The atrocity of the Akallabêth

[drigel]

The Valar had overstepped the mark by giving Men this island which was so temptingly close to the Undying Lands, by idolising Men too much.

Well put. And IMO Sauron simply hastened the inevitable. Such is the lot for mortals.

Rather than punishing the people left on Numenor, he is in fact punishing the Valar who were foolish/proud enough to set up Numenor in the first place.

I submit that the creation of Numenor was far more damaging to many more people than it's destruction.

Howeve, can the sins of the inhabitants of those cities ever compare to what the numenoreans did to others (torture, slavery, sacrifice to Melkor) and to themselves (slaying each other in madness), while disregarding each and every sign to repent?

I am curious, what more evil deeds did all of these do that "far exceeded" the numenorean actions?

Not to nitpick, but anything JRRT could conceive of, pales in comparison to the reality of S&G, or really any typical city of that era. Those kind of real atrocities were carried out 2500 years later in the capital of the greatest empire that man ever built. As for orcs - as with elves hobbits and dwarves, etc, arent they personifications of everything man has to offer? That's the way I see it. I think JRRT saw buroughcrats shuffling papers in cubicles offering a far more insidious evils than any orc or bad Numeronian.

That puts the reader in a strange position. He can accept that ambiguity or insert some other image of "god" or "ungod" into the story to try and achieve greater clarity.

But there is a chasm of not knowing that Tolkien purposely placed at the heart of his story, and there is a certain point we can't go beyond. Tolkien almost seems to delight in doing this to the reader.

Child's great post really sums up the debate. It poses a strange position to the reader, only if the reader can only accept one mode of thought on this. Id say that the reader is presesnted with choices because this is not a completed piece of work, in many ways - structure, theme, philosophy - both physical and meta, etc.

If such a major flaw exists at the heart of Middle-earth, what does it do to the Legendarium overall?

It's viewed as a major flaw because it was never finished. This reminds me of the canon thread. As an artist, the strict view would be that the only TH and LOTR, were available to the public, as completed by the artist. How long would it take the author to complete the rest of the legendarium? Much longer than the published works, I would guess. If were possible to complete it all, would the story that you are debating change? I would guess it would be dramatically different than what we have today, because of the observed flaws.

To put it bluntly, did Tolkien blow it by giving us tiny glimpses of deity or reflected deity in one part of the narrative and pulling back in others so that we are ultimately left with unaswered questions. If the author truly wanted to keep "religion" out of his created world, as he certainly stated at one point, then why start the whole thing off with Eru? Or did his Catholic beliefs compel him to do this and, yet at the same time, require him to make Eru no more than a "minor, irritable" character, because of the difficulties of writing in a pre-revelation world?

BINGO. I dont think he blew it, but he confronted the difficulties in developing an arc between his religion and pre-revelation western European man. A way has to have been made. The concept of personal salvation was beautifully developed thru the LOTR story. Individual, personal choices, thoughts and actions. No rewards for doing "A" instead of "B", but "A" was the right choice, wasnt it? The problem he had was taking that to the next (or higher) level. I see the Eru character, from what we have of the unfinished material, as the rough pencil sketch to a blueprint concept the author had in his head, but was never able to finish. The question to me would be was it simply did he run out of time? Or was it possible at all?