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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
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If evil in Tolkien's world is the absence of something then Eru (as creator of all) causes Melkor to be missing something.
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I don't follow how you get from your 'if' to your 'then'. Please explain.
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Simply that if we decide that in Tolkien's world that evil means something is missing then as a world with an omnipotent creator God, we must also assume that this creator
left something out of Melkor's creation. Everything comes back to him, even the gaps.
To use a metaphor, Melkor is rather like the talented son of a supremely talented father, but the talented son who the father has failed to give any guidance to; he has had all the gifts money can buy, and has had the best schooling, but the father did not guide him. Eventually, this son saw all the power his father had and decided for himself he wanted to have that. The good thing to come out of this situation though is that the eldest son's lack of guidance and his thirst for power has made all the younger siblings work all that harder (by and large, they aren't perfect) not to make the same mistakes. Nobody can say if the father intended this all along, but he was the father, nothing can take that away.
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Originally Posted by SofN
Tolkien's Middle-earth is a self-contained, completely rational model of reality. It is not a metaphor for an ideology or a statement about some Supreme Unknowable. It has nothing to say about the world you live in: it is a metaphor for the individual - for you.
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I agree, I don't think it is a 'lesson' or anything of that type - it is to me primarily Art.
But...
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Originally Posted by SofN
It was testament to nothing more than the word-thoughts which arose in him as he experienced reality unfolding, yet in it each of us can find our entire lives reflected.
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...this does not mean I think it has no structure or internal meaning. It has a lot of this, and it is good mental exercise to argue about that. And no matter how much I simply relax into the poetics of it all and like to speculate (it is after all fantasy, which encourages this sort of thing like no other literature can, apart from Poetry, which is perhaps even more like that), it is about a whole other world and there are boundaries, rules and frameworks.
But then who is to say that even what we read is correct if we choose to fully immerse into the concept of the secondary world? Like in the real world, how do we know that what we are told is the truth?
But that way madness lies...
