This is a little off-center, but one thing that fascinates me about the theology/morality of LotR is that Tolkien very deliberately made an effort to exclude overt, direct links to Christian religion:
Quote:
...there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.
--Letter 131
I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments, that may tend to 'bring them home'.
--Letter 153
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It's interesting to me that he found, or sensed, that the best way to talk about the truths that he held so dear was to
not talk about them, if you take my meaning. To portray the underlying truth without the trapping, or in a different trapping. I don't know what that has to do with this discussion, just something that comes up for me as I read through the thread.
Also, I think some posters are taking the idea of the legendarium as pre-history a little too far. At some point you are forced to consider Tolkien's stories as "alternate history", no? I mean we have two creation stories at the very least which aren't reconcilable. There's no way for the Silmarillion to pre-date Genesis: "In the beginning..."