Quote:
Originally Posted by Nogrod
I'm not willing to be a spoil-sport or anything, but wasn't it the case that Tolkien had to come up with this resurrection-idea only when he realised he had used the same name for two different characters both being remarkable enough they just couldn't have been two different persons - not to talk of the fact that one had actually died already before the second came along?  |
No that wasn't the case
Tolkien's Elves were reincarnated (in some fashion) even in the early
The Book of Lost Tales, thus well before Tolkien somewhat randomly borrowed the name Glorfindel for
The Lord of the Rings -- not wholly randomly it seems, if we judge by a note in the drafts for
The Lord of the Rings that Glorfindel should tell of his ancestry in Gondolin (although obviously Tolkien did not have Glorfindel tell of this in the ultimate version of the story).
Also Tolkien would not have been forced to use Glorfindel for
The Silmarillion, and it hadn't been published by him -- meaning if JRRT really could not find out the 'truth' of this matter to his satisfaction, he didn't have to explain a scenario with 'two Glorfindels' in any case...
... as his readership only knew about one.