Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
While I might agree about Ender's Game, I think it is pretty clear that J.R.R. Tolkien deliberately layered Christian/Catholic themes into The Lord of the Rings. He was being more subtle than his friend C.S. Lewis was, but not so subtle that a bunch of them can't be found without looking very hard. ...
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How do you distinguish deliberate versus being a result of a person's own set of values, or values they believe are appropriate for the story? With Tolkien I was mainly thinking of accusations about how the war effected his work, but the main deliberate layering of anything I see in his writing is the deep background in language and the evolution of it (and society). I don't need a dozen "Catholic themes" examples, but one or two that tell me this was a deliberate act rather than just personal values feeding a story could be interesting.