A brief note to that Hinduism thing. It's so that Hinduism represents a rather diverse collection of all sorts of beliefs in local gods, various traditions from various ages, various views of the world-order (from the brahmanism through upanishadas etc.). I am pretty sure you would find some gods in there which you could compare to some of the Valar pretty well. But it's not like that "in Hinduism, there is X gods", and then some specific order or structure between them. Hinduism, in fact, represents simply anything that is religious and comes from India at the same time, if I say it in somewhat simple way. The only thing is, that there is the attempt to ultimately reach the "main" gods, or maybe better to say "the gods above gods", if I am to hold this terminology (basically three, or two, or depends, it varies among certain specific traditions). But anyway, it's all somewhat complicated and I don't want to go deep to it here because that would be probably for long, but overall I believe it's quite alien from the concept of Valar and such. Also because again, the "nature" of the gods is a lot different from the one of the Valar, or even the Greek gods. In my opinon, when we are comparing, the Greek, or European pantheons in general are far more fitting, simply because they are European and M-E is rather European than anything else.
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories
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