oddly lacking among the primitive Vala.
Though apparently in an even earlier, now lost phase before the BOLT, (still alluded to in the Gnomish dictionary at the end of the book) Eirinty was the Goddess of "love, beauty and music" and had the role later given to Meril-i-Turinqui. Though Tolkien in that early state seemed fond of mixing the tropes of mythological love and spring goddesses creating Erinti, Vana and Nessa out of basically the same cloth(CT even points out that in the Gnomish dictionary they share some of their epitomes)
However linking Vana to female sexuality (while valid) is as much interpretation as linking Fui Nienna to the archetype of the crone. And in a later phase of the mythology we briefly have Vana the Everyoung, Nessa the Ever-Maid (now not married to Tulkas) and Leah, the Young (temporarily replacing Nessa as Tulkas' wife)
So many goddesses/Valier of youth and associated with flowers and springtime, but never do we get a Valier known simply as "the Beautiful" or, more explicit, "the Lover", probably because Tolkien would have never included a traditional spirit of female sexuality in his work. A Freyja/Inanna/Aprhodite type character would have been as out of place as Makar and Measse and would have disappeared just as quickly (and perhaps has, if Eirinty was supposed to fill that role)