[Lalwendë]

There are a couple of good points that have already been made here. Firstly, as SpM said, had Frodo 'succeeded' and thrown the Ring into the fire then the whole story would have ended in an anti-climax. Instead, Tolkien chooses to end the core tale on a knife edge, and succeeds in adding incredible tension at that point, through the three (four?) way conflict which was going on. By choosing to have the core tale end up in this way he also deals with the end of Gollum in a masterly way; could Gollum really have gone on without the Ring?

Something else that Tolkien does by having Frodo claim the Ring is to show us that in his world, there are no perfect heroes. Tolkien did not write Mary-Sues; his characters are human. Note that his characters are usually at some point shown to have failings, even Aragorn displays arrogance at Edoras, Gandalf is sarcastic, Sam has a bad temper, Galadriel has a lust for power.... Had Tolkien not given his characters failings they would have been insufferable. So having Frodo 'fail' in fact elevates him.

Again, SpM brings up the point that Hobbits are none of the following things: Christians, Eruists, Atheists, Agnostics. They are just Hobbits.

Remember that even if Hobbits do use words like Lawks, it means little in the context of the wider Middle-earth. In the opening chapters of LotR there are plenty of what we might think are anachronisms. I think rather than trying to express religious concepts, Tolkien in fact included words such as Lawks to represent dialect. I think that Tolkien said somewhere that he had his ordinary Hobbits use the dialect of English rural farmers in the general area of the old West Midlands counties of Worcestershire and Shropshire. Indeed, talk to any British person with a dialect for long enough and they will use words like Lawks without ever having any conception of what those words might mean. And just to round that one off, there's no evidence that Lawks comes from Lord in the sense of God anyway; it can just as easily come from lord in the sense of the Squire, the local Lord, who serfs would have had to swear allegiance to.

Anyway, anachronisms. The world of The Shire can be seen to form a kind of 'bridge' or 'step' from the recognisable into the wholly unrecognisable. I read about Bag End and think of comfortable suburban bungalows, I know what a Mayor is, and I instantly recognise the social status of Frodo and Sam and all that this implies on a silent level. I know what cases of silver spoons are, and I use umbrellas. But I have (or had!) no idea what Elves where, why they live so long, nor had I ever encountered a demon of shadow and flame or anything quite so freaky as a Palantir. Words like Lawks are used as the peoples in this Shire, this bridging point, are like us, they use language which reflects ours, unlike the other peoples who speak in high and formal ways, and who never use the word Lawks; in fact it could be as much a comment on (or signifier towards) the social status of Hobbits in comparison to 'noble' Elves and Numenorean descendents as much as anything else.

Anyway, Tolkien says (in a letter to his publisher):

The only criticism that annoyed me`was one that it 'contained no religion'...It is a monotheistic world of 'natural theology'. The odd fact that there`are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted. It will be sufficiently explained if... The Silmarillion and other legends of the First and Second Age are published. I am in any case myself a Christian; but the 'Third Age' was not a Christian world.

He also said:

I do not think Hobbits practised any form of worship or prayer (unless through exceptional contact with Elves).

So Tolkien is saying there is 'religion' but not Christianity; this 'religion' clearly includes Eru as the one God of Ea, but there is no Church. No hierarchy. The Elves and a few descendants of Numenor's faithful still retain vestiges of 'worship', the Elves appealing to Elbereth, the Numenoreans remembering their noble past now sunk beneath the waves, but otherwise, it's all this 'natural theology', with peoples working out for themselves (i.e. without a priest) what's the right and wrong way to behave in this world they have been born into.