Originally Posted by
Elebraen
LOL, he said that in a response letter to a priest, telling the priest exactly what the priest wanted to hear, as though homosexuals and other hiders aren't well practiced in doing that. He also said in his other letters that LOTR has nothing to do with the Christian religion and everything to do with his "please publish me" as yet unpublished Silmarillion, Middle-earth predating Christianity by a huge amount of time like many other major world religions that still exist today. And to hear his synopsis of LOTRO to his own editors and curious fans, he always starts out by describing all of the relevant events of the Silmarillion that led up to the culmination of LOTR, and he never once mentions any particular reference to anything in the Christian religion as being the reason why he wrote the story in the directions that he did. Just like everyone else, you're seeing the mirror of your own life experience reflected by the universal truths upon which all enduring religions are based. If you had any life experience with a different religion, you would naturally be seeing this story a different way.
What struck me as more curious with Tolkien's letters was that he saw the Silmarillion and LOTR as a work about Death versus Immortality, and wondered often why mortality, a short human lifespan, would be thought of as a "gift to men", as though he was questioning his own religious beliefs. He didn't seem to think there was a heaven for them, no Valinor for humans, or at least not one that he wrote into his Silmarillion that would give them some sort of rewarding life after death to look forward to. That's a very un-Christian thing to do. Contrast that with perpetual Elven reincarnation where they may die, but they get reborn to repeat exactly who they were in life as long as the world they live in still exists that the Elves have no fear of death. That's a very Hindu type of belief. And if the Elves do go to Valinor, that's like the attainment of perfection that is perpetually preserved that reincarnation is no longer necessary for them. Elves are more concerned with "fading", with becoming irrelevant and unimportant when the children, the humans, grow up and grow past them to take over the world.
But in my opinion, although the elves represent Time, the humans represent breadth. And if I was the Maker, I would want to have that mortality so that I could determine whether or not whatever the humans picked up or developed was a good fit for the breadth of the Music. Then I would decide if I wanted to have it permanently preserved in Time that there could be room for hobbits and dwarves in Valinor, a second lifetime for some select humans, so to speak, but not as a human so that the gift of mortality for humans would be preserved.