A very interesting thread on a very un-interesting story.....
I mean, if you (and I) were involved in a secret
evil cult, would we tell an old man who was obviously of high morals - He had beaten this guy as a child for stealing fruit off one of his
trees.
Duh....
I wonder how 'The New Shadow' would've liked his BIG MOUTH?
Now, a few comments on some other posts:
Tolkien seems to say that Men are inherently inclined to evil,
Well, that would be the Christian view of Man & Tolkien was a Christian....
TLOTR is the Sil on a several times lesser scale.
No, not really, other than 'Good' winning out over 'evil'.....
TLOR contains a story of ONE long journey that breaks into a few side stories & ultimate victory by 'the common folk' over the
Dark Lord whereas The Silm contains tragedy after tragedy that gains unlooked for victory over the Dark Lord snatched by one act of sailing a ship by one common folk into the West & gaining the aid of The Greatest Beings in
Arda......
Very little in common but the victory - and passing away amidst victory of much that was fair......
This is the very thing I have against the idea of a "God" who is all-good.
No offense,
Barley, but The God of the Universe will (not) be highly upset......
And this is what has been Man's problem since The Fall - we want to make God in OUR image instead of letting God make US in HIS image.
And this brings us right back to the Garden of Eden where we ate the apple when God said we could have ANYTHING but that one little thing.
Funny, but, isn't that what JRRT chose as the thing this guy stole in this story?
A piece of fruit.....
Coincidence?
I think not.
Why?
Because Tolkien has been using Christian imagery since day one in
Middle-Earth - he says so himself in one of his Letters. (If someone doubts it, I'll find the exact quote because I just read it yesterday. It's in the #140's.)
Look at
Melkor/
Morgoth. Unquestionably a takeoff on Satan.
He falls in heaven.
During The
Music of the Ainur.
Satan (Lucifer) was God's Minister of Music.
The other
Ainur (angels) fight with Morgoth and the Ainur he has tempted into falling in the 'void' (heaven) just as Satan did......
Even
Sauron is a parable of Satan, especially in The Alkabeth.
Here, he comes to
Numenor & corrupts the king,
Ar-Pharazon, an admidttly fallen & proud man already.
But, within a few years, Sauron has the
Numenoreans worshipping Melkor, 'Lord of Darkness' & 'Giver of Gifts', sacrivicing '
The Faithful' in a pagan temple of fire that is a conterfeit of the true temple, just as there are many pagan temples that sacrivice humans (such as the Mayans) in conterfeit to the true Temple of The Jews in Jerusalem where bulls, lambs & doves were sacriviced to Jehovah for 1400 years until The TRUE Lamb of God came.....
Sauron finally even persuades Ar-Pharazon in his pride to attack the
Valar to attempt to wresstle the rule of Arda from them, and even (though deceived), 'eternal life'......
Instead of all these frantic and apocalyptical reasons, how about we simply chalk it up to something less sensational, such as that the professor simply didn't see much potential in the story. Seems much more reasonable to me.
Absolutely not......
Tolkien himself says so in his reasons for not going on with the story:
'Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of
Gondor in times of peace and justice and prosperity would become discontented and restless -'
On the subject of there being no
Orcs after The
War of the Ring, nonsense.
We need to remember that MANY Orcs fled in the battle before the gates of
Mordor. Only some slew themselves.
Many were left in
Moria & Orcs had secretly spread through the
Misty Mountains since the
Battle of Five Armies.
A more reasonable answer to why there may have been few Orcs 100 years after
Aragorn's Reign (therefore 200 or so years after The War of the Ring) is that Aragorn &
Eomer are said to have gone to battle far into
Harad &
Rhun to clear out the Evil Men still around & it is reasonable to assume that they also erradicated the remaining Orcs.
Also, the time was at hand for the dominion of Men & the decline of all other speaking
Peoples.
But what is "sin," and what is "original sin?"
'Sin' & 'original sin' are one & the same......
Sin is not as you might think & seem to be implying being evil or doing bad things by a standard that MAN sets up.
Sin is litterally 'missing the bullseye' in the original Greek it was written, i.e., a lack of being perfect in God's eyes.
And who can say they are perfect in God's eyes?
'Good people' are so sadly deceived, 'for all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God'.
People may look at Heaven as a place to be gained by 'good' outweighing 'evil' or 'bad', but God looks at it as His Holyness can not stand in the pressence of ONE sin. And let's face it, we've ALL misssed the bullseye of being perfect once (or a thousand times).
And, it doesn't matter what WE believe, it matters what GOD says.
Eru needs love? What kind of omnipotent perfect god is needy?
Boy, Barley, you do have your issues with God, don't you?
As 'Eru' repressents the (real) Living God, and Tolkien makes his interaction the same as Jehovah (I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, that's just one of His many names - 'The Great I Am' if you prefer), let me explain how/why God would 'need', or 'want', if you prefer, love......
He makes us with free will.
If we didn't have free will, we'd be robots.
Love is to be GIVEN, not demanded, or it wouldn't be love. Yet God showed us love in that while we were yet sinners, in rebellion to Him, he became a man like us, subject to all our trials & tribulations, so He could understand our weak & fallen state, relate to what it meant to be human & show us what it meant to be truely loving & selfless, even to the point of dying on the cross as a sacrivice for us.
That's love.
When the truth that Jesus was real & did this for us hits home, we can't help but love God for what He did as a man.
We understand He is our Loving Father and He sends His Holy Spirit into us to commune with us, relate to us and change us to be like His Son, and to clean out the 'junk' in our lives that keep us from being like His Son.
If we hold onto our 'junk', this keeps us from the fullness of God's relationship with us & He states in the bible that He is a jealous God & we were 'bought with a price' (his Son's death). We belong to Him & He means BUISNESS.
If you accept His Son as Saviour, you will NEVER be happy unless you give up EVERYTHING to follow him with your whole heart.
He went to the cross & we have to pick up ours to - yet it frees us to love & be loved & see that this love is more than life itself because it is eternal life......
'Taste and see that the Lord is good'
You may say that this doesn't belong on a discussion on The Tolkien Forum, but I say it does because
A. Some of you brought God into it and
B. JRR Tolkien's creation of Middle-Earth/Arda was based totally on Christianity, from Eru to Melkor to Sauron, and many characters were based on Christian ideals such as
Gandalf (Obviously returns from the dead clothed in white),
Sam (The suffering servant) and Aragorn (The Return of the King - How? Through 'The Paths of The Dead').
