)From WFTR) "I don't see the Lord of the Rings books as being distinctly Christian. While there is a spiritual element to them, it never appeared to be me to be Christian."
From:
http://www.family.org/teenguys/breakmag/features/a0018699.html
Intentions
Just how serious were these writers {Tolkien and C.S. Lewis] about the Christian purpose of their "verbal inventions"? Let's ask them.
Lewis made no secret of his intentions. "Supposing," he once asked himself, reflecting on the nature of God, the sufferings of Christ, and other fundamental Christian truths, "that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency. . . ." This, he said, is exactly what he was trying to do in The Chronicles of Narnia.
As for Tolkien, he would have been shocked and angered to hear ... [anyone] refer to his work as pagan.
"The Lord of the Rings," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "is of course a fundamentally religious and Christian work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."
Humphrey Carpenter, author of Tolkien's authorized biography, takes this claim seriously. Tolkien's writings, he says, are "the work of a profoundly religious man." According to Carpenter, God is essential to everything that happens in The Lord of the Rings. Without Him, Middle-earth couldn't exist.
But be forewarned: Evidences of God's presence are not as obvious in Tolkien's work as in Lewis' more allegorical style of writing. They are there, however — firmly embedded in the tales he insisted on calling "inventions about Truth." < snip >
Gretchen, that link was really wonderful, thank you.