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Book-Freak said:
For the most part, no. This, door the way, is going to be a rather long explanation, so I hope you’re sitting comfortably. Basically, Valinor is a region of a continent called Aman, which lies to the west of Middle Earth. It used to be part of the physical world (and it took 36 days to kruis the sea between Aman and Middle Earth door boat) but due to some really complicated circumstances (which would take forever to explain, so I won’t) it was completely removed from the physical world. It still exists, but u can’t travel there anymore unless u are an elf of a mortal under very special circumstances. Valinor is used as a generic titel for the entirety of the continent and its regions, and is, in very simple terms, the homeland of the Gods and the Elves. In a way that is very like heaven, I suppose, it is a beautiful and much perfected version of Middle Earth and is, for the most part, totally peaceful. However, it isn’t like heaven in that u don’t have to die to go there. As Valinor is the homeland of the Elves, they are allowed to travel there but they cannot return (another desperately long story). There is an almost total ban on any mortals in Valinor: it is the realm of the immortals only, with very few exceptions. Now, death comes into this in a rather strange and very complicated way, which I’ll try to explain as simply as possible, but it goes into all sorts of complexities regarding souls and mortality. Basically, ‘mortals’ (which include Humans, Dwarves and Hobbits) have very short life spans, at the end of which they die. (Here’s the really complicated bit) The soul of a mortal is in no way tied to the earth. In Tolkien’s theologies, he stated that after death, a mortal’s soul travels out of all the circles of the world, and not even the gods know what happens to them. When a mortal dies in Middle Earth, their soul travels to what are known as ‘The Halls of Mandos’. Mandos is the god of death and his ‘halls’ are basically where departed souls go. The mortal souls pass straight through these halls and out of all knowledge, but this does not happen for elves and other immortals (I’ll explain who these other immortals are in a minute). When as Elf dies, their soul travels to the Halls of Mandos but unlike the mortals, their souls stay there. Elves are immortal, and their souls are tied to earth in a way that humans’ souls aren’t: basically, the elves will live until the end of the world.
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