[Child of the 7th Age]

And it is. Is M-e monotheistic or polytheistic? It can't be both. the simple answer is that it is monotheistic - except Eru doesn't do very much after Ainulindule, & the world is effectively ruled by the Valar. So for 99% of the Sil we have a polytheistic world.

Basically what we have is a monotheistic world that has been "deserted" by its Creator. I believe Tolkien says as much somewhere in the Letters. Whoever or whatever god is in the Legendarium, he is normally very distant. There are so few times when Eru puts his finger in the pot.

I guess I really have two issues that haven't been addressed on this very long thread..... Here goes.

The situation in Numenor was really a mess. The description of blood offerings and the enslavement of many in Middle-earth in the Silm was pretty disgusting. Frankly, if I had been living in Middle-earth at that time and had seen what was happening, I would have begged and pleaded for anyone to make the situation go away, even if that meant the death of a lot of people (though drowning the island would never have entered my mind). We don't have numbers for what is happening here, but it sounds as if a large number of people were affected by the atrocities (and they were atrocities).

So assuming that there really was a need for all this to stop, what would the alternatives have been short of drowning the island? Swallowing up the ships would not have done the job in my opinion, since there was still Sauron sitting with the Ring on top of his little hill. Taking out Sauron somehow? That would be a possibility, but could Sauron be gotten rid of so easily since he had the Ring? (Would it have been possible for the Valar to destroy the Ring while leaving everything outside the Temple boundaries nice and tidy?) And even if you took out Sauron and the fleet, the whole infrastructure of the Temple system would exist. The people of Numenor had the knowledge and resources to remake the ships. I doubt their behavior would change. Could anything effective be done short of what was actually done? What I am asking us to do is to look beyond the question of who does the punishment and ask if there were alternatives as to what was done.

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Now regarding the whole issue of a natural disaster versus a punishment….. Yes a tsunami would flatten the isle, and Eru could keep his hands clean. But isn't there a wider question? Tolkien is raising a moral issue concerning the behavior of the men of Numenor. To me that judgment is central to the story, whether the judgment is made by Eru or by the author himself. Indeed, I would say that moral element is central to all Tolkien's stories on some level. If that is the case, wouldn't a punishment be necessary, whether you agree with the form that the punishment took or not? A freak weather event just doesn't cut it for me in the context of the Legendarium.

This is myth, and much of myth involves questions of “why” and judgments concerning behavior (gods may get some leeway re behavior, but not men). Ancient cultures from around the globe have stories about massive flooding; such stories almost always involve a judgment made by the unseen powers that rule the world. Such stories says as much about the insecurity of man, the fact that everything we have can be swept away in the blink of an eye (and I’m not just talking physical possessions here), as they do about the nature of the ruling gods. Almost always, the ancient floods are explained in terms of a punishment given out for immoral behavior. That is certainly true of Atlantis, which is the closest analogy to Numenor. The most prevalent reason cited for the destruction of Atlantis and the Atlantean culture were the misuse of power and the moral decay of the Atlanteans themselves. Secondary emphasis is placed on the wrath of the gods.

In this sense Tolkien is following in the steps of myth with his tale of Numenor. When we raise questions about a god committing an atrocity by unleashing the flood, we are reacting like men and women of the twenty-first century rather than adjusting our brain to the mythic paradigms that Tolkien proposes. Myth rarely judges the power of the gods. It merely describes what is a real fact: the gods have amazing power and can pull the rug out from beneath your feet whenever they choose to do so.

The problem with focusing attention only on the question of whether or not Eru is just is that it pulls our personal beliefs from the twenty-first century into the equation. For those posters who’ve been here a while, I can pretty well predict what side of this question they are going to take. It depends how they feel about "religion" in real life. (And undoubtedly, you folk could predict my own answer as well). To keep the discussion from going in circles like a dog chasing his tale, aren’t we better off trying to look at this story not merely in terms of modern political/religious sensitivities, or the believer versus non-believer framework, and instead think in terms of myth itself?