The height of any reference to a personal deity in LOTR-the comment that Frodo was “meant” to find the ring-is the kind of pan-spiritual remark that might be at home in many of today’s movies. For all the minute world-building, that the dwarves and other peoples didn’t have their own gods or religious rituals made it hard for me to visualize, after one looked beneath the dazzling overall beauty of their worlds, how life for them functioned.

There is an afterlife, silver shores, but no deity to meet there. What do you think of The Lord of the Rings’ approach (not The Silmarillion but the trilogy) to God and religion? I was always, I won’t say troubled but perplexed at the absence of God and religion there. In response my long-form article The Secular Apocalypse: Irreligion, Pop Culture and the End of the World, a reader asks: Why is there no religion in The Lord of the Rings? If The Lord of the Rings is “fundamentally religious and Catholic,” why are there no religious institutions or rituals? SDG Original source: National Catholic Register

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