[Child of the 7th Age]

Oh, dear, I read these posts and tried to crawl in bed and sleep, but I felt compelled to get up and answer.....

This is a large part of why I do consider Eru to be both YHWH and the Trinitarian God-- the expectations and values placed on men are similar. Men are percieved as being "in control of their own destiny", having free will and making their own choices, their actions having true consequences. However, they cannot (by deciding and acting ) ultimately change the will and plans of Eru, any more than Melkor could. This has a similar feel to both the Christian Trinitarian God, and the Jewish YHWH. But it is quite different from many other religious concepts of God. I think that percieved personality is a large part of this whole consideration.

Helen

My thoughts are much closer to yours than they are to the depiction of Eru that Davem and Lalwende have put forward. I see Tolkien's Eru as distant and removed. But with all due respect, I do not see the demand for and glorification of human blood being one essential aspect of Eru in the Legendarium, which Davem's post states. Most of what is evil we bring on our own heads without help from the outside. I also have a problem with the portrayal of Frodo as an example of God's demanding and unreasonable nature:

Look at what happens in his work. This is a God who is not worshipped, whose only relationship with his people is to demand their lives every now and then (Numenor, Frodo) for the greater good. What Frodo goes through is very much like what the young conscript goes through. He is sent off to fight, to complete a suicide mission; he does not fully comprehend what will happen to him and only at Mount Doom does he realise what fate has in store for him. Against the odds he survives but only just, as what he ends up with is pure torment and Hell. He gets no reward. For all we know, his going off to the Undying Lands may as well be like taking his own life. We know he is mortal and going there is unlikely to change this; at best he might get a little comfort before he dies, but no reward of returning to his former life, no reward of going to 'Heaven'. What hapens to Frodo is horrible.

What happens to Frodo is sad, terribly sad, but it is not "horrible". Frodo was told, even from the beginning, that he could lose his life if he took on the task laid before him. Yet it was made equally evident that not taking on that task could result in the destruction of everything he knew and loved in the Shire. The full realization of what that meant came only slowly, but it was certainly not hidden from him.

Secondly, Frodo was given a choice. No God bludgeoned him over the head or put a knife to his throat. Sometimes, doing what is right is darned hard but you know in your heart what you have to do. Frodo was a decent person/Hobbit and he came to understand that. That he was injured horribly was true, and the general populace in the Shire did not recognize the sacrifice he made. Yet he was not without hope or friends. The support of Sam as well as the author's suggestion that the latter eventually sailed to the West, Arwen's attempt to give Frodo her seat on the vessel, Gandalf's gentle words of inquiry and how he made certain that Bilbo came with Frodo---to me this is not a scene of "horror" but of caring. I do not expect Eru to come flying down from the heavens to offer comfort and hope. Eru built these instincts into us, and it is our responsibility to respond with compassion. Frodo's friends clearly did this.

To assume that Frodo found no hope or relief in the West is to put words in the author's mouth that simply are not there. Nowhere in the Letters does Tolkien say Frodo would not find healing. He merely states that, like much in life, we simply do not know. But we have been told how much Frodo loved Elves and how the light in his eye came to gleem like a reflection of the splintered Silmarils caught in Galadriel's phial. If there is any mortal spirit who would be able to be healed across the Sea in Elvenhome, surely that would be Frodo.

I still think what we are dealing with here is not a difference in Eru but a difference in perspective. Somewhere in the Letters (I am too sleepy to dredge it up right now), Tolkien stated that one of the main reasons he wrote LotR and Silm was to see how men dealt with loss and hardship in an age when they had so little guidance: why and how they followed the path of "right" before they had been given any intimation of God's goodness and nature through revelation, and, in Tolkien's eyes, specifically through the incarnation. The author's eye then was not fixed on God or Eru, per se, but in looking at the response of men to the moral demands of the world. This is similar to Helen's statement above. Eru figures into this equation but only in a distant way, because that is the way the world worked in the pre-covenent period. If Eru is distant, it is because we are talking about the world before Abraham.

There is a second way that perspective comes into play here: that of our own personal perspective in reading the book. Littlemanpoet alluded to this in his post. If I had to use one word and only one word to describe the Legendarium, I would call it "bittersweet". The flashes of tragedy and horror are there, but so too is the steady undercurrent of hope. To view LotR largely from the negative side while failing to see the hope and light just won't work. And when we reduce Frodo's experience to "horror" or emphasize the "dark side" of Eru, we run the risk of erasing the clear line that exists between Sauron and the forces of light. I can't believe Tolkien would have wanted that.

There were clearly moments in life when the author was weighed down with despair. And yet there were other instances when we get a completely different picture. How else can you interpret the conversation between Andreth and Finrod? Tolkien felt so compelled to introduce the possibility of Eru entering into Arda that he even broke his own rule about "Christianity" not being part of the sub-created world. That conversation has always been magical to me: the tortured feelings of both parties, yet interspersed with the possibility of distant renewal. This interchange surely depicts a god of hope rather than anger or even distance.

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P.S. Can't help but add this, also in response to Lalwende . While no ritual is prescribed for the worship of Eru, Tolkien clearly states that those who follow Eru will combat the evils of the Shadow. I read this as essentially a moral directive: those who honor Eru will conduct themselves in such a way that their behavior will help to overthrow the evil posed by Morgoth and Sauron. To me, this moral imperative is far more significant than any ritual could possibly be.