Sean Astin, Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd star in a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic adventure The Lord of the Rings. Photo: OSV News/ courtesy New Line Cinema. Because J.R.R. Tolkien was a serious Catholic, one might assume religion would be obvious in his literary masterpiece. Yet there is no religion in The Lord of the Rings in the usual sense. There is magic and even glimpses of the demonic, but the world Tolkien creates is wholly contained within itself: large, old, mythological,…
