[Nogrod]

Good points Lal and Esty!

I would like to add one more.

If there is any truth in the claim that Tolkien wished to be making a myth / mythology, or even that he just had different mythologies as his examples, then leaving these unexplainables within would just sound reasonable and natural.

If one think of the way natural science aims to explain the world it is dissecting everything open and laying it bare to the objective study to find all the causal relationships it has with earlier things, laying bare the basic structures and causes of things. But with myths we are always left with puzzles where things are just stated incompletely.

Just think of Edda, f.ex. In the beginning there was Ymir (the ur-giant) and the ginnungagap (the void). Then came the sons of the primal being, Borr (Odin, Vili & Ve). And then we are told of the moon and the sun, and the Aasa and the Vana, the dwarves and the weak Askr and Embla (the first humans) licked out by the cow from a frozen rock (or however it went), and so on and so on... So where did they come from? The cow?

They just are, with no explanation. But we see them all play their part in stories and having their qualities. Like many characters in Tolkien's world.

And with myths, I don't think we need the explanations - otherwise we're doing the same thing the scholastics tried to do with Christianity: trying to rationalise it beoynd belief to be a rational world-view...