Point 1: I think that irg meant "unearned by
Gollum", but then again, all Mercy is unearned else it is "mitigation".
Point 2: For this it is more likely that rather than "
God's mercy to us "undeserving" humans", the message is that no matter how hard humans work against
evil they still need "outside help" to achieve victory.
Point 3: I doubt that it was "perhaps against his "will"" or that he felt any need to suppress admiration for it. His views on mythologies was based also on how these helped people to link to the land of their birth and to their past.
Point 1: fully agree; from the "sinner's" perspective, which I failed to take into account.
Point 2: only looking at the secondary world of
Middle-earth, that "outside help" was sorely lacking even for the
Elves for much of what is "reported" by JRRT;
Men really got a raw deal in that sense! I mean, a
Vala and quite a few of his supporting
Maiar (and such tertiary superhuman beings as
Dragons, one
Shelob …) were allowed to run amok for centuries of the
First Age without Valinorean "outside help" being forthcoming. Then Eonwë fumbles it, leaving one of the most powerful of the Maiar again free to run amok in the
Second Age (plus some of the tertiaries). The big cataclysm near the end of the Second Age? So that (known) remaining
Maia was taken down the odd peg, but he managed to remain (with still enormously superhuman powers) and cause trouble for more than three millennia. The tertiaries of reptile persuasion: as
Túrin had done in the First Age with
Glaurung,
Scatha had to be offed by Frumgar of the
Éothéod (ancestors of the
Rohirrim),
Smaug by
Bard the Bowman, another Man of the north (and to nit-pick,
Eärendil, called "
half-Elven", was of course also correctly half-Human through daddy
Tuor; so all of the major lizards mentioned were eliminated by humans!). "Only" the
Balrog of
Moria, perhaps the last of his kind, was actively eliminated by any of the "outside help". If JRRT wanted to make the point that "no matter how hard humans work against evil they still need "outside help" to achieve victory", he failed miserably in his writings. Such "outside help" is for all intents and purposes totally absent for humans. Even if you take Elves as representing one aspect of humanity (with some enhanced secondary world abilities) we're still pretty much in Ragnarök territory.
Point 3: yes, even "perhaps against his "will"" looks to be wide of
the mark. "Hesitantly" might come closer. JRRT was quite aware of the dark sides of heathenism (and the "Anglo-Saxons" of Hengist and Horsa were by any conceivable Christian definition heathens), which he excised from his "Anglo-Saxon" avatars in LoTR, the Rohirrim - who also have the odd touch of the Huns (also very much sanitized) about them. It may be in "Letters" that he commented on the bog bodies, among others the Tollund Man, found in 1950 on the Jutland peninsula in Denmark. While not on the scale of the mass murder perpetrated by the Aztecs in Mexico much later, the practice of ritual human sacrifice in the countries bordering the North Sea during the pre-Roman Iron Age seems to have been quite wide-spread. Or think of his "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son" - originally published in 1953 in volume 6 of the scholarly journal Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, as per Wikipedia - which I have in my paperback 2001 expanded edition of "Tree and Leaf". A kind of coda to a fragment of a poem now known as "The Battle of Maldon", thought to be contemporary of the historical battle fought between the forces of the duke of Essex, the mentioned Beorhtnoth, and a plundering Viking host. The battle was lost, Beorhtnoth's forces slaughtered, and the hinterland opened to the ravaging Viking plunderers, due to a misplaced remnant of what JRRT called "northern courage", called "ofermod". To a native German speaker, this immediately conjures up "Übermut", a term just one step down from "Tollkühn" ("rash-bold", foolhardy), so linked to JRRT's family name. The tale is seen by most as a severe critique of such aristocratic (and by then known to be a specifically "Anglo-Saxon" deficit?) arrogance and pride, as the English forces, holding a "bridge" or causeway against the superior Viking forces, could have slaughtered
them to the last man (had the Vikings been so rash as to press the attack heedless of losses). Beorhtnoth, upon being asked by the Vikings for leave to cross the ford "so that a fair fight could be joined", fell prey to his "fair-play" lunacy (and "chivalry", a term that the Vikings certainly had never heard of at home), accepted the challenge and allowed the to cross. JRRT takes Beorhtnoth severely to task over this, basically stating that Beorhtnoth's
only duty here was to slaughter as many Vikings as possible, preferably
all of them.
