I think it is this pattern in the Lord of the Rings that confounds me. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and he loved the Latin Mass. The only way I can make sense of it is that the patterns of policy set down by the Númenorian kings plays that liturgical role for the free peoples. The wildermen would be a good counter example. Hence the idea that I propose, that the story of the Shire is one of losing touch with Númenor (or the Kingdom of Heaven). My reason for thinking in this direction is my wondering whether one has to represent divine order through good monarchy in such stories, or if there is another, equally suitable, yet alternatively nuanced symbolism for it. Jesus himself uses the parable of the king and his kingdom quite a lot.

@rootsofday Tolkien is not writing allegory. The Numenorians inherited this pattern from the Eldar, who in turn received it from the Valar. No one fell harder than the Numenorians in the temple Sauron built to Morgoth.

Thanks, tracing it further back like that is good perspective. He does call his work history at a different stage of imagination, though. That it is no one-to-one allegory of events in a specific time is clear, but it's always good to point it out. I am just wondering how he related to his Middle-Earth. His avoidance of strong explicit religious constructs in general is something he does claim in at least one interview to avoid, and it is one thing I appreciate about Middle-earth. This intentional choice is something I've been wondering about. In the same vein, however, it would contradict Tolkien's own convictions to oppose the divine order of the church's liturgy. This liturgy, a lived expression of God's creative Word in community, would at least resonate with Westernesse, if it is not a simple correlation. That is important, if Tolkien the man is at all important.

Nearly all of the mythology was written, including the drafting of the Lord of the Rings without an explicit aim to embed Roman Catholic liturgies etc, he does explicitly state that he agreed it was a religious work, unconscious at first, but conscious in the revision. He did not rewrite the entire mythology constructed from 1917 onward, but seems to have revised explicit contradictions out of the work that would not align with a catholic worldview. The morality and much more in the book is a mixture of ore-christian Northern Europe and obviously Christianity as he would obviously understand it to be. Nowhere does he say the work is ‘code’ for his Catholicism. The work stands in itself as myth, his mythopoeic sub-creation.