The White Council

Re: Glorfindel

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: : A while ago we talked about Tolkien's mistake with the 2 : : Glorfindels. I am now beginning to wonder though if it was a : : mistake. I mean the original Glorfindel from Gondolin was, I : : believe, memorable enough for Tolkien to remember during his : : writing of the Lord of the Rings. And if it was a mistake, why : : didn't he just say they had the same name?

: : Jon

: I must have missed part of that discussion, or the whole thread. I don't remember anyone concluding that Tolkien made some sort of mistake. What would the nature of the mistake be?

: In THE RETURN OF THE SHADOW (p. 214 of my hardbound edition) we learn that Tolkien had originally written a note: "Glorfindel tells of his ancestry in Gondolin" in his preliminary work for "The Council of Elrond". Tolkien ultimately decided that he had used the named "Glorfindel" on a somewhat random basis and decided that the two Glorfindels had been one and the same.

: The only mistake I can see, if there was one, is that Tolkien forgot he had originally postulated some sort of descent from the original Glorfindel for the second Glorfindel, and thus he developed a fuller history for the character later on.

: Somewhere there may be a passage where Christopher Tolkien suggests his father did not like to reuse Elvish names. I cannot think of where such a passage would be, but a number of fans have mentioned such a point over the years. And yet Tolkien did indeed reuse Elvish names (Rumil and Gelmir, for example). In fact he renamed many Edain (or Dunedain) after Elves, and named some Elves after trees (Celeborn) or trees after Elves (Nimloth) and used "Minas Tirith" twice, etc.

: Anyway, it might strike some people as a mistake that he would use Glorfindel twice, but I don't believe this would have been a mistake.

: Michael

I'm not sure quite the nature of the mistake, but a mistake was definitely made. The Glorfindel of Gondolin died. It is more than a matter of a later elf (or man) being named after an earlier elf (like the examples you gave) because Glorfindel of Rivendell was not born after the earlier G. died (I would assume that Rumil of Lorien was born later than the previous one and the Dunedain obvouisly were). It is stated that Glorfindel of Rivendell lived in Valinor, prior to the Noldorin exile, therefore if he was a different person than the G. of Gondolin, we are faced with the unlikely prospect of 2 co-existing elves with the same name (unlikely). Due to the unlikely story concocted later to fix this problem (why just G. and not 1,000 Noldo warriors?), most of us now think that J.R.R.T. made an error, and explained it away later.