Everyone....many good points here. But I do feel compelled to add something.
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Saucepan Man I don't disagree. However, I do think that to attempt to shape a fictional world founded on myths and legend so that it accorded more with his own specific religious beliefs was as much a mistake as to convert it from a flat world to a round one.
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Yes, I do think that would have been a mistake. But I can't help feeling that Tolkien's beliefs were so strong that they are inevitably mirrored in his writing, even when there was no conscious attempt to mold a world according to his personal leanings. And yet, there is even more to it than that. Let's take the example of the dialogue between Andreth and Finrod. Most readers focus on the idea of Eru taking on incarnate form and coming into the world, a clear connection with the Christian view of history. There is also a veiled reference to the "fall of Man". Both those elements are definitely there. Yet so are others, equally important.
In fact, I'd like to go out on a limb and push this a little further.
In some ways the Athrabeth is
the definitive statement of Tolkien's legendarium (and strangely I don't think we've ever had a serious discussion about it on this site despite a thread started several eons ago). The author has told us repeatedly that the Lord of the Rings and, by extension, the entire legendarium is about death. This is the one and only place where we get a clear idea of what the author is actually thinking about death, at least as mirrored in the human and Elvish viewpoints. Nor is this a philosophical discussion set in a vacuum. We know that Andreth speaks with bitterness out of her love for Aegnor; she represents the human mind. Finrod responds from the Elvish perspective. In my opinion, he is slightly condescending to her. He has trouble comprehending what the aging (48) Andreth feels as she sees herself eternally separated from her lover, the beautiful young Elf who will never age (at least not for several eons).
In much of LotR, we are given very clear ideas about what's right and wrong. Aragorn is the classic illustration of this: his firm statement that, whatever the age, right and goodness do not change. In the Athrabeth, however, there is not statement but dialogue: a dialogue that ends in question and speculation rather than firm answers. The two characters are in the dark: they know so little and the answers are so uncertain.
If Lord of the Rings and the legendarium as a whole is "all about death and dying", then the Athrabeth is an integral part of that very concept. And, if it is so, how can we think that Tolkien may have "misspent" his latter years in producing something as poignant as the Athrabeth?
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I owe a heavy debt to Verlyn Flieger in the specifics of this argument about Andreth, although I've always felt this way myself. I've just gotten Flieger's new book "Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology". It was in paperback at Amazon.
Littlemanpoet -- Flieger has a lot to say that is relevent to the question you've raised. She looks not at the content of the mythology but the logistics of its development, start to finish. And some of her conclusions are pertinent to your question: understanding how the later writings fit in. I am just reading it now, so can't say much more than that. (I cheated and skipped ahead to the section on Andreth.
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