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Originally Posted by Neurion
If that had been the case, it would merely have been dull.
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I have to disagree with this. There are many natural disasters in the world today and we could describe none of them as 'dull'. Of course some people ascribe them to God but I do not (the only tragedies I ascribe to 'God' are wars and acts of terror and hatred driven by religious fervour - and even these are driven by people in extreme mental states rather than any 'God' I know). The Boxing Day Tsunami for example was no less tragic than 9/11 or 7/7 - the former caused by the plates of the Earth moving, the latter by an over-abundance of duty to God.
Interestingly the impetus behind the Killer Wave came from Tolkien's dreams of an all-engulfing wave, something which seems to loom large in the collective conscience of a lot of people today. Is this due to the rising sea levels that are threatening our very existence? To the horrors felt by seeing well-known tragedies such as the Boxing Day Tsuanmi and the New Orleans flood? Or do we share collective memories of older floods? There is a long tradition in Britain of flood myths, and archaeologists think these may have stemmed from real floods, from the cutting off of Britain after the Ice Age, from our genuine drowned lands, from the temporal merelands that once ran along our coasts... I'm sure this also true of other cultures, I know it is in Japan, France, Ireland etc.
So if Tolkien had merely written of a Killer Flood and not explicitly said Eru was behind it then it would have been just as effective, just as tragic. It would have given scope for people to wonder if Eru really was behind it (and some people ascribe seemingly every decision made in LotR to Eru) anyway.