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Eru only becomes "part of the story" as one reads further into Tolkien's works (unless one starts with the Silm). If a person's direct experience of Tolkien extends no further than the Hobbit and LotR, then surely they are entitled to exclude "Eruism" from their interpretation, even if they are subsequently told of its existence.
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Good Gracious
Saucepan Man, but you
do want to make me work my brain don’t you – ack!
At any rate, I have to say that on this point I utterly disagree with you. There are so many markers of what I will obstinately now call Eruism without the “” that I cannot see how anyone
could miss them. Please note, that my horrific new word is Eruism and not Eru – so, sure, while there may not be any direct reference to Eru in The Hobbit or LotR, there are more than enough examples of Eru’s effect on Middle-Earth (His presence in the unravelling of the story) that the following is fairly palpable to even the most casual reader (dreadful phrase – who amongst us ever felt ‘casual’ when reading Tolkien’s utterly engrossing stories?):
1) Somebody ‘up there’ is very much in charge of events – c.f. Gandalf’s comments in “Shadows of the Past” regarding the finding of the Ring (“there was another power at work in that, beyond the will of the Ring’s Maker. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring”; once more, I am distant from my books so all quotes will be approximate). (Oh, and please nobody interpret this as the beginning of the free-will/fate/providence debate – I’m having a tough enough time processing the current thread.)
2) Gandalf is a ‘divine’ or even ‘angelic’ minister (he’s been around a very long time; he takes on a balrog
then comes back from the dead; he performs magic; he says to the balrog “I am the servant of the secret fire”; he utters the above sentiment, number 1 – and many like them – indicating that he’s got some really good inside information; he’s able to ‘save’ Frodo from the Eye – at Amon Hen – from a psychic distance).
3) Aragorn is a ‘divinely sanctioned’ king (the light that shines around his head like a flame when he ‘reveals’ himself; the hands of the healer that show him to be the true king to the people of Minas Tirith).
4) There are ‘gods’ or ‘angelic’ ministers in Middle-Earth or who can affect it (at the council of Elrond, one of the suggestions is to send the Ring “over the sea” to those who dwell in the West).
5) The ancient stories of that constitute the closest thing M-E has to ‘sacred texts’ are presented as verifiable historical facts (i.e. Luthien is somebody whom at least one of the characters we meet in the tale knew personally!)
6) Tom Bombadil and Treebeard both make references to the ‘creation’ of Middle-Earth in such a way as to demonstrate that it came into being not through the slow accretion of dust about a central ball of highly-condensed gas in which nuclear fusion began.
And I could go on, but I haven’t the time or energy. I shall leave off this post by arguing simply that in Middle-Earth there is palpable and demonstrable sense of the sacred and the divine in all aspects of its subcreation. This is, perhaps, why there is no need for formal religion or religious practices in Middle-Earth (at least in the Hobbit and LotR) – the presence of Eru (if not the name, nature or mind) is so apparent that religious practice is irrelevant. It just occurs to me that this is more than likely the source of that lovely sense of enchantment about which
davem has been so consistently and eloquently writing.
To return to my thought above: it is possible to develop a non-Catholic interpretation of an Evelyn Waugh novel because Catholicism is as open to question both in the text as it is out of the text. It is impossible to develop a non-Eruistic (yuck yuck yuck) interpretation of Tolkien’s texts (any part of the
historia?) without ignoring the abovementioned examples and many many more.