The Lord of the Bible?

[davem]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

As a point of fact, Ask and Embla are the names of the first man and woman, so called because they were made from driftwood: pieces of ash and elm respectively. There are also two trees in Alexander's letter to Aristotle, which was a popular text in the Anglo-Saxon period both in Latin and in the English translation. In fact the trees of Sun and Moon seem a more likely direct source for Laurelin and Telperion, although it's possible that the trees in the dubiously ascribed letter were directly based on the two trees of Genesis: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Accepted - though the pieces of driftwood must have come from trees (I take my permission for pedantry here from Hookbill ). I think we are dealing here with 'Archetypes'. Similar themes recur throughout myth, legend, folklore & many religious texts. We are not dealing with specific manifestations of the Archetypes - whether in myth or religion, but with the primal Archetypes. I don't see the Biblical trees as the Archetypes, but as manifestations of them. One can argue over the 'true' nature & origin of the Archetypes, but, according to Jung that 'origin' cannot ever be known.

The point is that the Trees in M-e are living trees, born from seedlings, mature, grow old & die. They are not mythological symbols - though they may have 'mythological' antecedents. Tolkien dies not just 'lift' things. Every tree Tolkien encountered is the source for the Two Trees.