🧝Elf children

[Feanorian]

I was hoping someone would prove me wrong because it just seems like Elves are meant to have pointy ears. I believe it was on this very website that i read there was never a point of Tolkien's writings where he mentioned elves having pointy ears. I guess you just cant believe something until you see it though.

 

[Turin]

Does anyone know what the difference between Gnomes and Elves or are they the same?

 

[jallan]

“Gnomes” was used by Tolkien to mean the Noldor only, or the Noldoli as he called them in his early writings.

He dropped this practice in writing THe Lord of the Rings because the common image of a Gnome as a Dwarf-like being was too ingrained.

That was about the time the garden-Gnome statues first became popular.

“Gnomes” seems to have been coined by Paracelsus as a name for earth elementals, but gradually became a synonym for supernatural beings like Dwarfs or Knockers: the kind of beings associated with the earth and underground in genuine folklore.

Some further discussion here.

 

[Turin]

Thank you for all the info.

 

[Confusticated]

Now the way they are reincarnated is a very difficult thing to wrap your mind round, but they are born into the body of a newly born child, so an Elf who has died and been reincarnated will have passed through two stages of childhood. As they grow older and move towards maturity they remember more and more of their past life, until they can remember all of it.

I just have to reply to this. What Ceorl says is written in Laws and Customs, but later Tolkien wrote the Converse of Manwe and Eru, where the idea of rehousing is introduced (were the Valar may rehouse an elf in a body identical to the one if had before it was ruined). Tolkien also wrote "Reincarnation of the Elves", presumably after the Converse of Manwe and Eru. To keep it short, I'll give what Christopher says of this:

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 it's validity in the terms he had adopted, it had come to seem to him a serious flaw in the metaphysic of Elvish existance. But, he said, it was a 'dilemma', for the reincarnation of the Elves 'seems an essential element in the tales'. 'The only solution,' he decided in this discussion, was the idea of the remaking in identicle form of the hroa of the Dead in the manner declared by Eru in The Converse of Manwe and Eru: the fea retains a memery, an imprint, of it's hroa, its 'former house', so powerful and precise that the reconstruction of an identical body can proceed from it.

Tolkien mentions in Reincarnation of the Elves that because an elf reborn would have new parents, he/she would grow to have a body different than the former. This would not be healthy for the elf, but it would also go against that idea of the hroa and fea being fitted to eachother.

In short: an elf released from Mandos is not reborn as a baby but given a body identical to it's former.

This is all found in Morgoth's Ring.

hroa - body
fea - spirit
house as used here - body