SOURCE: Madsen, Catherine. “Light from an Invisible Lamp: Natural Religion in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 14, no. 3 (spring 1988): 43-7.

In the following essay, Madsen argues against interpretations of The Lord of the Rings that locate the trilogy as a specifically Christian allegory and contends instead that it is informed by a nonspecific religiosity.

It was in 1971 that a reader wrote to Tolkien, calling himself “an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling” and saying how profoundly he had been moved by The Lord of the Rings. “You,” he said, “create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.” (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 413)

Some eight years earlier, though I was too young to put it so clearly, I had a similar response upon first reading...