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Originally Posted by davem
Or we could just read & enjoy the story as a story, stop trying to second guess, impose meanings, foist our own belief systems on the work & generally try & make it serve our own purposes…
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I'm inclined to agree here with Mr Dave. Reading Tolkien's forward alone tells us that looking for deeper meanings or messages wasn't the intension in creating the Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion, but merely to create a history for his languages and an entertaining story.
It is folly, I think, to assume that Tolkien had any ulterior motive.
Perhaps there are hints towards Christ.
Perhaps there are some similarities. Who can say? I think that trying to look too deeply down this road can lead to us walking in circles for a long while.
I will not deny that there are some Characters that have some kind of Christ like attributions. Just as Christians are supposed to show forth Christ like behaviour (the term Christian being, of course, an insult to the early church meaning 'Christ like' to describe the behaviour of the early church) this was probably a little more common in Tolkien's day than today and would not have been regarded as anything unusual.
You could look at it a different and more ambiguous way... The Bible says that "God is Good" so, when in a book there is a character who does something good do you say they are an allegory for God? Personally, I wouldn't.
But... hay ho... I don't know...