Eonwë

A few years back when I was re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, I studied a book which pointed out the numerous examples of Christian symbolism that proliferate throughout the novel if you but look with open eyes.  I blogged about it, here. 

Last night I was listening / reading the Akallabêth, one of the two twenty-page codas to The Silmarillion, and I found another instance all on my own.  The Akallabêth is basically Tolkien’s take on the Atlantis myth, the island of which he calls Númenórë, and it fits right in to the history of Middle-earth.  Four paragraphs in I came upon a sentence which features Eonwë, a Maiar (angel) known as the herald of Manwë.  Though not God Himself (in Tolkien’s world), Manwë is a sort of demi-god, like the Greek Olympians, the most powerful of this subset of beings.  Eonwë is the greatest of the Maiar, a St. Michael the Archangel.

“Eonwë came among them and taught them [the Númenóreans]; and they were given wisdom and power and life more enduring than any others of mortal race have possessed.”

Whoa!

My first discovery of a Christ-like reference in Tolkien! 

Consider me well-pleased, and on the hunt for more …