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Originally Posted by mark12_30
More good observations. Moses certainly; don't forget Samuel; and yes, there are others. More on that later I suspect.
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This is based on the rejected passage in HoM-e 7 where the baby Gandalf was found by Tom Bombadil floating in a basket on the Withywindle presumably?
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Interesting, Lal. Where did the (western concept of) Divine Right come from?
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Maybe Rome & the whole deification of the Emperor thing? Or from the fact that the Anglo-Saxon kings claimed descent from Woden, or the Egyptian tradition that the King was the incarnation of Osiris, or just the fact that it was fairly common for ancient peoples to see their rulers in that way.
And this is the whole problem here. You're taking universals & claiming they are uniquely 'Christian' in order to prove some kind of point, or worse consciously or unconsciously misinterpreting incidents & characters in order to make them 'fit' your theory.
If Tolkien had wanted to write a book of theology I'm quite certain he could have done that. If he wanted to write an allegory on the lines of Narnia I'm sure he could have done that too. What he actually wrote was a story. Whatever got taken up into his secondary world became absorbed into it. I can think of no Biblical figure or event that was taken up wholesale. There may be bits of Moses, & Jesus, & Satan & the Heavenly Jerusalem & other stuff in there, but they're all mixed in with bits of Odin, Merlin, Beowulf, & lots of other stuff. This whole 'Gollum-like' scrabbling around among the roots & in holes to find out 'secrets' is vaguely insulting to Tolkien's genius as a creator.
EDIT Cross-posted with
Lalwende