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Originally Posted by Mansun
Knowbody is really saying that so & so are Christ figures etc. More to the truth is that some characters do have a Christ-like aura about them, so one may be entitled to question whether Tolkien was heavily influenced by characters in the Bible in is works.
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They don't have a 'Christ-like aura' about them for me as I'm not a Christian. For me they are who they are, & are not 'in service' of any other person, real or imagined.
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I for one believe that were it not for his experiences of the World Wars, as well as his interest in Christianity, the LOTR would not have been as it is today. It is possible that he may just have ended up with a longer but comparable tale to The Hobbit.
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Its a truism that a writer's experiences will shape the kind of tale he tells. I'm not even sure that he woulld have written TH as he did (particularly the Battle of Five Armies) were it not for his wartime experiences - or his trip to Switzerland come to that. However, none of that is evidence of any conscious 'allegorical' element in any of his works.
It could be argued there's as much (if not more) of Odin in Gandalf as Christ, & a reader with a knowledge of Norse myth who was completely unaware of Christianity would possibly see Gandalf as having an' Odin-like aura'. Or one who read LotR first & then came to Christianity would possibly argue that Christ had a 'Gandalf-like aura'. All of which gets us precisely nowhere it seems to me.
LotR works because the Secondary World of Middle-earth is self contained, & has no dependence on primary world myth, religion or history.
As I said, if you want to see Gandalf (or Elrond or Aragorn or Frodo) as a 'Christ' figure, an 'Odin' figure, or a 'Mickey Mouse' figure I couldn't care less. If, on the other hand, you tell me they
are that in their essence, I'll tell you you need to get some perspective.