[Child of the 7th Age]

This complicated interplay within the concept of the “gift” is also at work in the idea of grace. Grace is simultaneously something that one receives and possesses. The Tree is thus a manifestation of grace, and the result of Niggle’s own grace-full art.

Fordim - When you put it in those terms, I think we are virtually on the same page. If you are more comfortable using "grace" rather than "salvation", I can heartily concur. I was definitely not trying to suggest that Leaf by Niggle was an allegory of salvation (or of anything else for that matter.)

Rather it is a question of how Tolkien thought: how he viewed subcreation. Everything we know about the author suggests that, in his mind, the concept of subcreation was intimately woven with that of "Truth". Mythmaking was an attempt to uncover what is "real" in the clearest way possible with the end product being what Tolkien termed "true myth". There was no artificial division between subcreation and grace/truth in his own mind, and I feel this same reality is reflected in the workhouse and Leaf by Niggle.

Tolkien, for example, utterly rejected Owen Barfield's claims that myth, although moving and beautiful, are mere lies:

No said Tolkien. They are not lies.

Man is not ultimately a liar. He may pervert his thought into lies, but he comes from God and it is from God that he ultimately draws his ultimate ideals....Not merely the abstract thoughts of Man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and in consequence reflect something of eternal truth. In making a myth, in practicing mythopoeia and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller.....is actually fulfilling God's purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light.

The last line of this quote is the key and is part of the grand gift that we see at the end of Niggle. My concern, therefore, is that we not "split apart" that which was so clearly linked in Tolkien's own mind. When Tolkien refers to subcreation, whether in Niggle or in any of his writings, it is not in an isolated sense, but rather in the context of "true myth", the storyteller fulfilling God's purpose. I say this not as a Catholic, Protestant, or anything else in-between (since I am not a Christian), but merely see these ideas reflected in Tolkien's own reality. (You can blame Davem for all these references to "reality". For the past day, that term keeps pounding through my head.)