Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
Basically, what I meant was that I look for common threads in the books, and that allowing for multiple 'River-daughters', for example, when there doesn't seem to be any evidence of it, seems improper to me. Speculation is free though, and I'm not saying anyone else is bound to 'limit' their thinking (if that's the way you want to consider it) the way I do. Like I said, that's just the way my mind works; I want to make things fit in ME. Maybe they don't, as an intention of the author, but that doesn't stop me trying.  |
But Tolkien himself says that there were more things that he has written about! So that fits.
And for multiple River-daughters, well, I always thought about it that way that she was just one of many daughters of her own mother, and in any case, if we take her mother as a real character, as specifically said especially in the Adventures of Tom Bombadil, that would imply that there is just a "race", we could say, of these river-sprites, who procreate and therefore one could assume there being more of them. Probably less than in ancient times, but still... something like Ents, for instance, or a good counterpart to the Spiders, possibly traceable to some Maia of Ulmo or something like that as their originator. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. And I don't know how about your local mythology, but at least in the fairy-tales and myths of my country some sort of sprites in woman form who live in the water is perfectly normal, so I am sort of associating Goldberry with them (she has basically the same traits) - I am assuming that some similar concept exists more widely, and therefore, Tolkien would likely use this as a basis for Goldberry's character. And such a kind of beings can easily exist throughout the Middle-Earth, not in every stream (especially if it's associated with Ulmo, the explanation is easy: Ulmo himself said that already in the First Age, his powers were withdrawing from the waters of the world), but somewhere - just like the Ents (with possibly even a bit more "isolated" social structure).