Re: questionable conception

In article <C_NPj.202$506.141@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Mike Schilling <mscottschilling@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> In article <slrng0v384.4r2.dbd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>> David DeLaney <dbd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:17:45 GMT, Dorothy J Heydt
>>> <djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>> With Gandalf, it's a bit different.  In the first place, he is
>>>> not of humble origins.  He is a Maia, a spirit of the second
>>>> rank, created _ex nihilo_ by Eru Iluvatar.  For him to be
>>>> incarnated as something that looked rather like a Man, and sent to
>>>> Middle-Earth to aid its inhabitants and oppose Sauron, must have
>>>> been something of a let-down.
>>>
>>> Oh, I don't know; we might think of ... the world, gah, lost the
>>> word for it for a moment ... Arda as the equivalent of an RPPvP
>>> server. He did level up at least once during the series, after all.
>>
>> Yes, from Grey to White.  But I'm talking about his initial
>> change from a bodiliess spirit dweling in peace in Aman, to a
>> carnate being that has to eat and drink and sleep and is addicted
>> to nicotine.
>
>Why bodiless?  The elves didn't become bodiless when they lived in the 
>West (they kept having children, for one thing.) 

Well, ok, I'll withdraw "bodiless", since we know of one Maia
before the Istari that either had, or made for herself at the
moment juste, a body: that was Melian.

Maybe I just feel being bodiless is preferable to being embodied
because mine is old and sick and tired.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]