Sauron vs. Your Mama - A Discussion of Power in Middle-earth

[obloquy]

Great post, Thenamir. I'm really glad to see you paying attention to The Books again.

[davem]

I still think we are dealing with different kinds or states of Hroa - some 'natural', some magically enhanced; some 'set' (as with the Eruhini & the Istari) & some more 'plastic'. There is no reason to assume all 'hroa' are of the same physical nature. H2O may be variously solid (ice), liquid (water) or gaseous (steam) in various circumstances. It changes easily - which could be the case with the Balrog's hroa (as seems likely to me). The Witch-King's hroa seems different to that of Frodo & Bilbo - for one thing its sinews are 'magically' knitted together by spells. I didn't argue that the WK was 'hroa-less' merely that his hroa was of a different nature to what it had been before he took service of Sauron & received a Ring.

[obloquy]

It's a tempting concept, but Tolkien never gave any more detail than discarnate, "clothed", and incarnate. There's every indication that the final incarnate stage of an eala is the same corporeal state that the Children are born in. The differences in hroa that you describe would not be out of place in the "clothed" category, but the Istari, Melian, Sauron, and Morgoth (our concrete examples of fully incarnate ealar) all apparently ended up exactly like the Children. They could no longer conceal their evil through manipulation of their hroar (in Sauron's and Morgoth's cases), and they were powerless without hroar. Shapeshifting doesn't seem to be possible for any incarnate being, regardless of original nature. If a Balrog changed shape, he must have been merely "clothed" and not incarnate; but if he was only deprived of a physical raiment rather than truly slain, then Gandalf's sacrifice was vanity.

(I have not forgotten about Beorn, but he is somewhat anomalous, at least as mysterious as Tom Bombadil, if not more. Additionally, he comes from a time when Tolkien's concept of embodied spirits did not include a "clothed" provision, and were either discarnate or incarnate.)

[davem]

Originally Posted by obloquy

(I have not forgotten about Beorn, but he is somewhat anomalous, at least as mysterious as Tom Bombadil, if not more. Additionally, he comes from a time when Tolkien's concept of embodied spirits did not include a "clothed" provision, and were either discarnate or incarnate.)

Now, not feeling up to scanning through HoM-e I'm going to be depending on you for the answer to this question, but what period are we talking about in terms of Tolkien's thoughts on the 'discarnate, "clothed", and incarnate' alternatives - were these thoughts in place during the writing of LotR? If we look at the Chronology of the HoM-e texts here don't we see these ideas belonging to the post LotR period? And so, isn't Tolkien 'writing back' into LotR? I think its clear, for instance, that the ideas on mental communication as set out in Osanwe Kenta were not developed when Tolkien had Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel & Celeborn communicating telepathically in 'Homeward Bound'. Were Tolkien's ideas on the relationship of fea to hroa fully developed when he was writing LotR - & if not, can we apply them 'backwards' to events in LotR?

BTW, this is a genuine question, as I say, not having HoM-e immediately to hand...

[Raynor]

As far as I am aware, the first time when the 'clothing' idea appears is in the Annals of Aman:

Originally Posted by Notes on the side of paragraph 28

"Note that 'spouse' meant only an 'association'. The Valar had no bodies, but could assume shapes. After the coming of the Eldar they most often used shapes of 'human' form, though taller (not gigantic) and more magnificent".

At the same time the passage concerning the Valarindi, the Children of the Valar, at the end of $4 was struck out (as it was also on the top copy), since this note is a most definitive statement that any such conception was out of the question.

Concerning the dating of AAm, Chris says that:

The work undoubtedly belongs with the large development and recasting of the Matter of the Elder Days that my father undertook when The Lord of the Rings was finished

Regarding Tolkien's essay on thought transmission, Osanwe kenta, Chris says that:"there seems to be no reason to doubt that it belongs to 1959-60" - after the publishing of LotR.

[obloquy]

I think you're right davem. It was my understanding that the two states of embodiment were first defined as unique in writings later than LotR, but now that I'm briefly flipping through X: Morgoth's Ring I'm not so sure. There was a letter I read from the early '50s wherein Tolkien makes no distinction between the two degrees which led me to believe that he had not fully fleshed out the topic at that point, but he may only have been simplifying the explanation for his correspondent. Unfortunately, Letters has a terrible index, so it will take me a while to find it again, and then to answer your question I will have to compare it with contemporaneous versions of the first chapters of the Sil. If nobody else pipes up with this information before I get around to it, I'll do what I can to find out. I'm sure Aiwendil or lindil could answer this off the tops of their respective heads.

All of my points/arguments in this thread relate to what I understand to be Tolkien's latest ideas on the subject. He was pretty careful to build around LotR rather than in contradiction with it, and I'm sure he considered the later concepts compatible with those already in print. That said, he didn't leave us anything like my original post above. It may not be exactly how he imagined it, but he didn't tell us exactly how he imagined it. I have merely tried to draw a more complete picture.

Edit: Thanks for the research, Raynor.

This thread has a lot in common with my other threads and shares a lot of the same research, so I'll link to them here for reference: Ëalar and Incarnation and The Powers of the Istari.

[davem]

Originally Posted by obloquy

All of my points/arguments in this thread relate to what I understand to be Tolkien's latest ideas on the subject. He was pretty careful to build around LotR rather than in contradiction with it, and I'm sure he considered the later concepts compatible with those already in print. That said, he didn't leave us anything like my original post above. It may not be exactly how he imagined it, but he didn't tell us exactly how he imagined it. I have merely tried to draw a more complete picture.

Oh, I can see a lot of value in your speculations - I don't disagree with it in its essentials. I was just posing questions that occurred to me.