[Child of the 7th Age]

Gandalf the Grey and others --

I'd like to raise one other question that is related to this. Ganalf brought forward the well known letter where Tolkien says that LotR was Christian, "especially in the revisions."

It seems to be there is a fascinating question here. We have HoMe which shows the different drafts the book went through, and, if someone wanted to be really ambitious, they could even journey up to look at Tolkien's papers which are mainly at Marquette University. The interesting thing to me is that no one, and I mean NO ONE, has systematically looked at the different drafts to see just where and when the explicitly religious and explicitly Christian themes come in. Were they there at the orgin, did they come in gradually, or only in the very final drafts?

First, you'd have to make a list to identify such ideas and themes, and then you'd have to compare that with the actual drafts of the book. There was an earlier thread on this started by Littlemanpoet several months ago. We actually started to make such a list (it was quite long). In one or two cases, you could see where that point had originated. But most of them were up for grabs. You'd have to do a lot of serious research.

Anyway it's an interesting idea for a project.

One point that may relate to this ....some of Tolkien's very last writings which relate more to the Legendarium and Silm. have some explicit religious/Christian themes there. I'm thinking of the Andreth/Finrod debate in Morgoth's Ring (my favorite) and the osanwe-kenta stuff on mind to mind communication. All of that was very late in Tolkien's career and most of it didn't get put in the published Silm, much to the dismay of some of us! (Lindil in the Silm project is the expert on this.)

sharon, the 7th age hobbit