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...if we have to seek the 'meaning' outside the secondary world... ~Davem
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I'm not sure we're really looking for 'meaning' here...we're looking for similarities, possible sources where Tolkien could have tried to draw parallels between his world and ours. If we go about looking for the meaning outside the books themselves we're going to get cases like TGWBS got with 3, some/most book-examples will fit the outside meaning but a few won't...and those few will sit there stewing and gnawing at the back of our minds.
To get a meaning for any of these numbers we'd have to look at Tolkien's likely sources and pick out elements which could be worked into the books while at the same time looking just at where the numbers appear in the books and what patterns, unrelated to anything outside the books, crop up within their uses.