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So you must not be aware that Tolkien's models for TLOTR and The Hobbit were pagan epics? Where do you think the plot about the ring itself came from? The Volsung, of course.

The Kelevala, a Finnish mythos, is where the whole middle earth scenario comes from, and helps explain why the ME languages resemble Finnish. Tolkien was a linguist, after all.

In fact, the name Gandalf comes from the Icelandic Voluspa, and the Elder and Younger Edda contain the forest of Myrkwood, as well as the Dwarven kingdoms. Still Pagan mythology. The name, however, is also a Norwegian King's name in The Heimskringla.

Tolkien was also enamored of Beowulf, by his own admission (he was considered a leading authority on Old English). And Welsh was another specialty of his, The Mabinogion being an influence on his Red Book of Westmarch (Sustitute the Red book of Hergest...).

I won't deny your analysis of "power divorced from authority", but from a purely Christian standpoint, the fatalism of Nordic and Celtic Mythology is more akin to Islam ("It is Allah's will that we suffer") than to Christianity ("God gives one a choice, it is up to us to take responsibility").

So you must not be aware that Tolkien's models for TLOTR and The Hobbit were pagan epics? Where do you think the plot about the ring itself came from? The Volsung, of course.

I am very much aware that Tolkien was a big fan of Teutonic and Medieval type epics, there is no doubt of that. But borrowing from a model doen't mean there were not even greater influences on Tolkien.

Tolkien wrote in a 1953 letter to Fr. Robert Murray "The Lord of the Rings’ is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."

His authorized biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, agreed that God was essential to everything that happened in the Lord of the Rings.

"The author’s Catholicism and arch-conservatism were instrumental in shaping his opus. (During the World War II Blitz, Tolkien kept a rosary next to his bed)... His Oxford friends included fellow don C.S. Lewis, author of "The Chronicles of Narnia." When they met, Lewis was a skeptic. Tolkien has the distinction of bringing back to the Christian fold the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. " ---------- Here's an except from another article:

snip... It was Tolkien's view of myth -- that it is always grounded in the reality of the transcendent God, (even if subtly) -- that ultimately shattered the barriers to Christianity for Lewis.

"Tolkien did not mean by 'myth' that it is defined as 'non-historical,'" Parker said, "but that it exhibits certain characteristics, certain ideas, recurring themes such as the dying and rising God, the sense of the moral universe behind things.