From the point of view of the writer, it is very challenging to deal with a period of Middle-earth history so little explored in Tolkien's works. !ll we have is the general outline of how things were supposed to unfold, in the
Akallabêth, the chronologies of the kings and a few, very fragmentary later developments which Christopher Tolkien published in The Peo(les of Middle,earth. (...)
However, this positive[ pleasure of reconstruction was connected to another one, more negative[ -meaning, critical and polemical. It is the pleasure of subversion,of picking up notions in Tolkien's work ( that bothered me, in order to highlight them or tear them down. The chief problem is Tolkien's general reluctance to show religions as part of his world. It is known why he did this. However, in the perspective of a readership that does not necessarily share his personal beliefs, the lack of religion, except as a very negative force, is a major stumbling stone when it comes to suspend one's disbelief and see Middle-earth as a viable world with its own history. &...( I have always been quite interested in History of Religions, and this story of a monotheistic Númenor which lost its faith in Eru and then spent an entire religion-free millennium before they were influenced by the bad guy into worshipping an >inevitably evil god?, became a really irritating and insurmountable difficulty whenever I tried to figuratively touch late Númenor with a less-than 10 inch pole. These people were human, not hobbits or dwarves or elves, and their civilization looked historical on the surface, but I could not make sense of it. &...( >To flesh out the society and the characters, I had to address what Tolkien did not want to address: religion, evolution, culture, and all those little concrete aspects of Númenorean society that would reveal specifical historical influences ( influences whose origins were clear to me, though not to many others who read Tolkien with a different set of coordinates in mind &...(. I discovered then that fanfiction could be more than a literary exercise, or a way of going deeper into something you enjoy or connecting the dots: it could be a form of expression, a creative way to antagonize the author and add what you feel is lacking in his worldview
