Among the chief accomplishments in our growing appreciation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the consensus view that it is indubitably a Christian epic.
When he called it "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," Tolkien was not being merely pious; he was also stating the basic intention of his grand Legendarium, as he called it. In the version collected by Christopher Tolkien, it runs to twelve volumes, and more items keep trickling forth. It is the huge collection of tales and languages, characters and events, genealogies and maps that Tolkien spent his entire adult life inventing, linking, re-arranging, but never of course completing.
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