Who, in The Lord of the Rings, was the most effective liar?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Clever, and your point is well taken; however, the question is asked of those "IN" LotR whereas the author stands outside it. So it is not, technically, an omission.

As Child pointed out, there are narrators who are part of the story--I believe we even had a thread on the Conceit of the Narrator. Yet at the same time, there are many threads here which attempt to discover who Tolkien is by virtue of his writing--and not just the more autobiographical writings such as Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major. There are many Downers no less than other readers (those poor unfortunates who have not found this piece of Middle-earth in the Seventh Age) who insist that we can know many things about an author from his work. There's an entire sub-category of literary analysis based upon psychoanalytic theory, for instance, as well as less theoretical interpretations which believe that the nature or character of the person is unfolded by his or her writing. So for those readers, Tolkien truly is in the text. He does, after all, have by far the greatest effect on the action, having decided either consciously or unconsciously what the story would be, where it would go, who would be the characters. Who other than the author has such an impact upon the action of the story?

But both Child's and Raynor's posts bring another interesting dimension to this question by pointing out that Tolkien, at some point in his life, decided or realized that what he was writing was true history, the very essence of real myth and he spent the remaining years of his life niggling his Legendarium to reflect more clearly aspects of his faith. Does this mean Tolkien saw himself as a Prophet, revealing God's truth? Did Tolkien believe that his writing personally helped him recover from the Fall--that is, did he believe that his writing granted him a State of Grace?