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Originally Posted by Hookbill
I hear you.
Perhaps the reason for Tolkien's lack of development of Eru is due to a sort of fear of getting it wrong or causing too much controvacy. To go into the character too deeply might make him too obviously an allegory of the God of the Bible and may have alienated some readers who just wanted to get down to the excitement, adventure and really wild things.
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I think it's that Eru simply had no place in The Hobbit or LotR. However he does have a place, putting aside all other arguments about if he was
necessary, in The Silmarillion, as that book deals with cosmology and creation. Myths have Gods, so at the most simple level, Tolkien gives us some. But I do think he found the Valar inherently more interesting which is why he concentrated more on them; and even beyond this, he found the Children most interesting of all, because around 90% of his work must be devoted to them. Tolkien said Lord of the Rings is not a 'religious' work, which is why it didn't 'do' to make too much of Gods. They didn't fit his story nor did they fit what he was saying with this epic tale, which is essentially about the amazing, mind-blowing struggles of the Children.
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Originally Posted by Neurion
Feel free to.
In a historical sense, such things are VERY dull. A brief interlude of blind nature interfering in the vastly more interesting sphere of human affairs. Not even worthy of notice, really.
Again, I would have to disagree, both with the assertion that such events are essentially tragic in nature and that "extreme mental states" are inevitably the cause.
Not an especially good comparison, I must say. On the one hand, you have a random and pointless act of nature. On the other, the latest major salvo in a very old war.
Since such evidence seems yet to have surfaced, I'd have to assume that the answer is a fairly defintive no.
Again, it would not have. Such as it is, the destruction of Numenor recalls the Biblical flood in its parallel tale of over-weening human pride and abandonment of God, and thus derives its power. As a "killer flood" it would merely have been just another freak act of nature such as tend to occur every now and then, devoid of any emotional power save in the glorification of victimhood as seems to be the fashion these days.
Because they were wrong, simply enough. Because they violated the divinely-established conditions that had been set upon the men of Numenor.
And how is it that you know beyond doubt that this was not wisdom?  |
First off, aside from it being ever so slightly sick to suggest that natural disasters are not worthy of notice (get caught up in one and you might think differently when other people are ignoring your cries for help), it's not even true that they do not make history, as they do.
And the 'glorification of victimhood' is some thing often trawled out by the extremes of right and left wing media these days just as a way of sying "Oh look at us, we're so rational we fail entirely to be moved by the deaths of other humans". It's quite frankly sad. Feeling sympathy, pity etc for those caught up in natural disaster is what separates us from the Apes - our inherent abilty to emphaphise, which is why Tolkien makes so much of this in his books; in contrast the Orcs do not empathise, displaying distict sociopathic tendencies - as lack of empathy is a common sign of that mental illness. It's not even a modern phenomenon. On March 11th 1864 a dam burst in the hills above Sheffield and the flood killed hundreds of people - the newspapers were full of stories for months afterwards (of great benefit to those if us who are interested in this as we have lots of documentary evidence to look at).
Oh, and the conditions set upon the Men of Numenor were not set by Eru but by the Valar.