3 ms·
Just read the creation myth in the first chapters in Silmarillion. It's basically Paradise Lost with more diacritics. What other mythologies have angels anyway?
by goto11 6y ago
Just read the creation myth in the first chapters in Silmarillion. It's basically Paradise Lost with more diacritics. What other mythologies have angels anyway? The Tolkien mythology is monotheistic and morally dualistic (good vs evil), which is fundamentally different from the pagan cultures he is otherwise inspired by.
I actually think this is key to his success: He takes a lot of cool stuff from pagan mythologies and legends, but he frames it in a simplified "good versus evil" dualism which is easier to understand for modern readers with this background.
- eredengrin 6y agoYes, the creation of the Tolkien universe most certainly has the most direct inspiration from Christian myth, but to say the entire thing is based on it is a much stronger statement. Once the earth is formed to the point of the arrival of the elves, most of those stories afterward have very little comparison to anything in Christianity. Beren and Luthien, the creation of the rings, the wars over the Silmarils...perhaps I was just misunderstanding what you meant by the "whole mythology is directly based on christian mythology". As I mention in another comment, there is certainly a lot of Christian inspiration in the framework of the world, and you do see that in how it is all set up in the first few chapters. The stories themselves (built within that framework) seem no more related to Christianity than any of the other places they draw inspiration from.
- goto11 6y agoYes I was thinking of the creation/fall, not the whole of the Silmarillion, sorry for not making that clear.