Morgoth Or Whatever, I Don’t Want To Deadname Him

Jared, Oriana and Ned talk about Jared’s choice of topic: bodies. Tolkien is, putting it plainly, not the most dedicated writer when it comes to the physical forms we all inhabit – his contemporary D. H. Lawrence would have had some things to say about it had the subject ever come up, say. But at the same time, he did have quite a few thoughts over the decades – never in a completely organized or systematized sense, but certainly strongly influenced by his own Catholic beliefs – about the distinction between soul and body in Middle-earth, or to use his own Quenya terms for them, fëa and hröa. Centered for the most part in discussions around and about the Elves, with their fates bound more strongly to Arda in the legendarium as a whole, this distinction and its implications, teased out in varying ways, contrasted strongly with the murkier fate of humanity’s own souls, leading in turn to much in the way of the deep background of Middle-earth’s history. How did Tolkien account for how the fates of the dwarves in the eyes of elves, if at all, and how did the Elves conceive of death in general when it was first encountered happening to men? What are the problems in assuming that there was a clear throughline of Tolkien’s thoughts on these subjects across time, especially given how they’ve been organized and presented posthumously? Can further evidence in how physical presence was memorialized in different ways among communities of men in Arda suggest something in terms of how Tolkien considered what the ‘right’ way to remember and honor such remains were? And did hobbits have hairy chests indeed? (This came up among more than one of us independently.)