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. He told a Jesuit friend that The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work — unconsciously at first, consciously in the revision — which is why it contains almost nothing that looks like religion: the faith is in the shape of the story, in pity and providence and the fall, not in its furniture.