Reincarnated elves and family reactions

[CuriousG]

Another dangling question from me: what happens when the child you've given birth to and raised tells you they're really an ancient hero?

Tolkien said somewhere that Glorfindel in Rivendell was the reincarnation of Glorfindel who died heroically in the fall of Gondolin. And he mentions in the Sil that "Finrod walks with his father" in Aman sometime after perishing while fighting Sauron's werewolf in the pits of Minas Tirith (the Beleriand one).

So, that makes at least two that we know of, and he said there were more: souls waiting in the Halls of Mandos, some of whom would eventually be reborn in physical form.

He didn't say anywhere how the parents would react to a reincarnated elf. Though they are noble, elves have sentimental feelings too. I just wonder what it would be like for a couple in Valinor to have their child announce someday that he is really the son of Finarfin, and he's going to go live with him. Wouldn't they be grief-stricken? Or is there joint custody? Or, from a medieval point of view, would this be less of a shocker since people believed in changeling children switched by mischievous fairies, so fanciful things like this could happen, and you just accepted them?

 

[squire]

Tolkien never really settled on a "mechanism" for reincarnation among the Elves.

The most explicit account of the conundrum you bring up is discussed in his unpublished essay "The Laws and Customs of the Eldar" (LACE), in Morgoth's Ring (History of Middle-earth Vol. 10). In the following passages, remember that fëa is his word for the concept of a person's "spirit", and hröa is equivalent to "body".

A houseless fëa that chose or was permitted to return to life re-entered the incarnate world through child-birth. Only thus could it return....
As for this re-birth, it was not an opinion, but known and certain. For the fëa re-born became a child indeed, enjoying once more all the wonder and newness of childhood; but slowly, and only after it had acquired a knowledge of the world and mastery of itself, its memory would awake; until, when the re-born elf was full-grown, it recalled all its former life, and then the old life, and the 'waiting', and the new life became one ordered history and identity. ... the Re-born are twice nourished, and twice parented, and have two memories of the joy of awaking...[their second life seemed] fairer and more blessed. (Morgoth's Ring, HoME X, pp. 221-222)
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Although Tolkien does not address the feelings of the parents on discovering that their child has had a former life, it seems clear that they would be expected to accept and cherish their grown-up offspring while simultaneously sharing its joy at being reunited with its first family once full memory had returned. But it doesn't seem that "custody" or "who to live with" is an issue, since the re-born Elves do not become conscious of their former lives until they have reached full adulthood.

Now, interestingly enough, Tolkien had predicated Elvish re-birth for many years at this point in his mythology. But writing it all out in LACE got him thinking, and there is a later set of manuscripts, though written in the same period, in which he abandons (or thinks about abandoning) the whole reincarnation-through-birth idea. The first piece is a fictional dialogue called "The Converse of Manwë and Eru", and it led to a meditation called "Reincarnation of Elves". To quote Christopher Tolkien, who describes the latter piece rather than reproducing it:

In this discussion [Tolkien] referred in rapid and elliptical expression to the difficulties at every level (including practical and psychological) in the idea of the reincarnation of the fëa as the newborn child of second parents, who as it grows up recaptures the memory of its previous life: 'the most fatal objection' being that 'it contradicts the fundamental notion that fëa and hröa were each fitted to the other: since hröar have a physical descent, the body of rebirth, having different parents, must be different', and this must be a condition of pain to the reborn fëa.
He was here abandoning, and for good, the long-rooted conception of rebirth as the mode by which the Elves might return to incarnate life: from his scrutiny of the mythical idea, questioning its validity in the terms he had adopted, it had come to seem to him a serious flaw in the metaphysic of Elvish existence. (Morgoth's Ring, HoME X, p. 363)
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Not that reincarnation itself was thrown out! As CT notes, that idea was far too deeply imbedded in the stories. Rather, the mechanism became a more mystic one whereby the fëa was empowered by the Valar to reconstruct a new hröa for itself, using its fabulously detailed sense-memory to ensure the new body replicated the old one exactly. Where and how this took place in the halls of the Valar, I'm not sure was ever made clear.

And which essay should we take as the "answer" to the question of whether Elves were re-born or re-created?

 

[Tim]

I think I would go with the "later" thoughts as the definitive answer on the reincarnation mechanism.

 

[FarFromHome]

The Dalai Lama, for example, is believed to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. As I understand it, it is a great honour to have given birth to the reincarnated Dalai Lama. As you suggest ("from a medieval point of view...things like this could happen, and you just accepted them") it's all a question of cultural belief, and if reincarnation is a part of the Elves' cultural belief, then I expect they would react positively too to having been chosen to give birth to the reincarnation of a past hero.

(Assuming that's how the "mechanism" works - although the word "mechanism" (which squire put in scare-quotes himself) seems too scientific to me, for such a belief-based event. As squire's quotes show, it's really about metaphysics. It seems that Tolkien discovered a fundamental flaw in the metaphysical connection he'd worked out between the spirit (fëa) and the body (hröa), leading him to consider something more mystical and less "mechanistic" still.)

 

[sador]

Once Tolkien started thinking through his mythology for too long, it began falling to pieces (as the whole section of Myths Transformed implies).
My guess is that Christopher noticed that, which was why he seems to have taken the writing of the 1950s (the later Quenta and the Grey Annals) for the base of the published Silmarillion. But this is only my impression, based on no great scholarship.

 

[TolkienOtaku]

Still, I can imagine how weird it would be to have your kid suddenly say one day "I'm an ancient hero reincarnated."