/lit/ - Literature

>>21448781

Why do people maintain you have to be Christian to appreciate Tolkien? I honestly can’t find any Biblical allusions or references to Christianity in LotR. I get he himself was a very convinced trad Cath but it is not a theme I can find in his work like in C.S. Lewis. The Christian claims on this board bothers me in general in that Christianity as the /lit/ religion is overhyped—I’d guess more Christians here have read the entire Harry Potter series than the entire Bible. No doubt there *are* literary aspects of the Bible and parts which are great literature but ultimately the measure of a book’s greatness in a humanist sense is reflected in the memorization of its passages (we can see how the Quran clearly towers in this regard), and really the only part of the Bible that gets this is the Psalms and not even in the original language. Furthermore Christians engaged in a lot of vandalism of great or important books to write their bibles on and I don’t consider this very /lit/. Christianity I feel is a more image-oriented religion than a textual one. Even Dante, the Christian textual triumph, I feel is overrated (and incidentally so did Tolkien), he worked in a very vowel rich language which abundant rhyme, it made verse quite easy. He is mostly remembered for his imagery but so much of it is devoted to describing a bunch of random individuals he has grudges against while portraying himself in his poem lamenting their fate. Dante himself being so Christian remains more remembered as images, illustrations of his work, than the recollection of actual passages, especially any passages beyond the woods