Images of Paradise: comparisons

[littlemanpoet]

I wanted to start with Niggle's Parish in Leaf by Niggle and the plain before the Mountains in The Great Divorce because those were the two that seemed to bear the greatest similarity; which gets me wondering which was written first and who influenced whom, if that happened at all.

Now that I think about it, there is a second reason for leaving Valinor out, that must have been at a subconscious level for me at first. It's that LBN and TGD are not mythical per sé, but more allegorical, though not completely. They are both stories primarily about dying and going to heaven (or not). By contrast, wheras that theme can be found in both LotR and The Chronicles of Narnia, it is one among many, however important. The stories, LBN and TGD, are extrapolations on our own experience of life rather than of a Narnia which is in another world, or a Middle Earth lost in the deeps of time.

That said, a comparison of Valinor may yield some answers to the questions I've raised so far. Differences between them may be more helpful to our understanding than the similarities.

I'm also interested in the end of Danté's Purgatorio, particularly the top of the Mountain of Purgatory, which is depicted as a lush paradise through which flows the River Lethe (spelling?), and is revealed as Eden. It has been too long since I read it, and I'll have to get back to it for the sake of this thread, but it came to mind as soon as I tried to think of other comparisons besides the original two.