Even more explicitly, Tolkien told the American scholar Clyde S. Kilby that the Secret Fire could be likened to the Holy Spirit,8 thereby making Gandalf a veritable and self-proclaimed servant of the Christian God. If this is so, the fire would of course be “secret” because the fullness of Christian Revelation had not yet been shown forth in time—though existing and therefore known in the eternal sphere to which Gandalf belongs—as an angelic being (another fact concealed in The Lord of the Rings but revealed elsewhere in Tolkien’s writings).
