Quote:
|
Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
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.
|
I think you misunderstand what davem is saying. He says that he doesn't need Eru to be there for the story to be satisfying, and he's entirely free to say that, as it's just a criticism of a piece of literature. I'd be quite happy with a few less Elves with names beginning in F (or indeed a few less Elves anyway, certainly less pathetically wimpy female Elves and a few more who do something, like Luthien or Aredhel). I'm allowed to say that. And davem not liking a character doesn't mean he does not comprehend things about the story or has somewhat less of a reading experience - that's an incredibly loaded statement to make.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli
It's perhaps worth remembering that Tolkien set out to recreate the Atlantis-myth- the essential datum-point of which is the sinking of the island and the death of its inhabitants. For Tolkien to have ended it otherwise would have been to write a different story. As it is he's far more merciful than Plato, since he posits survivors; and goes to great length to assign a general guilt to the nation.
|
It's interesting that the myths of Numenor and Atlantis also share a sense of mystery - we find ourselves asking why this happened, a question to which we can come up with a range of decent answers, but when we ask about drowned innocents we get stumped. In the case of Numenor, we at least know that Eru did it, and we can at least say he did it "because he can" - and say that this is just part of his own mystery and omnipotence.