![MrGreen :D](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
River makes a very good point about how tame Tolkien's gods are. Nothing like good ol' randy Zeus, nothing like the shrew Hera. I guess Tolkien thought gods ought to be like Melian or Oromë, and not very naughty. He arranged their, and the Elves', sex lives very carefully and sanitarily and that arrangement does really make me sad. Not for the Elves but for Tolkien and everyone of his generation, and many before or since. He couldn't help being a man of his time, of course. No one can.
His Evil is Evil, with no admixture of lovableness. He created the Evil ones, and they reflected or represented his ideas or wishes about Evil. That's why the Orcs drive me crazy. They are not "organic", but simple cannon fodder than no one needed to feel bad about slaughtering. Either that, or they are ruined Elves, and deciding one way or the other on that seemed to drive Tolkien crazy, so there you are. It's almost impossible to imagine female orcs, or orc families of any sort, except for the two arguing in the tower while Frodo sang above.
Sauron's "fall" is the most realistic "fall" of them all. Not godlike, just an overly ambitious power behind the throne. A sort of SuperGrima Wormtongue. Then there's Melkor, and he never attained the stature of Lucifer, not to me.
The part about Tolkien that irks me a bit, if I dwell on it and I mostly don't dwell on it, is that on the one hand he bemoans how the modern world has made Faery into a place where Tinkerbell flits about, but on the other hand he never mentions how his Church was mostly responsible for the attempted absolute erasure of the old gods and their stories. What we think of as "Faery" is the remnants of the old religion, and the old peoples, that our (western European) ancestors wiped out or marginalized.
The Church didn't mess too much with the Greek or Roman gods, of course, as it did with the other gods that lived in the woods and streams of the northwest of the old world. Those are the myths that went underground, were transformed into childrens' tales.
It's this sort of discussion that ungilds the lily for me. I have to take it whole, or not take it at all. It's so lovely, so perfect in its way, and I don't let the outer world into it, if I can help it.