[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I'm going to break in here, and hopefully prevent a riot.

Personally I found the biblical parallels quoted in the first post to be unconvincing, and for the reasons given in Hookbill's response. That does not mean that there are no biblical parallels in LotR, just that those particular examples could have been thought out more carefully. My reading of the book has never suggested a character or plot element that has obviously been lifted directly from the Bible, but Tolkien knew more about the Bible and theology than any of us, and without a similar knowledge both of the Bible and of Roman Catholic theology, modern and medieval, all of our theories are likely to run astray.

I find it unlikely that Tolkien would re-use stories from the Bible, and he certainly wasn't trying to write an allegory. He was frequently troubled by thoughts that his legends veered away from Catholic orthodoxy, and to make any obvious connections would seem to increase that danger. That is not to say that there are not Christian teachings embedded in LotR, such as the importance of mercy, the existence of an individual choice between right and wrong and the centrality of love and self-sacrifice, but these are not biblical characters or events, rather ideas which are expressed in Christian writings. Similarly, if one were to say that a character was a representation of Christ, it would not be enough simply to point to wisdom or self-sacrifice: those characteristics can be found everywhere in world literature. Certainly it's not enough to say that a character preaches (Elrond does not, to my mind, preach at all), or that he narrates stories from history: that character would need to share important characteristics, such as accepting punishment for the crimes of others, rising from the dead or being the son of a deity; preferably all three.

If there is a character who clearly fits a Christian model it is Morgoth. He is the most powerful and beautiful of the Valar, yet his pride in those gifts leads him to reject the authority of his creator . Thenceforth he is renamed to show his new role as the enemy of good, which is embodied in the Creator, Eru. In its essentials this is the story of Satan, who is also renamed from Lucifer ('Light-bearing One') to Satan ('Adversary'). However, this parallel is so obvious that most of us take it for granted; and its source is not the Bible, but a mass of apocryphal literature that was particularly popular in the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxon poem Genesis B, translated from contemporary Old Saxon, records this story in verse; and if Tolkien was not intimately familiar with it then I should be very surprised.

Setting aside davem's objections, we should all be aware when looking at Tolkien's sources and his use of them, that he knew and understood many things more completely than do we. His upbringing, education and experiences were far removed from the present-day norm, and he grew up in a society that is now virtually unrecognisable. Nobody seems to look at Thucydides, for example, for Tolkienian parallels, and yet Tolkien once won a school prize for his knowledge of the Greek historian, whom he read in Classical Greek and who was on the syllabus at King Edward's. Tolkien's influences can be sought in the Latin and Greek authors so beloved of nineteenth-century educators, in the Germanic legends with which he was professionally concerned, in the literature of his time, in his religion and in his own experiences and imagination: to pick out these threads requires a frightening amount of study, not only of Tolkien but also of all these areas. My education is not up to the task, and it's difficult nowadays to find anyone who does have the necessary grasp even of the essentials (who has read the Aenead in Latin? Tolkien had, before the age of eighteen.

My point is that when discussing something as central to Tolkien's life as Roman Catholicism, particularly when trying to spot it in his works, we ought first to find out as much about Roman Catholicism and Tolkien's works as possible. If we want to find Biblical parallels, we should at least know the entire Bible, since Tolkien certainly did. The same caveat applies to mythological and literary parallels: know the sources, know the literature, know Tolkien and think carefully. Tolkien was a subtle and learned man: he cannot be dissected with a hammer.