[Formendacil]

My initial inclination was to ignore this topic and given its inflammability, perhaps that would have been the better choice, but I've been ruminating on it and have been driven from my tree-like state into movement.

As with some prior posters, my reaction to the bare question "can atheists appreciate/understand The Lord of the Rings?" was "well, obviously they can." A lack of belief doesn't not mean the inability to understand a belief or to appreciate the artistry of something created under a belief. If it did, there were would have been a sharp decline in the appreciation of Bach and Michelangelo (to name but two) in the past century--or, to name some non-Christian religious art that has seen *increased* interest from those not sharing the faith of the original artists, in ancient Egyptian art in the past two centuries.

My second thought was that asking the question seems to fly a bit in the face of Tolkien-as-anti-allegorist. Although Christian apologists have flocked to The Lord of the Rings as their standard, Tolkien was much more ambivalent about the specificity of his faith in the work than, say, C.S. Lewis--let alone most of these apologists. The whole point of applicability-vs-allegory seems, to me, to be that the work can be appreciated as a story-in-itself by anyone.

That said, speaking out of my own intensely subjective experience as a Catholic sharing Tolkien's faith, this question isn't completely pointless, even if (first language barrier being in play?) it has to be sifted a little to get there. As I said, there is no bar to the capacity of an atheist or non-Catholic generally to comprehend or appreciate what Tolkien is doing, nor is The Lord of the Rings itself designed to be exclusive to non-Catholic/non-religious readers--yet, perhaps, I would be willing to admit that there's a certain intuitiveness that comes to sharing the perspective of the original author.

Of course, born a century later in the New World and lacking Tolkien's strong classical education--to say nothing of linguistic virtuosity--I do not dare say anything that remotely suggests I can read his mind, but certain analogies or impressions come to me automatically that I think do not come to others. When Tolkien says that The Lord of the Rings was an unconsciously Catholic work in the writing and conscious in the revision, I feel like I have a sense of what he is saying, and when he compares the eucatastrophes of his work to The Eucatastrophe of the Resurrection, it's not as though "ah, that's what he's going for" clicks on in my head, because it's already natural to my sense of storytelling (derived from my metaphysics of reality) that is how stories work.

I would add, too, that this is not the sort of intuitivity that is limited to shared religious belief. As I noted before, I do not share all of Tolkien's formative elements. I am not a philogist at all (though, thanks to Tolkien, I have frequently wished I were), but it is apparent to me that when a philogist reads Tolkien they *get* that side of him--this is, at its heart I think, why Shippey is such a good and instructive commentator on Tolkien: because there is one major element of Tolkien that comes to him with such naturalness.

This is not to say that any intuitivity is *needed*--all the connections that a linguist or a Catholic or an Englishman would make intuitively can be made with study by a non-linguist, a non-Catholic, a foreigner. Can be made and have been made. And if this extra effort (however minor or major it may be in individual cases) is required, Tolkien's storytelling is such that he invites the effort and encourages the exploration. The mark of a good professor, I suppose, as well as a good storyteller.