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Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle
So we once again come to this: which should govern our interpretation -- authorial intent (Tolkien intended Eru to be God, so He is), or personal response (Eru doesn't seem like God to me, so he is not). And as always, I am caught somewhere in between.... Insofar as Tolkien clearly created Eru as an image of God, and inasmuch as M-E seems to run according to fairly strictly laid out Christian morality (as interpreted by Tolkien) then I would go for the yes side. But, insofar as Eru does not reflect my own view of what God is or may be, and inasmuch as I interpret the moral vision of Middle-Earth as reflecting some fairly pre-Christian notions of honour and doom (OE dom) then I would like to answer no.
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Great Heavens above! If Eru is Tolkien's picture and understanding of God, then I'll be blowed! I don't know what the Catholic religion is, but I hope to goodness that they don't picture God as quite THAT far off.
Are people here sure that's what Tolkien meant Eru to be? Are you positive that it is a direct parralel, as well as he could make it? I'm not so certain. Anyone in the Christain faith knows that God's greatest thing was to send Jesus to earth and do the most difficult thing in the world for us measly human beings. But Tolkien wrote about Frodo Baggins, a tiny, poor, bewildered hobbit take the burden most of the way - and then even fail in the end. Eru let it happen like that. He didn't send his own son to do it, which he might've had it been a direct comparison.
You want a
god of an invented world who's
meant to be
God, read C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. (The Sacrifice is both in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and in The Silver Chair.
I'm sure many of us have invented worlds of our own and written about them, right? Well, recently, I've been running into problems. I need a god who can over look things so that everything doesn't run wild and go by chance and so that people actually have something to look up to when they're run down and completely broken by the cruel course of life. I don't want to write about a god who is actually God because that would be taking the assumption that I knew enough about God to actually write a fiction like that. Of course, if I should ever decide to put a god in, I'm going to fashion him after God, but I'll never try to claim or to write him as though he
were God. I'm thinking that's more what Tolkien did. He's made very stark differences between God and Eru. . .I don't think he would have done that if he had wanted Eru to be God.
Of course truths are going to show through Tolkien's work. It's impossible to avoid that. But he didn't like allegories, so he's not going to write one!
-- Folwren