Quote:
Originally Posted by tumhalad2
"Which should envy the other?" asks an Elven ambassador to Numenor in the Akallabeth. Who indeed. If Tolkien had absolutely, really valued the Elves above humans, made them true 'ubermenschen' surely he would have validated their immortality as something men do not have, for example because of the "fall"
Interestingly, Tolkien does an about turn on Christian mythology at this point and says that both the mortality of Humans and the immortality of Elves is simply "the fulfilment of their being" no more a 'punishment' than death is in real life. The drama plays out precisely because the Numenorians, who you call 'superior' perceive the Elves to be ubermensche pretty much. The Numenorians attempt to forcibly take immortality and they fail because of it. They fail not because they are 'lesser' beings, or 'unworthy' or 'deserving of punishment', they fail because they desire something entirely unnatural to them, something entirely foreign, somthing that is in no way a fulfillment of their being. Were men to step upon Valinor they would (something like this) die a quicker death as moths do when exposed to bright light.
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And you can answer this by looking at Tolkien in the light of Modernism (the theory). How was a Catholic to make sense of the mindless slaughter of millions in WWI? Many people simply turned away from faith altogether because they could not square the slaughter with the existence of any kind of 'good' God. Tolkien didn't do what a lot who did keep their faith did do, and ascribe the slaughter to some fall of mankind - no he came to view Death in a more Northern way, as a kind of inevitability, as part of the very nature of humanity is to die.