![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
huinare- Watching Tibetan sky burials on youtube totally counts as doing anthropology homework, right?
- Huzzah, new artist!crush. Lucy Nurnberg.
Geography of Death III
- I've been considering the nature of some of Tolkien's inventions I hadn't much thought about before, e.g. Balrogs.
For someone who is mainly interested in darker characters, I've never found the Balrogs particularly compelling so I've generally ignored them. Now that I've started to ask what on earth a Balrog is, I find this is puzzling. At any rate, it's puzzling for me given the various strictures my interpretation of Arda's physical and metaphysical properties puts on these matters.
I could interpret Balrogs the same way I interpret Ulmo's Maiar, as entities who are so emotionally/spiritually attached to their own element that they're become predispositioned to it and can't exist in any other type of physical state. That's all well and good until I consider how one goes about "killing" such a being, as Balrogs seem a bit prone to being killed. One can't kill a malleable amalgamation of flame.
The killing thing I've addressed with Draugluin and the dragons by conceiving of them as the results of quasi-sorcerous, quasi-scientific programs to bind Maiar to the frames of creatures. Somewhat the same as Melkor himself, these Maiar have been "distilled" into something other than themselves (Draugluin into sentient, mortal offspring--dragons into the indefinite maintenance of a massive organism that is technically impossible)--so that, when their forms are killed, their spirits no longer have enough of themselves to hold onto and patch back together into a new incarnation. If I take the same tack with Balrogs, envisioning them as being chained to solid forms, that brings up the annoying yet very interesting question of what kind of weird biochemical things would have to go on to sustain a burning body. Way out of my league with that one there, yet that's kind of the way I'm leaning because it would be fairly creepy and horrific as well as an intellectual challenge.
- Huzzah, new artist!crush. Lucy Nurnberg.
Geography of Death III
- I've been considering the nature of some of Tolkien's inventions I hadn't much thought about before, e.g. Balrogs.
For someone who is mainly interested in darker characters, I've never found the Balrogs particularly compelling so I've generally ignored them. Now that I've started to ask what on earth a Balrog is, I find this is puzzling. At any rate, it's puzzling for me given the various strictures my interpretation of Arda's physical and metaphysical properties puts on these matters.
I could interpret Balrogs the same way I interpret Ulmo's Maiar, as entities who are so emotionally/spiritually attached to their own element that they're become predispositioned to it and can't exist in any other type of physical state. That's all well and good until I consider how one goes about "killing" such a being, as Balrogs seem a bit prone to being killed. One can't kill a malleable amalgamation of flame.
The killing thing I've addressed with Draugluin and the dragons by conceiving of them as the results of quasi-sorcerous, quasi-scientific programs to bind Maiar to the frames of creatures. Somewhat the same as Melkor himself, these Maiar have been "distilled" into something other than themselves (Draugluin into sentient, mortal offspring--dragons into the indefinite maintenance of a massive organism that is technically impossible)--so that, when their forms are killed, their spirits no longer have enough of themselves to hold onto and patch back together into a new incarnation. If I take the same tack with Balrogs, envisioning them as being chained to solid forms, that brings up the annoying yet very interesting question of what kind of weird biochemical things would have to go on to sustain a burning body. Way out of my league with that one there, yet that's kind of the way I'm leaning because it would be fairly creepy and horrific as well as an intellectual challenge.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-22 11:54 pm (UTC)