• Dasus@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    it’s not something about being embodied that made them lose their bodyless memories

    Isn’t it though? I get that Tolkien may have specified that the Istari not having their memories aided in them being more like the people they were sent to save, but…

    Perhaps it is a property of being a body that you can not have the properties that the spirits do. A body is a finite.

    IIRC having watched a lot of Nerd of the Rings and whatnot, a lot of the depictions of Balrogs have them as sort of fiery angels instead of the gory beasts we have in the Peter Jackson movies. Now if Balrogs are a sort of angelic but demonic things, then I’d go with your assumption, but if they were the Peter Jackson beast-like, then I think mine could work. In the sense that if being embodied means you just can’t retain all the knowledge you have in the spirit realm and the body affects your spirit as well, then having that sort of raging demonic beasts would make sense as even if they were higher beings while disembodied, while being embodied they’d just feel the rage and fury of the body and wouldn’t recall anything about being a Maia before eventually being disembodied again.

    That was probably very incoherent. It was influenced by the thoughts I had when I used to do a lot of nitrous.

    • WillBalls@lemmy.world
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      30 minutes ago

      I haven’t read anything in the legendarium that supports your theory that the hröa (body in quenya) restricts the fëa (soul).

      All beings in Arda initially had hröar, but hröar are susceptible to harm regardless of the status of the fëa within (see Morgoth’s wounds, and Sauron and Saruman’s deaths) that could cause the fëa to become unbodied. In the case of the fëa becoming unbodied, the fëa would have to be powerful enough to exist on its own, create a new body (Sauron after the fall of Númenor), be otherwise tied to the world (Sauron after the war of the last alliance with the one ring), or dissipate into nothing (Sauron after the destruction of the one ring and Saruman after his death by Grima’s)