thegiffman wrote:So why does it feel utterly un-tolkien to have Sauron leading armies of zombies, or even having them for his lieutenants? I feel like even necromancy has different rules in Tolkien's world. The link between body and soul is pretty strong. When the Nazgul's mounts and forms are destroyed, they can't just fly off to the nearest graveyard and grab a fresh skeleton; they need to crawl back to Mordor and get some sort of genuine form that actually belongs to them (even if it's a sort of illicit necomancery sense of belonging).
You're pretty right with the last statement. It's not just an easy "grab a fresh body/skeleton and carry on with your business" thing as you rightly mentioned.
At first I felt a little uncomfortable with the Gibbet King as well, but with closer scrutiny and a bit thinking about it, I think he's depicted quite good. At first (already mentioned), he is very limited in the physical world, and reliant on servants. Second, his main power is spiritual, and this can be fought - not easily, but manageable even for "normal" characters if they are wise and steadfast. Thus he's not an overwhelming enemy, which is good given his limited status.
The point with the zombie army is a good one IMO and could be altered without any problem or change to the plot (N.B. There's a historical glitch in it, as Haycombe is said to be belong to the Éothéod in the time of the dream, but their land never reached that far south in this time - around TA 2500. But this can easily fixed by making this a settlement of other Northmen, as it does not impact the plot as well).
In the context of this question (the un-tolkienish "grab a fresh body and carry on") I find the Werewolf of Mirkwood much more problematic. In its description in the Rulebook, he is described as an ancient spirit from the past, embodied in the form of a great wolf for centuries. Now in the CB, and especially later in DoM, he is described as doing exactly this "body-hopping" regularly. This is - according to the available sources - IMO much more un-tolkienish than the Gibbet-King (who was wisely limited in his supernatural abilities).
As far as Tolkien wrote about it, if a naturally unbodied spirit (on one occasion called
ëalar) like the Ainur (Valar and Maiar) takes on a physical shape (necessary to interact with the physical world), over time this
fana (i.e. something like clothing that can easily be taken on or off) can become a habit and a necessity to him similar to the Children of Eru (whose natural state is a union of body and spirit). If the
fana is used to do things that are necessary for the body of an elf or man (but not for the
fana per se) like eating, drinking or (most binding) procreating, the
ëala becomes over time indeed bound to this form. This all pertains primarily to the "good" spirits, i.e. those that try to follow Eru's rules in good faith.
Those that do not (Morgoth, Sauron & Co.) need the body to physicaly rule their minions and project power. In this, they expend so much of their own power that they indeed become bound to the body and are not easily able to shed it. In their "younger" times, when time has not such a weight and they were more "fresh" (without being killed), shapechanging was easier and possible. But the longer they use a body to do evil stuff, the more bound to it they become. This is indeed a very central theme in Tolkien's Middle-earth "theology".
Conversely, when their body is destroyed (=killed), this is a very traumatic experience and they find it extremely hard to build a new one to carry on with their evil deeds. We see this with the Balrogs who - in the Third Age - are bound to their hideous form in which they terrorize other people. When this form is killed (admittedly, niot that easily), it's "Game Over" for them. The same happened to Saruman (a mighty Maia in human form) and eventually Sauron himself. Even the latter is not able to easily re-constitute a body, once the old has been destroyed. Such a destruction first happened in the Akallabêth, and he lost the ability (=the edge of his power) to generate a new
fair form ever afterwards (i.e. we see a loss of power with the destruction of the old body). And even then (with the One as his focus available) it takes the Dark Lord several decades to clothe himself again. And this new form is effective, but utterly terrorizing, as Sauron lost the power and ability to assume a veiling fair shape. Later on, when this new "Dark Lord" form was destroyed by the Last Alliance, it took Sauron more than 1,000 years to even re-create a weak physical semblance of his former self. And then it took him almost 2,000 more years to regain most of his old strength.
This is also what the whole
LotR is about: To destroy the One means that the power bound within it is no longer available for the Dark Lord to draw on and he falls far below the "critical" mass in strength to ever re-embody again.
What is clear in any case, is - for an evil Ainu - the diminishing ability to re-corporate when his old body is destroyed. A forceful destruction of its physical body is even for a powerful evil Ainu a traumatic event (and probably even more so for the less powerful ones) and not easily shrugged off. And with every destruction, it becomes more difficult to achieve the "critical mass" of finding the strength to re-embody themselves.
One might argue that the Werewolf is not creating new bodies, but inhabiting existing ones, but to me this seems a bit like following the letters of theme (as he is not
creating a new body), but not the spirit (the traumatic event and difficulty of embodiment with the associated loss of power after the destruction of the old body); i.e. some sort of wriggling around the theme laid out above.
And this is what disturbs me with the Werewolf as very un-tolkienish - his effortless ability to hop from body to body, just as it suits him and the old one is destroyed. Of course it is an important plot device in the CB and DoM, but I'll definitely fix that part for me due to the aforementioned reasons. By now, I don't have a good idea how to do it, as it so interwoven with this theme of "body-hopping", but I am sure a solution can be found eventually.
Cheers
Thomas
