Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7696783" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is Morgoth's Ring stuff, as you well know.The important thing thus far missing from the discussion is that by maiming themselves (in a sense) in taking on material forms, they weren't getting weaker.  They were trading one power for another they felt more useful.  They were giving up spiritual authority for greater material authority.  Fallen Maiar, in giving up detachment from the physical world, were doing so in order to gain greater command over the physical world.  They were seduced as it were by the dark side - quicker, easier, more seductive.  Their new physical forms gave them greater power in the physical world, at the cost - perhaps not originally realized - of becoming transient like everything else in the physical world.Indeed, not only could he not provide himself with a new body, but Manwe had to make a personal appeal to Illuvatar to return Gandalf to service, as he was truly and utterly dead and beyond the Valar's ability to do anything about it.This is a point of debate since the text doesn't make it clear.  My personal feeling is that the dragon and troll species where originally created by some powerful Maiar, one akin in stature to Sauron, extending their spiritual form into that of a whole species.  In sense, the 'dragons' were the 'ring' of some Maiar (possibly named Glaurung) that had given up its individuality and identity to become something of a force of nature.  This is a lesser version of what Morgoth himself was striving to obtain by enfusing himself into the whole of Middle Earth, turning the very matter of the universe and all of the universe into his 'ring of power'.There is a good possibility that the Eagles are descendants of Maiar that took this form and got stuck in it, though they appear to not have been fully corrupted in doing so, and are still vassals of Manwe.  Or at least, when explaining the origin of Trolls in a ME RPG (notably absent in the Silmarillion) the explanation of a Sauron-peer maiar infusing himself into the stones to bring forth trolls is the explanation I hit upon and which feels most right to me.Agreed.  If Yavanna (turned into the God of halflings in D&D) had been doing the same technique of infusing herself into the material world to create the trees that Sauron used to create the One Ring (and which Sauron tricked the mortal races into doing when creating the Rings of Power), this would have likely led to her corruption.  But yes, it seems a rule that you have to have 'inspiration points' to spend in order to create certain items, and that you can't do the same thing twice.</blockquote>

Verification