Beleriand or Eriador?
pause
I don’t KNOOOOOOOWWWWwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww…
“You’ve got to know these thing when you’re a king”
-“But Aragorn, you’re not king yet.”
“SHUT UP!!!”
“Sam will kill him if he tries anything!”
(Yeah, I know, weak. But nothing will ever top the airspeed of an unladen Balrog – greatest witty comeback line in SDMB history!
In FOTR, we do see wing bones. The smoke never clears enough to see if these are equipped with muscles, tendons, or the membrane needed to fly.
I haven’t seen TTT in a while, but I only remember seeing wing bones on the dead Balrog.
I took this to mean that PJ’s interpretation was that originally, before they served Melkor, the Balrogs had actual wings. Either due to their corruption, or their defeat by the forces of good, their wings were destroyed.
DocCathode, ok, so they had ineffectual wings. Which was more or less my point, no?
Squeegee No, that wasn’t your point. You say that FOTR, is unclear on the matter. Then you state that TTT shows wings. You conclude that PJ’s Balrogs had wings. You do not state that they were ineffectual.
This subject demands clarity and detail, dammit!
So was Glorfindel also brought back to life like Gandalf? Is there a pattern here?
[Gandalf and Glorfindel in a bar, speaking to an adoring group of bar-wenches]
Gandalf: Balrogs - pffft - it’s not like they can really kill you.
Glorfindel: Hurts like hell, though. They always want to drag you over cliff, or into a chasm.
Gandalf: They’re just irritating putzes, that’s all. All smoke and shadow, no sizzle.
Glorfindel: How 'bout another round, girls?
[Pssst. Be sure to put them on Gandalf’s tab. Guy’s rakin’ in the residuals from the movies, where I can’t seem to catch a break. First they replace me with Legolas at the Ford of Bruinen, then it’s Arwen. I tells ya, I just don’t get no respect from the movie goombas. One of these days, Bombadil and I are gonna go First-Age on their ass…
Actually, yeah. Elves reincarnate if they get killed; that’s Tolkien canon. (Of course, when and where – and in a couple of cases, if – is not within their control. But they do.) Men, however, do not. (Don’t ask about dwarves – Terry Pratchett-on-dwarves is calm, sane, and humorless by comparison!)
As for Gandalf, however, there are several issues at hand. First, as a Wizard, he is an incarnated Maia – just as much an angel-wearing-a-body as anything Della Reese ever came up with. Second, he appears to have been the only Maia to have ever met death by mischance while remaining true to the duties he was doing for Eru Iluvatar. So we don’t know “what the rules are” for Maiar – the ones portrayed as having turned to evil end up turning to smoke and blowing west, presumably for judgment by Manwe or Mandos. As I once pointed out in a religious thread over in Great Debates, the rate of resurrections among human beings is not relevant to the Easter story – according to the Bible, the rate of resurrections among Persons-of-the-Trinity-in-human-form is 100%, the sample set universe from which we can generate valid statistics being one. Likewise, the sample set for “good”-Maiar-who-were-incarnate-and-killed is one, i.e., Olorin, called Mithrandir and Gandalf among other things.
So you’re telling me that penguins are descended from balrogs?
I always thought they looked a little too suave to NOT be evil in the end.
And in Zoo Tycoon there’s an easter egg where if you put a Tyrannosaur in with a penguin the penguin kicks it’s ass every time. Coincidence?
Penguins can fly.
Just not in air.
It’s a rather inane point, but an interesting one.
Penguins use the methodology of how a bird flies to “swim” in the water; that’s why they’re so fast in the water. Unlike other paleognaths, they preserve the functionality of “flying” but are only able to use it in dense media, i.e., water.
(It might be interesting to generate a SF scenario of a low-gravity, high-pressure-atmosphere world where penguins are imported and can fly.)
Minor nitpick, Poly.
Penguins are neognaths, not palaeognaths.
See if I compliment you for wittiness again!
Darn glad you cleared that up.
Wait…
And they live in extremely cold zones because they retain the oven-like heat of their forebears, right?
OK, one of my favorite cartoons is several thousand penguins on an ice flow, and a tiny little balloon over them, saying, “You want to know what we need around here? I’ll tell you want we need around here. We need some gawddam *name tags *around here.”
So, switch it to looking over the wire at Jurassic Park and a couple hundred little velicoraptors, “You want to know what…”
See? They are the same
He did (presumably) come back to life, but I wouldn’t say that it happened “like Gandalf”. There’s some indication that Gandalf’s was a special case, requiring direct intervention from God Himself. When he did come back, it was in the same place as where he “died”, and presumably in the same body (or at least, in a fully mature and rather aged body, like the one he had before).
With Elves, by contrast, reincarnation is the normal state of affairs, and an Elf is only not reincarnated in special cases and by intervention of God Himself. Elves aren’t subject to many of the same causes of death as humans, but if an Elf should happen to die by misadventure or by grief, his spirit goes to the Halls of Mandos for a while, before eventually being reborn. The reborn Elf starts as a baby and grows up as normal, but some time around attaining adulthood, regains the memory of his previous life. How long this takes varies, and in the case of Feänor it’s believed that it won’t be until the end of the World. But the Elves are intrinsically bound up in the World, and unlike humans, can never truly leave it until the End.
This much, about Elves in general, we have from Tolkien directly. Nowhere is it made explicit that this is the case for Glorfindel specifically, and it’s possible that the fellow at the Fords was a separate person from the exile of Gondolin who just happened to have the same name. But given that there are no other known cases of Elves reusing names, and given that Glorfindel is an Elf-lord of great standing, and who glows radiantly as he appears “on the other side”, and given that Elves get reborn, it’s the simplest conclusion. If Glorfindel was reborn, he’s the only such case mentioned in Tolkien’s works, but remember that most Elves are in the West, death by misadventure is uncommon for Elves, and we don’t know what a typical waiting period is before rebirth. So it’s still quite plausible that we would have only heard of one.
So if humans aren’t reborn, and elves are, what of crossbreeds?
They are required to choose which Kindred they will belong to, and live out the life appropriate to that Kindred. That’s an enormous piece of why the Elrond-Arwen-Aragorn tension is what it is; Arwen is choosing the opposite Kindred from what her father had chosen 6,500 years before.