Letter 153

This is a long letter that was never sent to a reader of the LOTR, yet preserved for our education. It has much to say, of which only a little is reported here about mortality and immortality, the nature of worship and the possible origin of the Orcs. These topics are returned to in other letters or writings.

Mortality is “represented as a special gift of God to the Second Race of the Children (the Eruhíni, the Children of the One God) and not a punishment for a Fall...”

“Immortality and Mortality being the special gifts of God....it must be assumed that no alteration of their fundamental kind could be effected by the Valar even in one case: the cases of Lúthien (and Tuor) and the position of their descendants was a direct act of God. The entering into Men of the Elven strain is indeed represented as part of a Divine Plan for the ennoblement of the Human Race, from the beginning destined to replace the Elves.”

There were no churches or formalized worship of God as we know it in Middle-earth, yet He was believed in. The Númenóreans and the Rohirrim were monotheists. The former had the Meneltarma or Pillar of Heaven on top of a mountain which was “dedicated to Eru, the One, and there at any time privately, and at certain times publicly, God was invoked, praised, and adored...” They also prayed for help to the Valar as Catholics pray to the saints. The hobbits did not practice any form of prayer or worship “unless through exceptional contact with Elves...”

“In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus [Morgoth] subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the ‘gods’ [Valar], let alone of God.” This ‘sub-creation’ of the Orcs is the worst of the abuses of the powers Melkor/Morgoth had been given, but the Orcs themselves would not necessarily be outside redemption. “...that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making necessary to their actual existence even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good... I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord [Morgoth] has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them.

That God would ‘tolerate’ that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today.”