[QUOTE]Originally posted by lotrfreak
[B]These Letters are from Tolkien himself:

From Letter #320:
...I think it is true that I owe much of (the character of Galadriel) to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination



The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like `religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.





I.
Despite the eucharistic hint, Tolkien's work is not self-evidently Christian.


There is little that is Christian about The Hobbit, Tolkien's first fantasy work, published in 1937.

They all learn, in a proleptically Christian way, what every mortal must confront: the solemn reality that we no sooner find our lives than we have to give them up.




Perhaps we can now understand what Tolkien meant when called The Lord of the Rings "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." Its essential conflict, he insisted, concerns God's "sole right to divine honour" (Letters, 172, 243). [QUOTE]


got it,
i believe that you may want to say that he was influenced by christianity and those teachings.
tolkein admits that the Galadriel/Mary connection
was influenced by the christian/catholic religion...one reference....but from that are we to glean that the LOTR was ALL a biblical revision??

the simarillion does read like Genesis for the most part.....

i'll look for the full text of his letters and
see what they say, in context. no, not that i do not believe you, it's just that a few snippets of a letter and an exhaustive interpretation of the body of his work can never accurately 'decode'
what he meant, or what the message of his books is. i can make the same correlation about stephen king's THE STAND...check it out

everyone plagerizes everyone else....

not doubting you....just looking for a bit more of what HE meant when he wrote the books...and just how much he borrowed from the bible!
thanks.