Out of curiousity, I went to the source -- the Oxford English Dictionary -- to find if "eru" is a 'real' word. It is not, but
eruv is. It's Hebrew and means:
Quote:
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Any of various symbolic arrangements which extend the private domain of Jewish households into public areas, thereby permitting activities in them that are normally forbidden in public on the Sabbath; spec. an urban area within which such an arrangement obtains, and which is symbolically enclosed by a wire boundary.
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So an
eruv (or the variant
erub) is a public, social space that has been symbolically 'made' or converted into a private, religious space...soooooooo interesting. Is it too much of a stretch to see Eru as Tolkien's own extension into the public domain of his own "private domain"...? Given that the man was fond of, in his own words, "low philologic jokes" is it possible to see him using the narratives of Middle-Earth as "symbolic arrangements which extend the private domain of [Tolkien's] household into public areas, thereby permitting activities in them that are normally forbidden in public"????
(For what it's worth, the closest words I could find in the Latin family are
eructate: "to vomit forth" and
erudite: "learned, scholarly"; in Old English there's
-ere: the masculine suffix (-es/-as) that "signifies a person or agent" and maybe
ǽr-: a prefix meaning "early, former, preceding, ancient")