Tolkien's books are just as full of witchcraft as Harry Potter is.

They aren't, so there's your answer. There are no LotR heroes using witchcraft. The abilities of Gandalf, Aragon, elves, etc. are racial and special traits (as in, owing to their species).

They do not practice magic, alchemy, etc.  They're more analogous to comic-book superheroes.

Richard Abanes, author of "Harry Potter and the Bible", warns: “Ultimately, only a short distance needs to be covered in order to cross over from Harry’s world into the realm of real occultism.”

http://harrypotterpower.com/


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An Example of Symbolic Analysis

How the ‘Deathday Party’ in Book 2 is, in fact,  a parody of the Holy Eucharist

On Halloween night, Nearly-headless Nick, the friendly ghost, invites Harry at his Deathday Party in a dungeon.  The whole place is dressed in black as in preparation for a black mass (black drapes, jet-black tapers, a thousand black candles, etc.).  It is indeed a parody of the Holy Mass, especially the table:

On the other side of the dungeon was a long table also covered in black velvet.  The smell was quite disgusting.  Large rotten fish were laid on handsome silver platters, cakes, burned charcoal black, were heaped on salvers; there was a great maggoty haggis, a slab of cheese covered in furry green mould and, in pride of place, an enormous grey cake in the shape of a tombstone, with tar-like icing forming the words Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington died 31st October, 1492.  Harry watched, amazed, as a portly ghost approached the table, crouched low and walked through it, his mouth held wide so that it passed through one of the stinking salmon.

-         ‘Can you taste it if you walk through it?’ Harry asked him.

-         ‘Almost,’ said the ghost sadly.

This table is an altar with a black velvet tablecloth, as in a Requiem Mass.  Here the fish, a symbol of Christ (IKTUS), is not only dead but rotten, exactly like God’s enemies wish Him to be (actually, there is a Greek group of Heavy Metal Rock that calls itself ‘Rotten Christ’!). The fish represented with bread traditionally refers to the Eucharist.  The “bread” here is the “cakes burned charcoal black”, like black Hosts used in a black mass.  The night of Halloween is believed to be the night where the veil is the thinnest between the worlds of the living and the dead, but this table shows the Living Christ as a dead and rotten fish with burned hosts (meaning that the Eucharist is dead food for brain dead people), while it exalts ghosts, who are believed to be dead but who are allegedly very much alive. The fish (i.e. the One it symbolizes) is lying flat, hopelessly horizontal whereas the wizard’s tombstone is erect, gloriously vertical “in pride of place”, like a promise of immortality.  

On the esoteric side, fish almost always means salmon in the Celtic tradition. Eating salmon is believed to give clairvoyance and omniscience. Moreover, the symbolism of salmon is the same as that of the wild boar, which is likened to the Druid because he lives alone in the forest and who is “the animal of sacred science”, i.e. divine knowledge, Gnosis.  The sadness of the ghost who tries to eat the salmon is not only that of the ghost who cannot eat anything anymore, but also the deep regret of the soul who is also deprived of the Gnostic sacred science.

http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2011-0725-harry-potter-girard.htm

Tolkien gets a "pass" because he was a Catholic and a scholar and his stories reflected to varying degrees his learning and his Catholic faith.

Why is this even a question?

The LotR characters derive their powers from the creator being (forgot his name). They're natural gifts from God essentially.

Where is this "God figure" mentioned? In what book?

I saw all the Peter Jackson movies and there is not the slightest hint at any sort of "God figure" anywhere.

I don't think the presence of magic in a story is necessarily problematic,

This goes without saying and is not what I'm saying.

The point is that some of the "good guys" use magic and magic, spells, witchcraft etc. is all around portrayed as a good and normal thing. Gandalf himself is a WIZARD for crying out loud.

I remember the scene in the Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf is about to fight the Balrog and Gandalf says "I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the flame of Anor."

but a person's faith is almost always professed in their art, and Tolkien and Rowling clearly express in their respective stories spiritual views  diametrically opposed to eachother.

And what spiritual views are expressed in Tolkien's books?

Quote from: Catholic Samurai

The LotR characters derive their powers from the creator being (forgot his name). They're natural gifts from God essentially.

Where is this "God figure" mentioned? In what book?

I saw all the Peter Jackson movies and there is not the slightest hint at any sort of "God figure" anywhere.

Quote from: Catholic Samurai

I don't think the presence of magic in a story is necessarily problematic,

This goes without saying and is not what I'm saying.

The point is that some of the "good guys" use magic and magic, spells, witchcraft etc. is all around portrayed as a good and normal thing. Gandalf himself is a WIZARD for crying out loud.

I remember the scene in the Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf is about to fight the Balrog and Gandalf says "I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the flame of Anor."

Quote from: Catholic Samurai

but a person's faith is almost always professed in their art, and Tolkien and Rowling clearly express in their respective stories spiritual views  diametrically opposed to eachother.

And what spiritual views are expressed in Tolkien's books?

The God figure is mentioned in the Silmarillion. Iluvatar I believe. The films are hardly true to the books save in certain parts. Most of it is completely different from the book.




As for the protagonists using magic, look at it as a priest using his Church bound authority rather than a witch using magic.



The spirituality in Tolkiens book is quite obvious once you get the underlying story of the series. Basically Sauron and the forces of darkness are worshipers of the Lucifer of the series (and the other books regarding his history say as much). There are many parallels to Catholicism as well and Tolkien says as much in one of his letters (I forget to whom) and many pieces of the LOTR series seems to be interpretations of the bible.  For example they call Sauron the "faithless and accursed". This is because he worships Morgoth (Satan) instead of Iluvatar (God).



And if no one mentioned it yet, in Rowlings books (which I unfortunately read) they draw obvious parallels to actual witch craft. The whole thing about muttering the proper words and using a wand. An unknown source for the powers they all use. The spells are all in a language unknown to any. Its basically a way to get little girls and boys to idolize occultism.

I saw all the Peter Jackson movies and there is not the slightest hint at any sort of "God figure" anywhere.

Have you seen many film adaptations of books?

Quote from: TKGS

Read The Hobbit and then read The Lord of the Rings trilogy and, if you are still unable to understand what is being said here then you can simply put yourself in the "blooming idiot" category of human being.  As it is now, your comment above merely puts you in the "idiot" category.

Not so fast. It's the majority of people who read them and popularized them who twisted it into the neo-pagan nightmare it is today. Tolkien probably assumed that people wouldn't be so quick to shed their Christian sensibilities, or historical awareness for that matter.  

I wasn't talking to "the majority of people".  I was talking to a person who claims to be a traditional Catholic.  If he is a traditional Catholic, then this shouldn't be a problem.  AND, he most definitely should read the books.

I have never read a book and seen the movie based on the book that was 100% faithful to the written work.  I freely admit that in some of those cases, I enjoyed the movie more than the book, but I certainly understood that it didn't matter which genre was subjectively better, they are certainly different works.  It is simply ignorant to criticize the author of a book because you saw the movie.  

What kills me is that if he had lived to see how much his work was used for pagan escapist fantasy like D&D and virtually every other piece of juvenile entertainment out there today, he would be horrified. I know he never intended for this to happen, I just wish he had done something along the lines of C.S. Lewis and made his stories inseparable from Catholic culture. Hindsight is 20/20 but ugh, look at all the bastard children coming from LOTR!

I agree.  If J.R.R. Tolkien could have foreseen the "Paganization" of the culture, I don't think he would have given any of his works to a publisher.  By all accounts, he wrote the Lord of the Rings and the mythology surrounding the tale for his own personal enjoyment and others encouraged him to publish his works.

By all accounts, he wrote the Lord of the Rings and the mythology surrounding the tale for his own personal enjoyment

Yeah and i think this is how things should stay: this is all fantasy and people should not try and strain out and emphasize "Catholic" and "Christian" parallels/similarities/etc. in these books because it's a work of fantasy and fiction and not intended as something religious.

This is what bothers me about this whole thing, those who say "Oh you should read these books because they have Catholic meanings and parallels!" The ones in the Novus Ordo are really good at that. They've put Tolkien on a pedestal.

They blow the whole thing out of proportion and make these books quasi-theological works and "must-reads."

They do the same thing with the whole Narnia series.

At the end of the day, what benefit is there in reading these books? What? What contribution do they have towards Catholicism, devotion, piety, spirituality? What advantage do they have over traditional official Catholic works? Writings of Saints and Catechisms?