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Seemingly weak, insignificant Hobbits help to bear the burden of the evil One Ring until it can be destroyed. This echoes the gospel theme of the foolish confounding the wise and the weak conquering the strong.

The pity of Frodo for Gollum clears the way for the final moment when the Ring is cast into the furnace of Mount Doom. This affirms the gospel's good news of God's mercy providing salvation to an undeserving humanity.

And so on. Writing against the backdrop of two chaotic, evil World Wars, Tolkien created each of his characters, as he once said to W. H. Auden, to embody "in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life."

True, such parallels as those just listed may often have been, as Tolkien himself avowed, unconscious. But given Tolkien's beliefs about the nature of Myth, they were inevitable. In a famous lecture titled "On Fairy Stories", Tolkien argued that in mythical tales a reader may gain a "fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world." Such glimpses, said Tolkien, are reflections of the one True Myth: the coming, dying, and rising of Christ.

Whether each reader is willing to accept the echoes of that Greatest Myth in the "new myth" that came from Tolkien's pen has much to do—I am convinced—with whether they are able to perceive and receive God's grace in the stuff of culture. Do they see God present not only in the ordained elements of bread and wine at the altar but also in the "everyday sacraments" of books, conversations, music, art?

Of course the latter are sacraments only in a "small-s" sense. They have, in themselves, no saving significance. Yet they may serve as self-revelations of God, working deep transformations in those with "eyes to see" and "ears to hear." And Tolkien felt that mythical stories could work to enliven readers with the sacramental nature of all of life:  "It was in fairy-stories that I first divined … the wonder of all things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine."

Bradley Birzer, a professor at Hillsdale College, Michigan, and a Roman Catholic with a deep fondness for Tolkien's work, has written a fascinating inquiry into how Tolkien's sacramental faith infused his writings. J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth argues that Tolkien believed the best of the pagan world—for example, the noble Nordic virtues of "courage and raw will"—should be welcomed and sanctified by Christians.

In this, Birzer argues, Tolkien was working in the tradition of Augustine of Hippo, who once wrote, "[If philosophers] have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it." Tolkien believed the author of the old English story of Beowulf had done just this sort of thing, melding ancient Scandinavian myths with Christian insights.

Some 50 years ago H. Richard Niebuhr pointed out, in his landmark book Christ and Culture, that this sort of affirming approach has always characterized Roman Catholic and Anglican responses to culture, much more than it has the responses of Protestant groups.

Those who responded negatively to our poll question about the "Christianity" of Tolkien's stories seem often to be acting in the spirit of the Protestant "loyal opposition." Their concerns reflect those of the Reformers, who were disturbed with how, in the high medieval church, the gospel had become encrusted with material and intellectual "traditions." Many of these traditions had started as attempts to mediate the gospel to the people, but their end result, it seemed to the Reformers, was to dilute the message of the Bible.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47