Quote:
Originally Posted by Morthoron
The "problem" as inferred by said writer is nonsense. Again, Tumhalad, you are taking events out of context in an effort to serve your ongoing proposition, merely rewording your theories in every post you make, but nevertheless ending with the same central thesis. One would think, by your lack of intertextuality, that suffering of an individual only occurs with Turin in CoH, and not throughout Tolkien's entire corpus. Your continuing attempts to divorce Turin's fate from his bad choices and attempting to make them separate issues does not take into account the overall plot and overarching theme of the story.
You are reading in a vacuum. How many Elves and Men suffered equal horrific fates in the First Age without the intervention of Eru? The answer is simple, but since you insist on ignoring "'intra-text' or 'historical' associations", it is never apparent to you, and you keep stumbling down the same blind path to an empty well.
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I'm not sure why you treat me like such a pariah, is it you prerogative to decide who belongs to the in group and the out group on these boards? You could be nicer.
How many Elves and Men suffer? I imagine many do, and that only makes my point more immediate. Without the intervention of Eru? That's the question I'm trying to tackle in my post. I don't think the essayist was writing nonsense. Why, indeed, would Tolkien write about a fictional world created by a god with contradictory and illogical qualities? He probably didn't actually recognise the Problem of Evil
per se, as it is formalised logically, although it is obvious that the nature of evil itself is one of the primary themes of his works.
Suffering does occur in all Tolkien's works, but Turin's suffering is singled out and expanded upon in almost novelistic terms, hence it is an interesting case study. I don't agree with you that the writer is inferring "nonsense", and I don't think Tolkien's internal metaphysics supplies an answer to the problem of evil in his world.
With regards to Turin, Melian has been repeatedly mentioned as some kind of divine authority, and that the difference between her and Gandalf is that Frodo listened to Gandalf's advice whereas Turin rejects Melian's. True, she may be of "divine" stature, but she is not, and she does not claim to speak for, God. While Gandalf does not claim to speak for God explicitly, his words are just one example in LoTR where he (or the text) makes claims about the nature of fate. In LoTR, we are left with the sense that fate is orchestrated by unseen divine powers. There is a qualitative difference between this, and Turin receiving "wisdom" from Melian, or "advice" from Elven messengers, regardless of which Vala they claim to speak for.
The Valar are not omnipresent, omnipotent, nor indeed omnibenevolent, so their perspective, while powerful, is also provisional. Even were Turin to take the advice of the Valar, he would not have moral certainty of his life choices. We might say he would be better off had he chosen listen to the advice of Ulmo, for instance, but we cannot know for certain that his life would have turned out for the better. Frodo can be sure that the purpose of destroying the Ring is the correct one, and that his suffering thereby attains
meaning. Events that take place within the LoTR have purpose, they are sanctioned. In CoH, the closest we come to this is the "advice" of the Valar; there is no sense that events are meaningfully orchestrated by unseen benevolent powers.
The Valar are characters in the fiction, powerful characters, to be sure, but temporally and spatially limited, just like the Elves and Men (though to a lesser degree).