The Lord of the Bible?

[davem]

The major problem with reading LotR as a 'Christian' work is that so much of it is clearly not in any way Biblically inspired. the whole Tom & Goldberry/Barrow Downs 'world' for instance. If Tolkien was writing a Christian novel much of it would not be there - in other words there is, from Wright's perspective too much 'chaff' among the wheat, & that 'chaff' is in there intentionally.

Reading LotR in the light of the Bible leads one to force interpretations on it - Raynor's statement:

I have little if any doubt Eru would have kicked Melkor from one end of Ea to the other, should he have been supplicated. But no, Men failed and fell - in the end, to the glory of Eru.

cannot, as Lalwende pointed out, be supported by any textual reference in Tolkien's writings. It is a 'Biblical' reading. One may be able to claim that if Men had supplicated themselves to God He would have kicked Satan out - perfectly in line with Biblical statements. What one should not do is make similar claims for events & characters in LotR, without supporting evidence, because Tolkien wrote the story he wrote & set it up in the way he did, with its own rules & narrative structure.

This is where the whole approach of drawing analogies falls down & requires us to ask 'So what' so often in these kinds of threads. Assumptions cannot be made & stated as facts, posters must state clearly what point they are making, why they are making it, & when they are expressing personal opinions & when they are stating facts (& preferably give quotes).

LotR is what it is. Much has gone into the 'soup' which Tolkien ladled out, but also much has been attributed to it & many of those attributions cannot be supported. A thread which is simply about noticing similarities between two works will produce both serious & ridiculous examples (& in my opinion so it should - if only to get posters to answer that 'So what' question).

We have very limited 'evidence' of what inspired Tolkien & in what way it inspired him. This makes me think of earlier statements made about 'Pagan' attitudes. These statements were based, it seemed to me, on the surviving literature. Now, in the case of Anglo-Saxon literature we have very little - a few poems, homilies, riddles & Chronicles. The idea that we can make a valid judgement on the ordinary Anglo-Saxon's attitudes & world-view on such scanty evidence (as if for centuries they just recited the same verses over & over & over every single night) is not all that sensible. If all we had from the Elizabethan/Jacobean period was Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, a handful of Dowland songs & the Authorised version of the Bible we'd have a very different view of the people who lived then. To conclude that they were a bunch of depressives who spent a lot of time in church would maybe be 'supported' by such 'evidence' but it would be far from the reality.

This search for 'specific' sources is dangerous - especially when those doing the searching have already decided what they want to find, already determined what is 'chaff' & what is 'wheat'.