Jules Verne

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Hi VarTalman,

your point about parallels between LotR and some other literary works, namely the Bible, is of course valid. There have certainly been pages and pages filled with musings about those parallels, how much or how close they are, which are the most "striking" ones etc.

Personally, I would not consider the Path of the Dead being in any way the "striking" case. Of course one familiar with a tale of some "rising dead" would easily recall it when reading it - but that's the familiarity you mention in your example of Verne: it is easy to attempt to see a parallel, but it does not necessarily fit unless you force it.

I believe everyone would agree that the tale of bones rising back from death, by itself, is not anything specific to the Bible and Tolkien. You will find many more and much closer parallels in many old folk mythologies, through various epic tales up to modern literature.

The text you mention has, when you look at the context, very little to do with the role the story of the Paths of the Dead has in Tolkien. In LotR, these "bones" (if you can even talk about bones - I'm not sure if in the book there is any reference to bones except for the corpse of poor Rohanian explorer prince; the Dead are "shades of Men", not any walking skeletons - likewise, in Ezekiel it is not about walking skeletons, but, as you can read in the quote you provided, these "dry bones" gather flesh and skin and are, effectively, brought back to life as normal humans), these Dead of Dunharrow come back to aid the King of Gondor to return to his realm, defeating the people of his kingdom from the threat of Umbar corsairs. In Ezekiel, the story is a view of future "resurrection", of "revival" also of the land, of the dry and desolate and destroyed country. So the meaning of the two "stories", if you wish, is something completely different.

If there is anything of a similar feeling in Tolkien, then I could think of e.g. reclaiming of Dale. One could imagine a Middle-Earth's "Ezekiel" standing in the Dale shortly after its destruction by Smaug and being shown the vision of its renewal in the future (after the slaying of the dragon): once dead land, the Dragon's desolation, is renewed (even though Ezekiel has even deeper meaning, since the renewal is also on the spiritual level, and to be proper, it should resurrect those who perished in the destruction of Dale and return them to their renewed homes). But in my opinion the similarity to the Dead Men of Dunharrow can be only "outward" (dead people coming to life - and not even that, because the Dead of Dunharrow do NOT come back to life, they are trapped in "un-death" until they fulfil their oath, and then they are gone - while the revived ones in Ezekiel settle down and live in the land renewed).

So, while I certainly agree that there could be things where Tolkien's writings consciously, unconsciously, visibly or less visibly allude to the Bible, I would not list this as one of them. Tolkien, unlike Lewis, has been in many ways inspired by the Bible "thematically", I would say, rather than "literally": he uses themes (temptation of power; mercy, forgiveness and redemption; hope! and "strength of the weak ones"; promises of renewal of the lost etc...), but not obvious references in the sense that he would copy a Biblical story and narrate it with different characters.