[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

Lalwende wrote:
This strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Gandalf has no particular association with Gondor over any other part of northeastern Middle-earth. I suppose that, in the absence of further information on Gandalf, some readers might interpret it this way, but it seems quite clear that this is not what either Gandalf or Tolkien intended..

That would be one of the inevitable conclusions that a reader might make before reading The Sil, in the absence of any information about Eru. Yes it does look like a stretch to us, but we are privileged as we have much material to read.

However, the relationship between Gandalf and Aragorn is a special one, and Gandalf does act on Aragorn's behalf, and very much acts as his personal adviser; note how Aragorn does defer to the wiser Gandalf and allow him to make decisions, very much what a Steward would do.

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

This strikes me as splitting semantic hairs. One might as well ask whether Milton's character is "really" Satan, or whether Allah of the Koran is "really" Yahweh of the Torah.

Hmm, no, as Milton's Satan is a clear literary interpretation of the Biblical Satan - this is what Milton set out to do; and readers of Paradise Lost must accept that this is in no way a depiction of the 'real' Satan but one writer's vision of him. In fact, if readers did start to think that this was the 'real' Satan they might end up deserting churches in droves as he's rather cool. As for the second example these are theological writings and so are very different to either Paradise Lost or to LotR.

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

If you ask me, the question "is Eru God?" is only a semantic one.

Now that's a wormy point to make knowing the rows that have happened over the years on this very topic. Everything I've read has pointed to the fact that the question can't be answered definitively. We cannot even all agree that Eru is Tolkien's personal interpretation of God, let alone that Eru is God full stop. I'd rather this one remained buried where it was.

Had some more thoughts on this recently and the gist of them went thus: Tolkien may have wished to have a Monotheistic God in the manner of the Christian God (who we can't even define anyway as there are Unitarians as well as Trinitarians in the real world, and a Pantheistic range of Gods in Arda) in his cosmology, and he may even have referred to Eru as He (capitalised) in his letters, and drawn upon comparisons of God and Eru, even going as far as saying Eru is 'The One' (what? Neo?); but the very nature of God and how he is interpreted by each individual is far too numinous for us to be able to say with absolute certainty that Eru is God. The very most we could ever say is Eru is Tolkien's God.

Even breaking this down further, Tolkien may have hoped that his readers would perceive Eru as being in nature something like the God he knew, hence using terminology similar to Christianity to emphasise this fact. As someone who writes, if I wanted to create a cosmology where there was a Monotheistic, omnipotent God in the nature of 'our' God, then I too would employ the familiar literary devices of He and The One and Almighty.

Whose God anyway? Eru is most defintely not the God I have known even as a Christian, nor the god that I know now. Eru is a construct in a book, a writer's creation, and in his nature is something entirely different. From my Christian youth one thing I remember being taught is that there was only one book to find the real God in and that's The Bible.

Consider this - if we are going to say that Eru is God, with absolute certainty, does this not then suggest that Tolkien's work, stories about Eru and his world, is the Word of God and we might as well study that in church instead of the Bible if we so desire? I think Tolkien would have found this prospect slightly frightening himself!

There's something very clever and very deliberate behind all of this fudging in my opinion, and Tolkien put it there. He despised allegory and did not want to write one. Likewise he was squeamish about creating a world with a God which was wholly different to the God he loved as a devout man. If he had the God in there then this would be allegorical, not only that, but also potentially blasphemous. But he could have something which might remind some of us of God, and he could cleverly construct this to make it convincing; he could also construct enough around this 'Eru' figure he made up to make it look like something new. And hey, what an opportunity to explore all his own, personal feelings about God?