See the middle paragraph here, with three cites. Some discussion, plus a reference to Tolkien acknowledging “religious significance,” but unfortunately I do not have access to the original book.
When I read it I thought more about the Cold War with the enlightened values of the west being pitted against the despotism of the eastern powers.
I may be misremembering but I think Tolkien himself indicated he was thinking in terms of the recent World Wars and conflicts which he had lived through and which continued until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Just want to remind you guys that, just because you don’t see a Christian allegory doesn’t mean you can’t see a Christian subtext. Some of you seem to be arguing against the former but not the latter. A rather blatant example is A Wrinkle in Time, which is a rather Christian book that never becomes a direct allegory. (It does in later books, though.)
No. I’m well aware of Tolkien’s feelings on allegory. What I’m saying is the subtext that I am hearing about (the transformative nature of suffering, the primacy of redemption as key to salvation, stuff like that) aren’t uniquely Christian. I could come up with a fantasy story based on a Hindu or Buddhist background and have those themes be as natural a part of the subtext - look at Journey to the West - Monkey easily fits the same themes.
But Wrinkle never really hides the Christian subtext to any extent. There are Bible quotes, angels, spiritual darkness held at bay by religious figures - hell, they visit a planet named after an archangel populated by what I identified at the time as straight-up cherubim. I wouldn’t even call any of that subtext.
A story can have a Christian subtext without having a Jesus character. Consider C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and The Great Divorce.
I always took it as a combination of Germanic, Saga style story telling, combined with a protest against industrial expansion and pollution.
Though I’ve been told that the latter is wrong.
Not as far as I know - it was definitely in there.
I didn’t recongnise Christian subtext when I read it.
I’ve read Tolkien shunned the interpretations of it as contemporary political allegory. It is too dependent on German medieval culture to be criticism of Germany and he was quoted saying something to the effect. While the tales have Celtic and other elements, most heroes are German heroes a la Niebelungelied more than anything.
The earliest fragments of Tolkien world were written in WW1. This was not a war where heroes slay orchs left and right. It was a war where the soldiers sat in damp pits under mortar fire. Whenever there was a heroic charge it turned quickly into a pointless massacre. I would say its roots are in escapism more than anything else. The passages of Saruman corrupting environment are indeed criticism of industrialization.
I thought Tolkien was using a kind of christian ‘manifest destiny’ thing with the time of the elves/hobbits/dwarves going & the time of man coming. Other than that, I don’t remember thinking of it in christian terms.
Kinda OT but I was really surprised when I read all the christian offense about Pullman’s ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy. When I read it I thought it was a pro christian allegory. The familiars being stand ins for souls & the church in the books really being communism/atheism.
Maybe just me.
It’s a different thread, but I think you’re completely misreading His Dark Materials. It’s very anticlerical, being in many ways an attempt at a direct rebuttal to The Chronicles of Narnia. In particular, the overlong (in MHO) sequence in the Land of the Dead is a clear response to the scene in the stable near the end of The Last Battle.
It’s too bad, really. Pullman began what could have been oen fo the all-time great fantasy series, but he got too caught up in kicking C.S. Lewis’s corpse. He was making his point a lot better in the first book, but then he got all overt.
There’s that, and there are the repeated hints that there’s A Plan working away in the background somewhere. You have lines like this, where Gandalf says to Frodo:
I think The Tolkien Professor does a good job of pointing instances like this out in his discussion of Tolkien. I know I didn’t see that stuff when I first read LotR. But in the many times I’ve read it since, I’ve come to see a lot more in it than I saw when I was 15. 
And I also like “Till We Have Faces”. But then, I also really liked “Perelandra” too, back when I was a church-goer. I’m afraid to read it again now, in case I want to throw it against the wall.