The White Council

Re: Religions in Middle-earth...

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

Last night I tried to post another note (a sort of addendum to my previous one), but something went wrong, and now my long dissertation is kaput! Most of you will be happy about that - it was long winded and pompous.

Basically I mentioned Adam and Eve in Eden and that they had no need of religion or ritual since "God" walked with them in the garden. There is no mention of temples or how the people worshipped until after the time of Noah and the Flood. I suppose that theologists could argue the point, but as I read it, God walked with Adam and Eve in a physical sense. If not physically, then in some way that was apparently "real". Adam didn't need faith to know that God was real or a temple in which to worship Him. Why would he when God visits him every day to see how he's doing. Sacrifices weren't mentioned until after the "Fall", so we can assume that such practices continued.

My point is that this reality of God (Illuvatar) that Adam had is similar to what the Elves must have experienced in the Blessed Realm. They came to Middle-Earth not needing "faith" or hope, since they had "lived" it and had seen it. As for Tolkien being disturbed by his mythology, I see no need for him to feel that way. The Two Tree story is no more fantastic than the Genesis account of the Tree of Life (or the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). It may be that Tolkien wanted to draw parallels to the Bible in the same way that the Gilgamesh Epic recounts the Great Flood, indicating to me (though not others) that the Bible account and the Sumarian account spring (possibly) from a common ancient source. So in the Bible we have a Tree of Knowledge and in the LOTR we have a Tree of Light. From a metaphorical point of view they are the same (Light=Knowledge). And Eden was closed to men after the Fall, and might just as well have been removed from the earth, just as Tolkien does with the Blessed Realm.

I don't want to make too much of this. It's only speculation, and of course from a Christian perspective the Elves wouldn't be the first born. And Tolkien takes some rather complex theology and looks at it from a new angle, and actually makes more sense than many theologians.

I didn't know that he had modified his mythology to make the Valar more like angels. But the modification doesn't surprise me, considering the number of revisions to the whole mythos that he did during his lifetime.

I can recall a number of years ago that some conservative Chrsitians were calling to have LOTR burned, since in their eyes it was a demon inspired work. Of course most of them had never read it, and they had confused Tolkien's book with the very popular Dungeons and Dragons (which owes so much to Tolkien's creation). To many, Tolkien's book and D&D were one and the same. I hope that view has changed over the years. I haven't read or heard any complaints lately, but I'm curious to know if any fundamentalist churches are still trying to have LOTR banned?