Catholic faith

Mabel Tolkien was received into the Catholic Church in 1900, her family cut her off, and when she died of diabetes four years later her sons passed into the guardianship of Father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory. Tolkien held to that faith for life and regarded his mother as a martyr for it. To a Jesuit friend he described The Lord of the Rings as a religious, indeed Catholic, book at its core — not by design at the outset, but knowingly by the time he revised it — and that, he said, is why it wears almost no religion on its surface: the faith is in the shape of the story, in pity and providence and the fall, not in its furniture.