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Literature

How Tolkien Represented Christ

The threefold office in the Lord of the Rings

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ThinkingWest
Aug 12, 2025
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My attempt at recolorizing the professor's iconic photo. : r/lotr

J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy-defining book The Lord of the Rings is not an explicitly Christian work. In fact, Tolkien disliked on-the-nose allegory, when fiction conforms to a historical or religious arc and permits a message to lead the story.

Nonetheless, in a 1953 letter responding to a Father Robert Murray, Tolkien admitted the following of his magnum o…

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