akshually, he was writing the Silmarillion from 1914 on, and the Christianity in the Silmarillion is WAY more blatant than the Hobbit or LOTR. he just wouldn't stop screwing with it so it was left to his son to finish and publish in the 1970s.

i suppose you've already referenced a Lomachenko breakdown?

Dude. Tolkien didn't just understand the dynamics of power and corruption – he literally wrote the books as moral warnings about the dangers of power. The Hobbit was basically a formalisation of the stories that he told his grandkids before bedtime and wove together Norse mythology with light Christian morality tales, but The Lord of the Rings was where he really got going with building a Christian-influenced mythos.

The whole saga, from beginning to end, is all about the relentless march of evil, the corrupting influence of power, and the brief flashes of hope and goodness that emerge from ordinary people doing their very best to be decent and humane in the face of overwhelming evil.

On top of that, the rise and return of Aragorn as King of Gondor is in itself a mythical retelling of the second coming of Christ. The movies actually alter Aragorn's story. He is not a reluctant king running from his destiny in the books – he is in fact grimly aware of his fate and accepts it with stoic calm and nobility.

The books are not easy going – the last third of The Return of the King in particular just loses the plot completely, and you really understand why Tolkien was a linguist and not a writer very quickly. Yet, for all of their flaws, no one – NO ONE – has ever come to the level of his work. The only one who comes anywhere close, nowadays, is our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH), Vox Day, with his Arts of Dark and Light series, but that's a LONG way from being finished.

I remember playing Shadow of war on PS4 about a month ago and after beating the game I tried to look for the lore behind the rings in LOTR and I was stunned to find out that the movies came out 50 years after the book and then almost 100 years for Hobbit. Tolkien was ahead of his time. I have not read his books, but it looks like this man understood the dynamics of power and corruption. It's a shame he did not live to see his work turned into movies.