Recent scholarship on Tolkien has been especially attentive not only to the importance of religion in his personal life, but also to the wider theological implications which may be drawn from his works. In this study, Alana M. Vincent argues that the cultural influence of The Lord of the Rings provides an excellent model for understanding the mutually transformative relationship between religion and culture, and in so doing also provides an important and unexplored pathway for inter-religious exchange.

This is a book about living with the past. About about the process of constructing cultural memory, about the negotiation, implicit or explicit, between what is remembered, transmuted into narrative, handed on from generation to generation, and what is forgotten, unspoken, overlooked. Alana Vincent's underlying assumption is that the understanding of the past generated by such a process plays an essential role in shaping attitudes and actions of individuals and societies in the present. As well as memory, this book is about identity, imagination and the role they paly in liturgy. In 'Making...