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Originally Posted by davem
The physical elements of Paganism like statues, temples, sacred groves, could be destroyed, but the symbols had to be twisted & made fearsome to ensure a 'clean break' with the past.
This was a deliberate policy on behalf of the church. In Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the english Church & People we find the following letter from Pope Gregory:
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I'm with you in all of that, and I think that in Machiavelli's
The Prince it states that that's how you win arguments and make friends.
Actually, now that I've thought about it more, my point is again that people see that which they are used to seeing. Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all of that. Tinúviel always looked like a girl I idolized in my past, not Liv Tyler. If you think that Eden had an apple tree, all well and good, but is that because you could not imagine an orange tree, having lived your life just below the Arctic Circle? If one sees a Christ-like figure in Aragorn, or Gandalf, or Frodo, what does it tell us of the viewer?
So if we have a person who lives in Middle Earth, what then can he/she see? You might see one thing, but he/she may be limited to the ideas and items in that world. One would think that if Biblical history were concurrent with Middle Earth's history, being one and the same but just concerning different regions, you might hear or read characters making references to the things in the other 'history.'
So again, Middle Earth has no Second Adam as it never had the first, no matter what you might see.
Middle Earth does, however, have apples.