The atrocity of the Akallabêth

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by davem

So, [Eru is a]very boring character, & the reason I think he's best left out. The Valar are interesting because they're flawed, make mistakes & produce drama. Yet they themselves are too powerful when the story turns to focus on individual people in Middle-earth & have to be removed to the background.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I really must protest such a reductive reading of the character Eru.

Eru, being transcendant deity, is a fundamentally different type of character than any other. By definition, Eru cannot be flawed and make mistakes and produce that kind of drama.

To want or expect Eru to have done so is like asking the Sun to function like a planet. If one were to expect all heavenly bodies to exhibit the characteristics of planets, then there would be no light source for those heavenly bodies that really are planets, nor a strong enough gravitational pull to hold the planets around the sun.

Just so, Eru is the center of gravitation and light source, for the entire story. To miss this basic fact of Tolkien's creation is to have a somewhat povertystricken experience in one's reading of The Silmarillion. There are things about the story one simply will not comprehend.

The sequence of the creative process, interesting as it is, doesn't tell us as much as that which the mature author chose to include in the mature product.