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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 1238929" data-attributes="member: 13098">It is debatable where the "mistake" could be.  Glorfindel did fall in battle against a Balrog when Gondolin was sacked.  Glorfindel also faced off the Witch-King in the Battle of Fornost.  It was at that time that he prophesied about the Witch-king "Far off yet is his doom and not by the hand of man will he fall."  It's all in appendix A.Since Tolkien rarely reused Elvish names, the question is:  Is this the same Glorfindel?  Could it be an error of Christopher Tolkien's to include the fall of Glorfindel in the Silmarillion?  Could it be that Glorfindel returned from the West?  This is an unanswered issue.  Were there two Glorfindel's or just one?  Looking at it, I see two reasonably developed Elven characters with the same name.  Or I see one well developed Elven character that died and came back. In the end, it isn't an important debate for resolving why Glorfindel, as a story element, was in FotR.  He was in it because Tolkien had established a powerful, historical Elf-lord that could strike fear into the Nazgul, and he was a character that had prohesied the fall of the Witch-King in TA 1975, 1044 years before Eowyn and Merry brought about the Witch-King's final rest.  Glorfindel was a powerful enough Elf-Lord that it makes sense that the Nazgul would be struck in dismay by his sudden appearance at the Ford of Bruinen.  This was necessary to remove the Nazgul as a threat for a short time.  Otherwise, some of the Nazgul would have been wiped out by the raging water at the ford, and the rest would have just waited for the Fellowship to leave Rivendell later.  Tolkien could have written it differently, but he didn't.  Thus, we have something to debate.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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