A third Glorfinded thread revived? Yes (even though it began about Hadhafang), but this one brings up the issue of Tolkien's faith...
Starlight wrote:
Luthien was brought back to life, but I was talking about being reincarnated, which is being reborn, but in a different body or form. So it coulod be that Glorfindel was reincarnated, though not brought back to life. Tolkien, however, was a Christian, and his books have a definite Christain theme, so I doubt very much that Incarnation, which is not part of Christianity, would be included in his stories. I too agree that it probably two different Glorfindels.
As we now know, Tolkien imagined only one Glorfindel, and as far as his faith goes, he once explained the following. It might be noted first that for a long time (decades) Tolkien imagined Elves being reborn as Elf-children as the mode of reincarnation; thus actual rebirth -- which, one assumes, includes having a different body. In 1954 Tolkien explained to Peter Hastings (here somewhat edited by me for brevity):
Quote:
'Reincarnation may be bad theology (...) as applied to Humanity (...) But I do not see how even in the Primary World any theologian or philosopher, unless very much better informed about the relation of spirit to body than I believe anyone to be, could deny the possibility of re-incarnation as a mode of existence, prescribed for certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures.'
JRRT, Letters
So Tolkien defends his position on reincarnation with respect to his tales (not for Men in any case), and here to the manager of a Catholic Bookshop in Oxford.
JRRT would never abandon reincarnation, but he did ultimately revise his long held idea of Elves being reborn as Elf-babies. The revised idea was: the
fea of an Elf [the term fea roughly translates as 'spirit'] contained an exact imprint of the
hroa [roughly 'body'] -- a memory so precise and complete that a new but exact copy could be made from it by the Valar. So the restored body was 'new' but in all ways like the old
hroa.
