I believe that Tolkien was working out a quasi-Christian morality in pagan terms, using a former culture and literary tradition to furnish the scenario to a quest which incorporated the major issues of Life. His landscape is one of utter contrasts, images of good and evil…. The denizens of Tolkien's world fall into two camps, broadly good and bad; and, with a simplicity due to this moral viewpoint, as well as due to the simple characterization in epic, so we find Gandalf ranged against Sauron, Fangorn against Saruman, Sam against Gollum, and Bard against Smaug…. It is thus a dualistic scheme we see, with the ultimate victory to good (the "eucatastrophe"), and in this sense Christian.

Perhaps the most effective of the images representing this Good (or, in Christian terms, Love) is Sam's rehabilitation of the Shire…. [Sam] uses his "magic" creatively, for the good of others, as an attempt to transform the "primary world" into a "secondary world" with the "inner consistency of reality". (pp. 87-8)

Yet the victory good has over bad is almost Pyrrhic: so clearly do the heroes anticipate and acknowledge defeat that we are in the world of Beowulf and the Norse sagas. And this is the culture which Tolkien so lavishly resurrects…. Tolkien's world is an arena, no paradisal garden or utopian golden age but a world shot through with archetypal threats and phobias…. (p. 88)

This "dream world" is not escapist…. Withdrawal into a secondary world, and the communication of that in the primary world, are coinherent in the scheme of life, and religio-fantasy creates a bridge between the two worlds: for they have parallel and cross-fertilizing eschatologies. (p. 89)

The Lord of the Rings is a story, a saga, stories within stories, a "what then?" story. It is a quest or odyssey undertaken by an Everyman figure, the Hobbit, who likes regular meals and the peace of his Shire. We believe in Hobbits, with their Hobbit-holes and genealogies, and we travel across mountains and plains, feeling the weight of the Ring. Man in a landscape of moral ambivalences and on a quest with metaphysical and mystical overtones. Parts of the route are purgatorial, as when Aragorn leads them through the Paths of the Dead like Aeneas with his golden bough; as when Frodo crawls up Mount Doom to wrestle for his life and soul against the power of the Ring. The fate of the participants moves from physical to metaphysical planes continually in the archetypally patterned symbolism, which subconsciously alludes at all times to Christian iconography…. But subsuming the overtly Biblical is the story which can in poetry mirror man's dilemmas and look Life in the eye. Whether we are refreshed depends on our faith, that bridge of the two worlds. (pp. 93-4)

However many uses Tolkien's text is put to, it has vindicated the fantasy tradition from the criticism that the genre is a mere "contamination of reality by dream". To have read it is to have come nearer, if not to Veritas, at least to verities, and one has joined an elite—not self-appointed but arising naturally—an elite of those with a clear view. (p. 94)