Interesting; I thought I had seen on one of the numerous Tolkien shows about the time that LoTR came out that he claimed NOT to have done so. Maybe that was just editorial content on the part of whatever person was presenting the show.
[Interviewer]Gerrolt - There's an autumnal quality throughout the whole of The Lord of the Rings, in one case a character says the story continues but I seem to have dropped out of it . . . however, everything is declining, fading, at least towards the end of the Third Age. Every choice tends to the upsetting of some tradition. Now this seems to me to be somewhat like Tennyson's "the old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfills himself in many ways". Where is God in The Lord of the Rings?
Tolkien - He's mentioned once or twice.
Gerrolt - Is he the One?
Tolkien -The One. . . yes.
Gerrolt - Are you a theist?
Tolkien - Oh, I'm a Roman Catholic. Devout Roman Catholic.
In another (1967) interview: "Hobbits," Tolkien says, "have what you might call universal morals. I should say they are examples of natural philosophy and natural religion."
It sounds, in this particular article, that it was Tolkien's "close friend" CS Lewis who sought the allegorical in Tolkien's LoTRs:
His close friend, the late C. S. Lewis ("a very busy official and teacher" to whom Tolkien test-read a great deal), wrote once that the darker side of "The Lord of the Rings" was very much like the First World War. He gave examples: the sinister quiet of a battlefront when everything is prepared; the quick and vivid friendships of the hobbit journeys and the unexpected delight when they find a cache of tobacco. No, Tolkien says; there is no parallel between the hundreds of thousands of goblins in their beaked helmets and the gray masses of Germans in their spiked ones. Goblins die in their thousands. This, he agrees, makes them seem like an enemy in a war of trenches. "But as I say somewhere, even the goblins weren't evil to begin with. They were corrupted. I've never had those sort of feelings about the Germans. I'm very anti that kind of thing."
Students produce lots of allegories. They suggest that the Dark Lord's ring represents the Bomb, and the goblins, the Russians. Or, more cheekily, that Treebeard, the tall treelike being, "his eyes filled with age and long, slow, steady thinking," is Tolkien himself. In a rather portly note to his publishers, he replied: "It is not about anything but itself. (Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political.") But he will agree that the Shire, the agreeable hobbit country, is like the West Midlands he remembers: "It provides a fairly goo[d] living with moderately good husbandry and is tucked away from all the centers of disturbance; it comes to be regarded as divinely protected, though people there didn't realize it at the time. That's rather how England used to be, isn't it?"
Links found on this page allow you to hear Tolkien himself read from all three LoTR books!
I must add, SuziQ, that I didn't lie intentionally, but I have found that JRR Tolkien (-1973) *was* alive after I was born, it was CS Lewis (-1963) who died before I came into this world. Sorry about unintentionally misleading you about my true age! ( ;