In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Glorfindel appears twice as a name of an Elf who appears in the tales of Middle-earth. The first appears in various material relating to the First Age of Middle-earth, including The Silmarillion. The second appears in The Lord of the Rings, which takes place in Middle-earth's Third Age. In later writings, Tolkien states they were one and the same, though this is not evident from The Silmarillion and The Lord of...
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In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Glorfindel appears twice as a name of an Elf who appears in the tales of Middle-earth. The first appears in various material relating to the First Age of Middle-earth, including The Silmarillion. The second appears in The Lord of the Rings, which takes place in Middle-earth's Third Age. In later writings, Tolkien states they were one and the same, though this is not evident from The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
The character and his name (meaning "blond, golden-haired") were among the first created, when Tolkien first conceived of what would become his Middle-earth legendarium in 1916–17.
Glorfindel first appears in Tolkien's fantasy in The Fall of Gondolin about the conquest of the Elven city Gondolin by the Dark Lord Morgoth. It was the first part of "The Book of Lost Tales" to be written, in 1916–17. As his ideas evolved, Tolkien wrote about this event various times, and it appears in compressed form in The Silmarillion, when much of...
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