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Of course this means that Eru is not actually a character as such - which is waht I've been arguing. I'm not sure the analogy with Tom works. Tom is enigmatic, but he has a character & plays a specific role in his world & in the story He is a person. Eru seemingly exists only to make the mythlogy monotheistic. Eru is so far outside the world & the events of the story that effectively he is not a part of it.
Yet Tolkien insists on bringing him into the story as an active participant at certain points, & this causes a problem due the fact of his one dimensionality. When he appears it is to do something & we don't really know why he does what he does because we don't know who he is. You can't just have a metaphor popping into the story & then popping out agan - not if this changes the story in a major way. If the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan had popped up in the Gospels as an actual person we'd be totally confused as to to the point of the parables - suddenly they would become reportage & not stories with a moral truth behind them. If Ainulindale is a parable/myth how 'true' is it? Is the 'mythic' Eru the same as the Eru who appears to trahs Numenor, or is he different? We need to know more about Eru if he is to become a physical fact within the world. If we'd never encountered him outside the Music, no problem. The point at which he enters in he becomes a problem, because he becomes a fact which changes the world of which he is a part.
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