Is Tolkien anti- religious?

[badlands]

https://medium.com/belover/no-tolkiens-t...d3b34b7677

[Michael]

Well, that's yet another uninformed essay on the topic. He quotes Tolkien's point about there being no overt religion, but there is certainly religion in The Lord of the Rings. Sam even calls upon God when he says, "Lor bless you" to Gandalf.

Don't pay any attention to such nonsense. There will be much more like it in the months ahead.

[bilbobaggins764]

Well, that's yet another uninformed essay on the topic. He quotes Tolkien's point about there being no overt religion, but there is certainly religion in The Lord of the Rings. Sam even calls upon God when he says, "Lor bless you" to Gandalf.

Don't pay any attention to such nonsense. There will be much more like it in the months ahead.

Yup, trying to set the stage for Amazons viewers to accept their vision of the man and his creation.

[Alvin Eriol]

It seems clear the writer was looking to project his own poor opinions about "religion" wherever he could.

JRRT refrained from making a concept of God (iirc" the one Person who is ever present and never named" in Tolkien's opus according to one contemporary reviewer) explicit and part of the plot and dialog. He may have envisioned a world in which there was no good true 'religion' in the sense of a Church, observances, scriptures, explicit references (Sam's exclamation aside), or other such utterances save a few hallows (one long gone under the Sea by the time of LotR) and a custom or two like the Standing Silence, and Elven invocations to angelic beings, but that doesn't mean God wasn't there. As the book developed, a tale came into being that served to reveal how an omnipotent omniscient creator God could engineer the downfall of a powerful created entity when the time had come to do so, simply by having 'strange chances', and the efficacy of the perserverance and blind faith of the humble, come through in the nick of time.

In any case, the ethics of the book are clearly JudeoChristian ethics. While I think JRRT's opinions of his own motives developed over time after LotR was published, he wrote (but probably never sent or published, Letter # 183) a response to a 1956 review by W.H. Auden,

"In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about 'freedom' (...) It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour"

. Make of that what you will.