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Originally Posted by Roa_Aoife
And davem made the excellent point:
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Originally Posted by davem
I think its clear that Tolkien did not distinguish between Eru & God. The fact that he translated the prayers that were most significant to him into his own languages (Our Father, Ave Maria, Litany of Loreto, etc) points towards this, & many of the comments he makes in the notes to the Athrabeth confirm it.
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So, as far as this discussion is concerned, it doesn't really matter what you think about God. It matters what Tolkien thinks. It's his story, after all. He gets to write it however he wants, and we can't change his intended meaning- no matter how much we don't like it. |
Ah but.... Tolkien can change his intended meaing. One of the great difficulties in ascertaining
what Tolkien thinks is determining whether what he thinks at one stage of his life is similar to what he thinks at another stage of his life--or perhaps I should say, stage in his writing career. What he thinks as he writes Athrabeth might not--does not?--necessarily reflect what he thinks when he writes his earlier works. (And, yes, I'm mixing up my verb tenses deliberately.)
The other difficulty lies in deciding what weight to give works unpublished in Tolkien's lifetime.