The atrocity of the Akallabêth

[Lalwendë]

Look, we're arguing as though Eru destroyed Numenor because of something done against his will, but that's wrong. Eru detsroyed Numenor because the Valar asked him to, not even that, that Valar pleaded with Eru just to do something.

The Valar had overstepped the mark by giving Men this island which was so temptingly close to the Undying Lands, by idolising Men too much. Then when Men came to act as they inevitably would, wanting to explore the seas and wanting to see what it was about the Undying Lands which gave the inhabitants unending life (to their minds, it was the place which did this, not the inherent nature of the peoples there - the Men of Numenor lacked understanding of immortals just as much as the Immortals lacked any comprehension of mortality) the Valar were powerless to act. They pleaded with Eru, the one who made these creatures, and Eru smote.

He did not do it as those remaining on Numenor were 'evil' themselves - indeed Miriel is perfectly innocent. And I seriously doubt that Tolkien, devoted family man would ever write about children being evil or wicked. The event is not 'just' nor is it 'justified' apart from it is something that the god of this world does. A god who as I have pointed out already is like the God of the Book of Job, a law only unto himself. Rather than punishing the people left on Numenor, he is in fact punishing the Valar who were foolish/proud enough to set up Numenor in the first place.

Nor was the event meant to echo the Noah myth in any way, it was meant to be Atlantean. The only part which echoes the Noah story is the escape of Elendil and the Faithful, which Tolkien calls "a kind of Noachian situation". The rest of it, this whole, huge, overbearing and memorable story, is drawn from something Atlantean. It comes from Tolkien's own mind, from his own recurring nightmares, something which he squarely points down to being common amongst those who live near the Sea and those in Western Europe. I know exactly what he means - I grew up with exactly the same kinds of tales of drowned lands and fears of the lands being drowned once more.

So while we're all scratching away at some kind of Biblical analogy, meaning or comprehension to all of this we are looking in precisely the wrong place. This really has very little to do with what Eru and the valar are really like, little to do with whether the babies drowned at Numenor were evil, and a whole lot to do with Atlantis.

Some quotes:

Originally Posted by Letter 154

The particular 'myth' which lies behind this tale, and the mood both of Men and Elves at this time, is the Downfall of Númenor: a special variety of the Atlantis tradition. That seems to me so fundamental to 'mythical history' -- whether is has any kind of basis in real history, pace Saurat and others, is not relevant -- that some version of it would have to come in

Originally Posted by Letter 163

for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Númenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age.

Originally Posted by Letter 180

For when Faramir speaks of his private vision of the Great Wave, he speaks for me. That vision and dream has been ever with me -- and has been inherited (as I only discovered recently) by one of my children

Originally Posted by Letter 227

The legends of Númenórë are only in the background of The Lord of the Rings ... They are my own use for my own purposes of the Atlantis legend, but not based on special knowledge, but on a special personal concern with this tradition of the culture-bearing men of the Sea which so profoundly affected the imagination of peoples of Europe with westward-shores.

Originally Posted by Letter 257

What I might call my Atlantis-haunting. This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of deep water. I used to draw it or write bad poems about it. When C. S. Lewis and I tossed up, and he was to write on space-travel and I on time-travel, I began an abortive book of time-travel of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West.

Originally Posted by Child

To put it bluntly, did Tolkien blow it by giving us tiny glimpses of deity or reflected deity in one part of the narrative and pulling back in others so that we are ultimately left with unaswered questions. If the author truly wanted to keep "religion" out of his created world, as he certainly stated at one point, then why start the whole thing off with Eru? Or did his Catholic beliefs compel him to do this and, yet at the same time, require him to make Eru no more than a "minor, irritable" character, because of the difficulties of writing in a pre-revelation world?

Really the most obvious answer is that anyone writing a mythical saga would not want to miss out the Coolest Bit Of All: the chance to write your very own creation myth. I'm not religious and I too would be champing at the bit to get some god/creator action going on. Tolkien didn't put Eru in because he was a Catholic but because he was a writer.