Can atheists appreciate/understand Lord of the Ring?

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Tar-Verimuchli

I do remember HOME recounting his attempts to remove the flat world and light from trees elements and make them mannish myths.

Tolkien did more than make attempts to make some of the unscientific parts of the Silmarillion into Mannish myths. In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien has Gimli recite a poem beginning with the lines (emphasis mine):

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone
When Durin woke and walked alone.

This conflicts with all Silmarillion accounts in which Durin and the other first Dwarves wake before the first rising of the Moon and Sun.

Gandalf later sings a short poem about the Ents (emphasis mine):

Ere iron was found or tree was hewn,
When young was mountain under moon;
Ere ring was made, or wrought was woe,
It walked the forests long ago.

Here the moon predates the first cutting of trees, presumably by Elves.

Also, in The Lord of the Rings, in Tolkien’s summary of early days in the Appendices, Tolkien makes no mention of the late creation of Moon and Sun from flower and fruit or of the tradition that the Earth had been flat before the drowning of Númenor.

In the The Hobbit in the chapter “Flies and Spiders”, Tolkien had originally written:

In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon; and afterwards they wandered in the forests that grew beneath the sunrise.

In the revision of 1966 this was changed, removing all mention of a “raising of the Sun and Moon”:

In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost.

In the last three HoME volumes, except for text which is represented as part of the Annals or of the Silmarillion, in all mentions of the days before the return of the Noldor to Middle-earth, the Elves who appear as living in Middle-earth dwell under the Sun, where this is mentioned.

In Morgoth’s Ring (HoME 10), page 370, Tolkien makes clear his dissatisfaction with the tale of the late creation of the Moon and Sun from flower and fruit. Attempts to revise this did not work, and so Tolkien’s decision was to consider the Silmarillion to have been a legendary document in which Mannish tradition, sometimes false, has been mixed with Elvish tradition. This seems to have been Tolkien’s final and permanent opinion on the matter, perhaps first arrived at when he was considering publishing the Silmarillion for Milton Waldman.

On page 374 of Morgoth’s Ring (HoME), note 2, Tolkien writes:

The cosmogonic myths are Númenórean, blending Elven-lore with human myth and imagination. A note should say that the Wise of Númenor recorded that the making of the stars was not so, nor of Sun and Moon. For Sun and stars were all older than Arda.

Here Tolkien seems to imagine The Silmarillion eventually being published much as his son eventually did, but also including some notes, attributed to “the Wise of Númenor”, indicating that the account of The Silmarillion is not be taken as true on all points.