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Originally Posted by Raynor
There are some traits of Odin which would never be reflected in Gandalf; I haven't read anything past Voluspa, but it seems to me that Gandalf would never sacrifice an eye, or a human, for the sake of wisdom. He already had it in him, he just needed to rediscover it; moreover, Gandald isn't bound to a bodily form (IIRC, Odin is slain in the final battle and that's it for him, correct me if I'm wrong), doesn't have children, and esspecially wouldn't kill one of his his child Hoth who _unwillingly_ killed Baldr.
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Yes, fair enough, but Tolkien calls Gandalf "the Odinic wanderer that I think of", therefore he did indeed have Odin in mind when he wrote of Gandalf. But I can totally see why you would question the evil (or maybe
violent, as it wasn't necessarily evil to those who thought of Odin, and some still do) side of Odin, as this isn't there in Gandalf, but it is there in his counterpart Sauron. And the fact that neither have kids (although who knows what Sauron had got up to in Numenor or Mordor?!) doesn't matter, as Tolkien originally conceived (no pun intended
) of Ainur who had sex and kids, so if he had continued down that line we may have seen Sauron's progeny.
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Originally Posted by Raynor
Well, that is a matter of debate; we have the tree of knowledge of good and evil - therefore evil existed at least theoretically.
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Or potentially? It reminds me of the Pandora's Box tale, another story in which evil did not exist in the world but had the potential to; in both cases it was humans who allowed it to be set free. In Arda, the people have no blame in that sense, it was there already.