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Old 02-27-2013, 06:50 PM   #22
Zigūr
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TheGreatElvenWarrior View Post
Before Sauron became The Eye
I just noticed this. Is it a metaphorical statement? Surely it is well-established that Sauron was never just a big floating eyeball. Nonetheless I can't think that Sauron, whose first fixation was Order and later simply hatred for those who appeared to obstruct his vision of Order, would have had much interest in anything sexual even at his most incarnate level of spiritual degradation. Sauron seems to me to have been an obsessive person, who in the Third Age at least had two overriding goals: the conquest of the West of Middle-earth and the recovery of the Rings of Power (and especially, of course, the One Ring). He does not strike me as the kind of person who put those fixations aside for the sake of his leisure.

I am still convinced that the Ainur were largely asexual unless confined to a single incarnation, and that their marriages were based on a "purer" form of "gender-attraction" rather than the sexual attraction that Incarnates had to put up with. Again, it seems to me that Professor Tolkien considered sexuality to be in many cases a wearisome obstacle in the relations between men and women in this world ("The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall." (Letters p.48)) and that an emotionally intimate relationship between the two without sexuality would be an admirable thing. Hence in the secondary world Ainur couples would be "better" than Incarnate couples because they wouldn't have sexuality mediating the affection and compatibility of partners.

Likewise I am almost entirely sure that Professor Tolkien made a remark somewhere to the effect that marriages among the Ainur were non-sexual in nature (more explicitly than in the quote I've already provided in my previous post, that is) but I still cannot find it...
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