[Lalwendë]

First up, I have two questions. One - what do you mean by 'bloody'? If there is symbolism, why is it 'bloody'? Tolkien doesn't say it's 'bloody', so why are we looking for this? Secondly - are we all sure how the word 'fundamentally' is used by Tolkien? Remember he may be using it in the older, looser, English sense, rather than in the modern sense which conjours up images of people whipping one another into a warlike religious frenzy.

Anyway...I think this quote should always be borne in mind:

Originally Posted by Tolkien's Letters
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.

We should also remember that it was followed by the following words:

However that is very clumsily put and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little;

So we know a couple of facts. He was writing to a Catholic priest and so we must remember his 'audience', and that he would be writing to that audience - he would hardly be expected to say "No! Lord of the Rings is a fully heathen work!" if writing to a priest, even if it was a "fully heathen work". So we must bear in mind that he would emphasise a point here that may not have been an overarching influence at all. This is also private correspondence. If he had wanted his readers to take his work in that way then he would have made a public statement after the fact; however he did not, and as such we must be careful. Hammond and Scull make the point in their new Companion & Guide that all Tolkien's Letters must be used with extreme caution by fans and scholars alike.

So that's that. Now for how much he 'consciously' planned - taking the second half of his statement into consideration, he admits that it is to a certain degree, bluster. He says he actually consciously edited very little, so I think right away we can cast aside any notions that Tolkien sat there with a red pen and a Catechism excising, adding and rewriting to 'Catholicise' his work. If there are Catholic references there, then they are small fry in the grand scheme of the story, and most of them he did not put there on purpose. It seems that if anything, this little bit of 'conscious revision' amounted to removal of references to Earthly religions, possibly an attempt to ensure this could not be mistakenly seen in any way as an allegory, as Tolkien's deep dislike of allegory is well-known.

Now to 'unconsciously Catholic'. I'm interested in lmp's ideas that this is to be found in the 'anti-machine' elements of the theme and in the idea that the earth itself is 'sacred', but these are not exlcusively Catholic ideals in any way shape or form (and I suspect that the Catholic Church is not, in fact, like that in general, as in its history it has sponsored scientists and it has made money like most churches have through business and industry), so I think it may be something else (though I want to explore those ideas too). And this is what I think it is: morality.

Without writing much more about it right now, so as to leave things for discussion, specifically Catholic morality can be found embedded in the story. The idea of 'marriage for life', and associated morality around sex, reproduction and love. The way that life is presented as sacred; I can think of no instances outside acts of war where the death sentence is used. There are Monarchs in Middle-earth, but they are there by 'divine right', harking back to the Medieval Kings, the days before Henry VIII separated the English throne from the authority of the Church in Rome. And at the point of Death, characters 'make their peace' and 'confess'. These are all pretty instinctive beliefs for a Catholic (except perhaps the third) and could indeed be called 'unconscious'. These kinds of things are what Tolkien absorbed into his story, not through choice, but simply because these are ways that he saw as the correct ways to live, in much the same way as if I wrote a story, I too might present capital punishment as ignoble; it would be instinctive.

So that's what I'm putting forwards. As Tolkien himself said, there was indeed little consciously planned, so it might prove fruitless to try and find that stuff, and it will be very little anyway in the grand scheme of one of the longest novels ever written. But there might indeed be some specifically Catholic influence, put there because he couldn't help it, because it was simply part of his outlook on everyday life, and it might best be found in the 'rules' of everyday life in Arda.