[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by Roa_Aoife

Certainly valid, Saucy, but hardly relevant to the question presented. I simple meant that in the context of the thread, it's meaningless. Such points are really just getting off topic. The question was "Is Eru God?" and the only person who would know for certain is Tolkien himself. Since he can't really answer that for us, we are left to discern what he thought on our own. Application of the text is a different subject altogether.

Fea and Esty have already made the point, but just to reiterate the clarification which I extracted from Fordim:

Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle

At any rate, Esty has already pointed to what I meant with the question: what do you think? If the question were what did Tolkien think the answer would be pretty obviously "yes" -- Tolkien intended Eru to be the Christian God (as Tolkien saw him).

Originally Posted by burrahobbit

I see them as the same question since we are talking about things that Tolkien wrote. Tolkien's world, Tolkien's rules.

I would disagree. The reader can, of course, interpret Eru on the basis of presumed authorial intention, but he or she is not inevitably bound (by the text or otherwise) to do so. A Muslim reader, for example, may well interpret Eru as Allah regardless of Tolkien's intentions and imply into Eru's character aspects of that God. Similarly, an Atheist reader, or one who has no strong religious convictions, is likely to view Eru as a purely fictional character, just like the other characters, with no equivalent in reality and interpret him solely on the basis of the material presented in the text. Neither, objectively, is wrong to do so. Why should "Tolkien's rules" bind the reader when they have no direct bearing on the story?