Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

Theological Consequences · Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Child Adam? · Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? · What If Adam Became a Man - When he Became a Man? · Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

As so often, so also on this topic, a Tolkien like scenario would make much more sense than glueing the Biblical history onto an Evolutionary one. It would still not be actually good.*

What co-divides with "animal rationale mortale" (definition of man)? Well, there is not just "animal irrationale" (automatically also "mortale" in scholastic philosophy) but also, in Neo-Platonic philosophy (since I am citing the tree of Porphyry) "animal rationale immortale".

Before we proceed, how would one spell Beren and Luthien in Old Greek? Not Modern Greek, where the man's name would start in MP, but in Old Greek. One option would be BEPEN and ΛOYΘIEN, especially in Attic or Ionic, but in Doric, at least older such, and Homeric dialect, it might perhaps be more like BEPEN and ΛYΘIEN, since Y was not [ü] but [u]. Opting for a Doric spelling would perhaps be appropriate, since her dialect of Sindarin was called Doriathrin. Or inappropriate, since both normal Sindarin and Doriathrin actually have an [ü] to spell Y, if using the Greek Alphabet, and might use OY to spell [u]. Anyway, I'll deal with the spelling inspired by Doric:

B	E	P	E	N
		100				100
				50		50
2	5		5			12
Λ	Y	Θ	I	E	N
	400						400
30			10		50		90
		9		5			14

BEPEN would add up to 162 and ΛYΘIEN to 504. What does the total equal? Well, a number I partly got in the post-number on the first draft I opened for this post. Three consecutive sixes.

Now, bear this in mind.

In Tolkien's "Legendarium", as the collection of stories in certain books** and as the scenario joining them is called, there is a created kind intermediate between angels and men, called "elves" although they do not quite totally correspond to traditional folklore creatures of this name. He envisaged a story in which for each conttiguous pair, a female of the higher kind chose a man of the lower one. Tolkien's reasoning would have been like with a male angel on a human woman, there is too big a difference, it is total rape (confer what I have said about the idea of Adamites "marrying" creatures that did not have rational souls up to the marriage : rape. But - his reasoning went on - if there is an intermediate kind and if in each pair the weaker vessel is of the stronger kind, that would not necessarily be so. Hence he considered the offspring of Beren and Luthien would not have been damnable in origin as the Nephelim were. Obviously he realised that this intermediate kind was speculation for the convenience of the story.

Now, the scenario I will again propose without necessarily anyone believing it is, this were not so. There would have been a kind that is both "animal" (that is, a moving body animated by a soul) and "rationale" (man not beast, able to say "the grass is green") but unlike Adam's descendants after the fall instead "immortale".

This would obviously mean that any pre-adamite men we find would not have died naturally, they would have been casualties. And that we could some day run into a Neanderthal who was alive 20 000 years before Adam was created, or for that matter a Cro-Magnon of such description.

Those who married into Adam's kin would have been very well aware of what they were doing, as keenly aware as Luthien and Arwen in Tolkien's stories, that they were contracting death by doing so after Adam sinned.

There are people who consider, with an age difference of 30 years from man to teen girl - even if the girl is physically mature, not under the age of puberty - there would be a kind of rape, because the man would have had so much more experience. I disagree. I don't think it would have been wrong if Noah at age 500 married a girl of 50 (after being stopped from or willing to forego marriage up to then), as long as the girl of 50 had reached puberty and was not a case of Down's syndrome or any condition making physical adults to have child brains, I strongly disagree with the sentiment.

But if an immortal who had 500 000 years' experience came to meddle with for instance Cain or Seth, I think it would be that.

Other question, why would someone intermarry if that meant contracting death? Less problematic, it would be opting for getting a particular judgement before Doomsday, with the option of Redemption by (Faith in the yet to come) Christ rather than mix up and get judged a million years later without this help, and perhaps screwing up royally.

Where would they be now? Maybe on a well chilled part of Mercury, undertaking the upkeep of Enoch and Elijah until they return? Maybe inside the Earth (meaning they didn't get wiped off the surface of the earth at the Flood, because they weren't there in the first place), in a scenario reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar, also known as Hollow Earth? We don't seem to see such people now, and it seems the Irish tradition about a people inside the hills would come from the times when the "Anatolian Neolithic Farmers" from Babel came to replace an earlier population of "Western Hunter Gatherers, involved in the Genesis 10 spread.

You see, for the carbon date (not to be confused with real date) of the Flood to be 40 000 BP or 38 000 BC and for the carbon date of Babel to be between 9600 and 8600 (8200?) BC, you need to have a spread of mankind's peoples from the landing place before you have a dispersion of mankind's kingdoms from Babel. And this means, no, the Daoine Sidhe are not elves in the Tolkien sense, they are people who arrived on Ireland between Flood and Babel and hid from those arriving after Babel. This is then one of the arguments against "immortal, near-human" parents of Adam. Of course, the argument falls if one assumes old age. But if one does, one creates a problem for the population of Ireland. Unless one takes this fairly outlandish idea.

But the main issue is, such an intermediate kind between angels and men does not seem to exist. If it did, some things we know about Neanderthals seem to exclude them from such a role. Not the fact some were found with wounds, even a trepanation here (I seem to recall) and a cut off arm there (in Shanidar), that could be penalties for individual sins, within an overall still blessed kind, no, we have found genes for diabetes in their bones. Of course, it is possible that the gene which in us promotes a hastened mortality, with other combining factors could have contributed to an overall immortality, but it is not very likely.

Biblically as well as in anthropological archaeology, we do not find likely candidates for such an intermediate kind. Indeed, they would have had the kind of covenant that some Protestants attribute to Adam and Eve, which would be a fairly troubling thing with the things we do know of Adam and Eve. And of course, take the gematria of Beren and Luthien too. No, such intermarriage would not have been OK, notwithstanding the imagination of one of the clearest headed Old Earth compromisers, so, this also is no way out of the conundrum you pose yourself by saying "Adam wasn't created within 144 normal hours after the creation of the universe" - which therefore remains still preferrable.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Feast of Annunciation
25.III.2022***

* As in Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? I am refuting a position which may not be actually held by old earth compromisers, just for completeness.
** In order of publication, a) in his own lifetime: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (in three volumes), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; b) posthumously, published by his son Christopher: Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales from Númenor and Middle-Earth, and after that all of the "History of Middle-Earth" series, 12 volumes, starting with The Book of Lost Tales, two parts, and The Lays of Beleriand.
*** It is also a significant day in Tolkien fandom ...