JRRT and C.S. Lewis

[Halfir]

On a somewhat sour note I'm afraid I can't share some of the enthusiasm for Lewis. Lewis wore his Christian faith so openly on his sleeve that it subjugated his fictional works. Tolkien on the other hand - while clearly a devout Catholic - was also a philologist par excellence and a storyteller in the great bardic tradition, in which the story subsumes the mesage and not the other way round.

Indeed Tolkien makes that very point himself in Letter# 142: "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."