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Bethberry Wow!
I was looking at the world through 'Tolkien-coloured' glasses there (though I admit leaning towards that view myself).
As Garth said re Ainulindale:'It is nothing less than an attempt to justify God's creation of an imperfect world filled with suffering, grief & loss.'
This is an imperfect world, & it is filled with suffering, grief & loss - & that's simply the fact for most of humanity, & always has been. But then, if you're a believer, how do you account for God not putting it all right? You require an explanation - at least one that will work for you.
When you say : I know people for whom this does not follow and I would not like to see their experience disavowed. Can you really speak for them?:
I think that's another issue - aren't you talking there about their individual experience of life - their lives, mine, yours, may be happy, untroubled & comfortable, but Tolkien is not attempting to deal with individual happy lives, but with the experience of humanity on this planet through history. Not the relationship of you or I with God, but Humanity's relationship with God down through the ages. My life may be perfectly happy, I may go through from cradle to grave with not a single unpleasant experience, but that does not 'explain away' the inquisition, the Somme, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, 9/11. Or the famines, earthquakes, tidal waves. Or cancer, AIDS, babies born addicted to crack. All of it.
Tolkien is attempting to account for the suffering of humanity, not of individual humans. That's what mythology attempts - to explain our relationship with deity, & why the universe is the way it is.
Of course, there has always been good as well as evil in life - but its the evil we have the problem with, that we feel the need to account for - maybe we have some deep sense that the good doesn't need explaining, because that's how it should be.
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