ONLY The Silmarillion

[littlemanpoet]

Let's say we have no Old Testament, Baghavad Vita, Tao, Confucian anything, NO spiritual/religious writings. But we DO have The Silmarillion. Well? [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[Aralaithiel]

Does that mean I get to be an elf? For real? With REAL pointy ears? [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]
Hmmm...interesting thought, littlemanpoet! The church names would be changed, that's for sure!
Will have to ponder this awhile!

[Birdland]

Well, look what happened with the Hobbits. They all became secular Humanists!

[littlemanpoet]

This is not garnering quite the interst I had hoped, so let me try again:

The ONLY origins tale in existence would be The Music of the Ainur, and the only conception of life after death would be Tol Eressea and Valinor and the Halls of Mandos.

What would this have done to the thinking of various people now and in history?

[littlemanpoet]

Up!

What would Columbus have thought about the new world?

What would the history of the Jews be like?

Et cetera?

[Encaitare]

I don't know if this is entirely related to the original question, but I have wondered this:

What if, by some freak chance, mankind and nearly all of its creations were destroyed (including all the religious texts, etc.), except for the Silmarillion? Supposing the people who next developed and inhabited the earth found the book, were able to translate it, and thought it was a history book of a distant age long before their existence? It's a long shot, but I think it is theoretically possible that the new inhabitants would make "the Music of the Ainur" their Creation story and adopt the rest as the history of their world.

But I'm just weird like that.

[davem]

Too long & complex to go into here, but there is an essay in the collection Tolkien the Medievalist - 'Augustine in the Cottage of Lost Play: The Ainulindale as asterisk cosmogony' by John William Houghton, which shows that Ainulindale is not in contradiction to Genesis:

Given Augustine's reading of Genesis, then, the asterisk-cosmogony of the Ainulindale would fit alongside the other cosmoginies known to the early medieval west - an asterisk Bede or Aelfric, stumbling across Eriol/Aelfwine's report, would have been able to assimiilate it to the scriptural account. To the degree that Tolkien's myth strikes its real reader as different from Genesis, it represents a particularly ironic twist on the philologically inspired creative process Shippey finds in Tolkien: not only can he imagine things for which we easily find a place in the primary world, he can also imagine things that fit in ways we would not expect.
...What is of interest, however, beyond the neat fit of this literary myth into the real history of Western thought, is the symetry of opposed motives between Augustine's reading of Genesis & Tolkien's asterisked account of the creation. Each man lives in a time that sees Genesis under attack from contemporary science:in Augustines day, teh story of creation seemed to contradict the stoic & neoplatonist philosophers' picture of the world; in Tolkien's, as in our own, physical science & literary criticism seeemed to converge in an attack on the myths of Western religion, in particular on the stories of creation in Genesis.

In short, Houghton shows that Ainulindale can be interpreted so as to fit with no contradictions into a Christian understanding of creation. Certainly, if all we had was The Silmarillion - the whole Sil, including works like the Athrabeth, we would very possibly end up with a kind of amalgam of Judaism & Christianity - ie, the monotheism, with out the complex rituals, but with a kind of messianic belief in the coming of a saviour. How 'Pagan' it would be is another question, & whether it would produce Crusades, Inquisitions, witch burnings, bombing of abortion clinics & all the rest, is a question of whether you believe that those things were/are religiously inspired, or just down to the way human beings are.

[littlemanpoet]

Encaitare, that's the kind of thinking I was hoping for.

davem, it comes as no surprise to me that no dissonance is seen to exist between the Ainulindalë and the Genesis account. For me, that's one of the beauties of it.

Dorothy Sayers (an erstwhle Inkling of a sort) wrote a book called "Mind of the Maker", in which she puts forward an artistic view of the whole creation versus evolution debate, proposing that an artistic approach is as legitimate as the scientific, as an explanation or exploratoin of origins. I'm not getting this across very well, it's been a while since I read the book, and I don't own it. Anyway, it's just an aside.

I'll take a stab at what I'm talking about, as if I were, say, Bëthius (sp?) or some such.

"The Visigoths have sacked Rome. The Ostrogoths laid the Empire waste before them. The Vandals will follow. These events seem positively Melkorian in their destructive capacity."

Pretty lame, I know, but I thought I'd take a stab.

[littlemanpoet]

The Dwarves, Noldor, and humans that learned from either, or by their own lights, used technology. Gondor and Rohan apparently had iron smelting, as did the Dwarves. So, Turgon, the trampling of which you speak would not occur until the late 19th century, very late in history, indeed.

Still, I think a distinction is in order (which I've been suggesting already). The Enemy had minds of metal and gears. Which is to say, they cared nothing for environment; they are all about the abuse of the environment. Maybe it is an inherent pessimism in you, Turgon, but I see things a little more positively. If the Sil texts had been extant from, say, 1500 B.C. to A.D. 1000, technological advancement would not necessarily have been unheard of. Rather, until the 19th century, there would have been no dissonance between tech advance and environmental care, because there wasn't much anyway, before the industrial era.

[turgon]

I am aware of the explosion of technology starting in the 19th and 20th century.And the smelting skills of the seperate goodly races.(which was not at the expense of nature as opposed to melkor and minions) I must have a vastly differant opinion on said subject.(pessimistic perhaps)
I merely disagree with most people's overweening "feeling" that it may somehow be better. my reason- history is shot full of examples of the crimes against humanity said crimes made by MAN himself No Matter what philosophy or religion is in play. Since the dawn of time.
So that being said , my answer to the question is. No difference in my fallible opinion.