[Voronwe]

Due to lack of time I sadly won't be able to give the excellent posts made on this thread the response they obviously deserve. However I hope to be able to make one or two points, which I may be able to expand on later.

Firstly, Chris Tolkien dates the Athrabeth as being written in 1959, thus making it a fairly late work of Tolkien's. As Bill Ferny has pointed out, such late writings tend to focus more on the theological, philosophical and cosmological aspects of middle earth, rather than narrative, and the Athrabeth is clearly no exception. Nonetheless the Athrabeth is different from other such works in that it is presented as a dialogue between two characters, Finrod and Andreth. Thus all the philosophy presented in the Athrabeth, while it may be true or very close to the truth (if there is such a thing) is still speculation on the part of the two characters (mostly Finrod), rather than the voice of the author. Tolkien's voice is heard in the commentary to the work, but it is not clear whether he is speculating as, say, the translator would speculate in a commentary on his translation, or whether he is making authorative statements about Middle Earth. Since I know of no direct evidence for the latter, I tend to assume the former.

Turning now to Original Sin: my post above may have come off as comparing Tolkien's mythology too closely to Christianity. I was merely attempting to show that there was original sin (which is a very Christian concept) present in Tolkien's work (at least for men), though in radically altered, and perhaps less significant, form. Much of my post was devoted to analysing the 'Tale of Adanel', which, although it may not be historically true, is the only description of the original sin that Tolkien gives us.

I agree wholeheartedly that Tolkien's mythology is not equivalent, or even close to equivalent, to the Christian one. Nonetheless, Christian aspects arise in many places (as they are bound to, in a work of fiction on this scale). These aspects appear throughout the whole range of Tolkien's mythology: Heaven, hell and purgatory are essentially present in the Lost Tales (later abandoned of course), the Athrabeth is full of Christian concepts, and there are Christian concepts, of a different sort perhaps, in the Lord of the Rings, which have been discussed at length. Such things of course don't constitute allegory of any kind, which is just as well. I am sure there are just as many, if not more, connections (both obvious and subtle) with the Northern mythologies which Tolkien was so fond of.

I agree there is a significant problem with having an original sin affecting only men alongside a more general fallen world affecting all other races, and causing them to sin. Nonetheless, I don't believe it can be denied that some kind of fall of men (whether the one described in the Athrabeth or otherwise) occurred and was caused by Morgoth. It could be said, perhaps, that while the race of men fell all at once as a single race, only some of the elves and dwarves (and Ents?!) fell, due to their own individual deeds. All such falls would of course be an indirect result of Melkor's own fall. This is still, however, very unsatisfactory and doesn't even come close to resolving this most difficult of issues.