SOURCE: Abromaitis, C. N. Sue. “The Distant Mirror of Middle-Earth: The Sacramental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Touchstone 15, no. 1 (January-February 2002): 33-9.

In the following essay, Abromaitis discusses Tolkien's spiritual optimism in his writings.

Most notable about J. R. R. Tolkien's books is the imagination that created their world. Tolkien himself reflects upon the use of the creative imagination, believing that man, made in God's image and likeness, shares in the work of God's creation. At the same time Tolkien is quite aware of his being in a fallen world, one in which he is working against the zeitgeist.

This spirit of the age permeates the artistic depiction of man as the inevitably alienated stranger. The presumption of the age is, in a certain sense, a mixture of two apparently opposed concepts of the real: materialism, reducing all of reality to that which is sense perceptible, and gnosticism...