Much depends upon how the topic is defined and first presented and then how the posters develop and extrapolate the topic.
Myself, reading the first post here, thought that we were being asked to consider how Numenor ressembled the Old Icelanders. All well and good, except I happened at the time to be reading a compilation of old Welsh tales and legends and discovered that sunken cities are prominent in the old Welsh tales. Ah ha, says I, we have a common topic among many cultures of eld.
Now, we all know about Atlantis and we all know about Tolkien's recurrent dream of flooded civilization, and we all know about Tolkien's love of Welsh. So my initial reaction was to say, well, yes, but there's these Welsh possibilities too. So it isn't a question of ignoring the topic but of wondering just how it is to be defined. To say broadly that the Numenoreans could be like the Old Icelanders is to invite responses of 'well, how specific and definite is that similarity'.... It's a bit confusing moving between causation and correlation and simple similarities. It invites other similarities.
Besides, we have
Tristram Shandy which starts not just with ancestry and the hero's birth, but with the actual ... well, ... little man as it were.
I would like to see
Lalaith elaborate a bit on her post about how 'the feeling' of CoH is closer to the Eddic poems than the Sagas. What are those differences between the Eddas and the sagas? And, frankly, I would enjoy a bit more discussion of just CoH before we jump into the literary forebearers. After all, I want to explore the reading experience before I break it apart.