[davem]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Wither?

'either'.

I think we may be risking some very boring posts if we start picking each other up on every mis-keying that slips past us.

Your position requires an impossibility. No readers can read any book without bringing in their baggage.

No, it merely requires us to distinguish between 'me' & 'not me', between Eru & God. Even if your point is correct, one should still make the effort to distinguish between your baggage & what's already there. You seem to be saying that a kind of 'participation mystique' is inevitable & that its impossible to know where the primary world ends & the secondary world begins, where God ends & Eru begins - or even where you end & 'Frodo' begins. 'Know thyself & Know thy baggage'. Or if you can make those kind of distinctions, then I'm not asking the impossible.

As to your other questions, I daresay enough is presented throughout the Legendarium that readers can safely draw conclusions as to the nature of Eru. Based on these conclusions (among which are that Eru is Good and in no wise Evil, is All Powerful which is based on His ability to draw even Melkor's rebellion into His purpose (omnipotent), the Source of Life (holder of the Secret Fire), etc., etc.,), readers can then build an understanding of Eru which .... surprise! .... bears a striking resemblance to the Christian God!

I am so thunderstruck. How amazing. Who would have thought that an author who is a self proclaimed Catholic Christian, would actually subcreate a Creator that is for all practical purposes equivalent to the Christian God?

Spellbindingly obvious, isn't it?

I'd say that Eru is definitely similar to a certain concept of God, but He does not correspond exactly to the 'Christian God' for either practical or non practical purposes. As I said, he may (or may not) correspond to Tolkien's concept of the Christian God, but that 'similarity' or 'correspondence' is not the issue. The issue (as I see it) is: does Eru stand or fall as a figure in His own right, or does He need a knowledge of the Christian God to be understandable? If He does then he is an allegory, dependent on something external to the secondary world in order to be intelligeable. Seeing in Eru the Christian God is applicability - its something you as a reader are doing - it does not 'come with the set'.