The Valar and Illuvator's Children

[Morthoron]

As a lapsed-Catholic (or, as probably most ex-Catholics -- one who came to his senses once I actually gained some sense to come to), I honestly have never felt Tolkien's work had the catholicity some folk (and even Tolkien himself) implied. Certainly, the overarching modes of morality and ethics in Tolkien's cosmology have their roots in Catholicism (good works, mercy, redemption, ultimate Truths, etc.), but the manner in which the Numenoreans 'hallowed' Eru, and to a lesser extent the Valar, did not strike me as being necessarily Catholic. I say 'hallow' rather than 'worship', because what rites the Numenoreans had were simple (and held only three times per year), and there was not the sense (to me, anyway) of Sunday-cathedral-epistolary-incense censer divine worship, but more of, shall we say, respect and reverence for authority, and thanksgiving and remembrance rather than adoration and abject devotion -- more of a Celtic pagan rite than a dogmatic and ritualistically Catholic observance.

And that is what I think sets Tolkien's applicability apart from the intrusive allegory of C.S. Lewis. One doesn't feel they are being proselytized to. One is clearly given a creation theory in keeping with the Christian bible (right down to Milton's Lucifer mirrored in Melkor, save perhaps not so stuffily Puritan), but the manner in which it is written has such a wonderful patina of Old World mythology that the cosmogony of Tolkien lives and breathes with its own soul. We have Eden and arch-angels, the devil and the great flood, but it is told in such a manner that agnostics enamored of Odin rifle through the pages as readily as anyone wearing a scapular or counting the stations of the cross on the rosary.

Religion is relatively latent in Middle-earth; in fact, the use of the word 'worship' is more readily assigned to the seething masses who prostrated themselves before the images of the false Lord of the Earth in the Cult of Morgoth, and sacrifices and other religious facades are left to Sauron and his funerary pyre that scorched the golden dome of Morgoth's Temple.