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Old 08-24-2006, 12:44 PM   #15
Lalwendė
A Mere Boggart
 
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Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
No, Tolkien did not 'steal' anything from The Bible any more than he made use of influences from many other sources. Yes he was a Catholic, but references that seem similar to Biblical myth are not there on purpose any more than references that seem similar to Northern myth are there on purpose. Remember Tolkien filtered all his influences through his head and imagination and came up with his own, non-allegorical, tales. So he didn't nick anything, he just used all the influences swirling round in his capacious mind.

You can't deny that things such as his faith will have had an influence but at the higher, deeper level in forming archetypes to work from; I suppose we could say that some of the characters that seem Biblical could equally be from similar archetypes found in say Norse myth. The point is that the mind is a big old stew and influences definitely come through, but Tolkein did not intend them as allegories of certain Biblical characters. You need to read CS Lewis to find that for sure.

If we like to read them that way then there's nothing wrong in that, but I suppose a balance between our own interpretations and what Tolkien intended is important - otherwise you get either entirely personal interpretation (however wild and whacky) or you stick rigidly to Authorial intention and have no room to 'see' new things in the text. I think even Tolkien realised that readers would interpret things differently, as demonstrated in his many letters to fans - you get the impression that he was thinking "Hmmm! I never thought of that!"

Of course there's the infamous "consciously so in the revision", but even that statement is open to interpretation and doesn't mean that he sat down revising his text to turn it into a Christian text - or else it would become allegorical, the thing he said it was not, and everything would start to get very confusing!

I personally think that Tolkien wished the books to reflect his own moral system, i.e. Christianity, but this influence is just one of many. The charcaters have integrity as the characters they are - they are not rewrites of other characters, but this doesn't mean other characters influenced them and that the reader can't read what they like into it.

I guess I've summed up from what I've said before on this old can of worms. What surprises me is how often it comes up. Or maybe it shouldn't as I suspect Tolkien's work is getting close to the Bible in terms of big mythical characters that stay in the shared public consciousness.
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