The first question that comes to my mind is … why did he feel it necessary to write this at all?
I am unable to decide where or, better, how the Tale of Adanel fits into the Athrabeth Although I know it must form at least some the basis for Andreth's bitterness. She must believe that Aegnor’s rejection was entirely due to her mortality, her short life-span. It must fit somehow because it was first alluded to in the text itself and then expanded in the after notes. Did Tolkien feel Andreth’s refusal to elaborate on the mortality of Men was a deliberate ploy (to what end?) or representative of a genuine confusion of her part about death?
As already noted by others… the voice with which the tale of Adanel is told doesn’t quite fit. It presents Eru in a very old testament, biblical, judgmental light: a harsh, jealous and vengeful deity. A God to fear, to tremble at His displeasure. Not kind or loving or forgiving at all.
The tone of the tale makes me uncomfortable.
….I gave you life. Now it shall be shortened, and each of you in a little while shall come to Me, to learn who is your Lord: the one ye worship, or I who made him.
Is it possible that the Tale was written while Tolkien was in a kind of despair over close friends lost in WWI? That its darkness spoke to his feelings which must have been that of the enormous waste of young life cut down in a senseless war. I haven’t searched much for Tolkien’s views on the justification for the Great War but today we know it was a complex combination of nationalism and political alliances. Did he believe the propaganda that all England was subjected to by the newspapers? Did he honestly believe that the Kaiser (cousin to Edward VII) was the spawn of Satan and the ‘Hun’ were orcs personified as they allegedly raped and pillaged their way across Europe?
Instead of being just an account of Tolkien's abbreviated combat service, John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War fleshes out Thomas Shippey's claim that Tolkien was part of a generation of "traumatized authors" who attempted to express the horrors of World War I through the writing of fantasy. Garth believes that Tolkien’s experience in the Great War, and in particular the loss of two of his closest friends at the Battle of Somme, had a profound effect on the mythology he invented. He argues that without the catalyst of World War I, Tolkien might have not written at all, or might have developed into nothing more than a pale imitation of William Morris. Tolkien’s mythology, he writes, was born on the battlefields of World War I, and that is why Middle-earth "looks so engagingly familiar to us and speaks to us so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs."
Did Tolkien struggle to reconcile his faith with the harsh and unforgiving reality of death … which comes too soon and seems so unfair and so inexplicable.
Would we have had the Tale of Adanel at all if Tolkien had not been a combat soldier in the Great War?
, Tolkien was 67 when he wrote the Athrabeth; his own three-score years and ten were approaching, and he cannot have been unaware of his (and Edith's) impending mortality (although in the event they both lived more than a decade longer). Who knows how much of that must have contributed to his writing at that period, or what difficulty he may have had in maintaining his own fiction of Death as Gift in the face of the reality of "the gift of the One to Men (which) it is bitter to receive".
), looking at the different ways that this 'unnatural' separation of body and soul (so to speak) effects the two races of the Children of Eru.
I only say this because of his views and sentiments during WW2 which are documented in The Collected Letters. He hated vulgar jingoism and racist nationalism. He writes with great anger about a particular editorial in a British newspaper at the end of the war which rejoiced at the lines of German refugees escaping from devastated Berlin: that's what, in the editorial's opinion, these people deserved. Tolkien despised such ignoble sentiments - the demonising of a whole people-group, just as the Nazis did to the Jews - not least because of his deeply held religious convictions about mercy.
, and wrote some of the first criticism of LOTR in the 1970s. When the movies came out, she rediscovered her love of Tolkien and worked her way through the HOME books. But even with the HOME books, she did not realize what a heavy hand CT exerted on the Sil. Your work has made her go back and re-think her understanding of the First Age. Well done! 
