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Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man
There are elements of the perilous realm within Tolkien's writings - Old Man Willow and the Barrow Wight, for example - but overall it is sanitised. In particular, its "rulers" (Tom Bombadil, Alf the Prentice and Galadriel) are largely devoid of the tricksy, mischievous and sometimes immoral characteristics generally found in traditional Faerie beings.
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I'd agree with that! I think we've discussed this one before - in the Trickster thread and in davem's Fairie thread, and it did seem that Tolkien's own version of Faerie missed out a lot of the elements that Faerie traditionally has, such as chaos and amorality. If you look at drafts of the Silmarillion in particular, you can see that over time, Tolkien de-Paganised much of what he had originally written.
However, some of the biggest enigmas in his work seem to be hangovers from older versions of Tolkien's work, and trying to understand them, you find a lot of illumination in HoME; Tolkien did not always revise everything either, but left some things as he originally intended. For example, Ungoliant does indeed seem to have existed outside of all the creation in Arda, coming from 'The Void' and being neither good or bad, just
being.
If Tolkien did try to sanitise his work, then he did not sanitise all of it! I think as a Catholic he naturally did not veer towards too much sympathy for 'evil' characters, which is possibly why there is no Miltonic Satan figure, but there are still some traces of the amoral and chaotic in the world he created, beings which may well be out of Eru's 'control'.
It's a question that fascinates me, after hearing Ronald Hutton talk about
The Pagan Tolkien, and considering his influence on readers who think his work records real English mythology (it doesn't, it misses out all the sex and violence). And its worth considering that possibly a greater influence on Tolkien than his religion was his love of myth, particularly Northern myth, which was very non-Christian (but could be seen as quite
Catholic, which is an old and quite visceral religion, built on even older and more visceral religions). Maybe at a later stage in life (in the twenties he was not much of a churchgoer) he became more uncomfortable with how the themes of these tales echoed in his own and did grasp at moments suggested to him which seemed more Christian.
Hmm, maybe even his idea that all myths pointed to 'The Truth' was reaction in itself to his own love for obviously pagan myth whereas he was a Catholic - so he came up with the idea that loving Northern myths was 'OK' for a Christian because they all pointed to 'The Truth' anyway. Self-justification? Or not, given that in Tolkien's day there was nothing at all 'evil' or dangerous about the occult like there is today for some Christians? And by the way, some Christians today are comfortable with both as we have a Spiritualist church here where a workmate, a devout Christian, is learning to be 'a psychic'.
Perhaps we have to learn not to be so 'fundamentalist' about the influence of religion on this work. Tolkien was a believer but not a tub-thumper (as Lewis in some ways was), and he was also incredibly subtle with his poetic language. So maybe we have to accept that there may be a few things that remind us of Biblical/Christian elements, but also accept that they are not put there to give us deeper understanding of the story, beyond basics also shared by other faiths such as pity, forgiveness and tenacity.