If you could tell me how to reconstruct Christian teachings from Tolkien’s epic, you’d be doing more than anyone I’ve ever read on the subject. Obviously, I don’t deny (any more than Tolkien did) that his writing is effused with Christian culture, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Original sin, salvation, God’s sacrifice of his son, etc, are all absent from his writing, from which one could as easily derive classical Pagan meaning as Christian meaning.