Felagund
Nargothrond
12:56am
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G'day and sorry to have to ask: could you please amend the final paragraph of my post titled "the metaphysics of evil, as pertaining to Elves and Men and Fëanor (and slightly losing my mind by the end)". I was defo losing my mind by the end. It's a post in Maciliel's excellent thread called 'evil elves', in the Reading Room.
It's the para starting with "Playing by the rules...", which I'd like to replace with the mini-expansion in 2 parts below, if possible:
Playing by the rules of the metaphysics of evil in this secondary world might make it difficult to definitively or substantively call an Elf 'evil', but that didn't prevent Tolkien from making it clear that atrocity is still atrocity. And yet, it's still possible to infer from the metaphysics in question that because Fëanor doesn't reject Eru (he even included Eru in his crazy oath), by definition he can't fundamentally be evil. And coupled with the 'fallen' / 'non-fallen race' distinction between Elves and Men, this can make for challenging, even uncomfortable reading. Would a hypothetical human perpetrator of the Kinslaying assault on Alqualondë etc just be labelled as downright evil, using this framework? It strikes me as a lot less complicated to conclude this to be the case, following the rules, so to speak.
In a total lack of imagination, I'm just going to revert to the Aelfwine bookend to my previous post: "Yet the answer is not in truth difficult. Evil is not one thing among Elves and another among Men."
Welcome to the Mordorfone network, where we put the 'hai' back into Uruk
(This post was edited by Felagund on 12:57am)
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