I really like your Silm commentary and writing and I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about how you see the Valar
There are lots of ways you can read the metaphysics of Tolkien's world. One common reading is what I will call the "naive Catholic" reading, which is basically this: Tolkien was Catholic, so let's import certain basic metaphysical assumptions from Catholicism into his world, like neo-Platonism and a moral law following from a divine natural order, and take at face value, as if offered from the point of an omniscent third-person narrator, all commentaries on how the universe works, both within published works and from those non-published works which can be made consistent with them: LACE, different Silmarillion drafts, etc.
This approach has some problems, IMO. Not least is that we know many of those unpublished works are transitional fossils in an author's evolving thinking about his own world, and were later discarded. Similarly, we know that the major narratives themselves are explicitly mythologized, at various times conceived of as being the mythology of the Elves, some of whom had contact with the Valar in Valinor, or even as the mythology of Numenor, who had these stories thirdhand from the Elves, and wrote them down in some cases millennia after. I think it's also evident, by the way, that while Tolkien was very Catholic in his thinking in some ways, he was less so in others; the picture of him that emerges in his letters is someone who is religious without being dogmatic or ostentatiously pious, someone for whom religion is an important part of his life, but is not so all-consuming he finds it impossible to relate to anybody who is not religious. He is, in other words, a complete human being, and viewing his work only through the lens of his Catholicism is quite in error.
Another way to read Tolkien--which is not in contradiction with the "naive Catholic" reading, it just receives it differently!--is what I think of as the "Lintamande reading": the Valar are bastards. Let's face it: as written, the way the Valar relate to the Children of Iluvatar, and especially the Elves, can rankle. They summon the Elves to Valinor as soon as they discover them at Cuivienen, essentially seeking to annex them to Valinor without giving them a chance to develop their own culture and identity. They don't offer support to them in situ (though this is within their power), and their attitude is essentially "come to us, so we can protect you, or be left alone in Middle-Earth, probably to have to deal with Morgoth on your own." Manwe is framed as a king, ruling Arda from Taniquietil; the halls of Mandos have a purgatorial quality, condemning the unrepentant to a tormented, bodiless existence, while stripping from those who do eventually reincarnate aspects of themselves the Valar find troublesome. The valar refuse to help the innocent or guilty during the centuries of struggle in the First Age, and it becomes clear when they finally do rouse themselves to act that they could have ended this long ago, and with much less suffering.
I find this reading dissatisfying. For one, while it makes Watsonian sense of the evidence on hand, it still treats the text as authoritative in a way that I think quite intentionally it was never intended to be. Mythology is inherently an unreliable narrator! Even in a world where magic and greater-than-human beings are baked into the conceit, we must acknowledge that myth transmits information unreliably, and it has an agenda. Two, from a Doylist perspective, the Silmarillion is grounded in its arcs of catastrophe and eucatastrophe, like music returning to the tonic, part of which is also the general character interpretations offered, and I'm interested in exploring readings that maintain those interpretations while also helping us to understand why, for instance, the Valar act the way they do, or are reported to act thus, and highlighting ways that the apparently authoritative statements presented about how the world works can be complicated.
One interesting point of entry is the word "king" and associated concepts like royalty. Manwe is the Elder King, the viceregent of Iluvatar; Morgoth seeks dominion over all Arda; the leaders of the Elves are invariably described as kings and high kings, all very medieval in character and in keeping with the vibe of a North European mythological past. But where mundane, mortal kingship (as among the humans and elves) intersects with more spiritual notions of kingship and royalty, I think a more complicated picture emerges, one that Tolkien's self-consciously restricted register of language, in keeping with the tonal examples of early medieval sources he draws from, is helpless to explicate very deeply.
In conceptions of the afterlife in the Middle Ages, royalty and signifiers of royalty feature heavily. A great example of this is in the Middle English poem "Pearl," which is about a father mourning his dead daughter, and a vision he receives of her in Heaven; they speak at length from either side of a river, and she is depicted as an ennobled figure, a royal bride of Christ, who in the end is called away to the new Jerusalem. Heaven is depicted as a place of wealth: earth and trees and stones made of precious materials and so forth, and it's interesting to ask, all right, what do all these signifiers of wealth and power mean? These are, after all, very earthly things, and it seems strange that in this Christian text, which is embedded in a theological tradition all about how the last shall be first and the first shall be last, and the human world isn't nearly as important as the spiritual one, that material evidence of luxury and power should be associated with spiritual paradise.
But I think this makes perfect sense, given the context. A hierarchical society, one that does not have a tradition of egalitarianism like we do--the closest it comes is perhaps the rota fortunae and the idea that you who are high might one day be low and vice-versa--can best signify release from the physical and psychic oppression of the world by placing everyone at the top of the hierarchy, and thus obviating the need for everything below. What does paradise look like? A world in which we are all royalty, i.e., we all have the release from the burdens of existence in the manner that in mundane life only (we imagine) kings do; that we all can enjoy that luxury, that freedom from worry about our physical needs.
In a spiritual sense, "kingship" is an effective symbol for things we carve up quite differently in semantic terms, including aspects of words like "freedom," "self-determination," "sovereignty," "independence," "power," and "authority." And this makes sense even when speaking of Jesus: Christ is King, not because Christ conquered the world and handed out large tracts of land as fiefs to his retinue; Christ is King because he is God, omnibenevolent and omniscient, the source of order and justice and goodness for the whole universe.
Royalty in the context of Valinor, especially among the Valar, but also I'd say among the Vanyar and Noldor who live there, seems to me to have much more in common with spiritual notions of royalty than it does mundane ones. Not least since Valinor seems to be what we would call a post-scarcity society. Certainly it's one where the constraints and hardships of life elsewhere in Arda do not apply, and even if it's not truly post-scarcity, the best analogy might be between our modern day, in terms of cheap abundance in the developed world, and the early medieval era, where the distinction for someone from the latter might be pretty theoretical at best. This isn't to say that Valinor is an anarchist utopia, a hierarchyless society--I don't think that reading could be supported by the text--only that Manwe is king of Arda in a very different way than Morgoth seeks to be, or even than Elu Thingol is of Doriath. And that I think is supported by the text.
Moreover, I think it's clear that the Valar are meant to have the tinge of tragedy about them: their vision of the world is incomplete, and though wise and seeing much, they genuinely struggle to understand what to do sometimes. They were wrong to call the Elves to Valinor. They thought they could protect them there, and keep the influence of Morgoth at bay forever, and they couldn't. The fate of the Trees and the Flight of the Noldor proved that. They withhold acting during the First Age because they know their power is too much: they don't want to cause more suffering by unleashing themselves on Middle-Earth than the wars in Beleriand are already causing. And yes, they're angry. But they're not God; they're not omnibenevolent. They have flaws, like the impatience of Aule, the aggression of Tulkas, the possessiveness of Yavanna, and yes, the hesitancy of Manwe. They're children of Iluvatar too, just older ones. And the Doom of Mandos isn't a curse or a punishment: it's a bare statement of fact. You are doing something inadvisable: here are the consequences we forsee. We cannot (or will not) help you.
And things which we might hold up as especially authoritarian qualities of the Valar, things like the Halls of Mandos "purifying" the souls of the dead, have I think to be understood in the context that, definitionally, no one who has ever been there for any length of time has contributed any information to the stories we are reading. And the stories we are reading are composed by figures who do not live in Valinor, who do not have the example of spiritual kingship to draw from, who have only mundane kings and mundane social systems to use to understand these concepts very remote to them in both time and place. These authors are going to have to do a lot to make their hardships in Middle-Earth feel more necessary and more meaningful, to try to speculate about why the world is the way it is, and to inscribe their own particular worldviews and ideologies onto far-off figures like the Valar to try to rationalize their imperfect understanding of them. And that's the only lens we're able to see them through, because Tolkien (who knew all this; but even if he didn't, this would be a reasonable Watsonian take) intentionally chose a documentary device as a core mechanic for his worldbuilding.
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