LotR - Foreword

[The Saucepan Man]

But if the 'message that it conveys to his readers' includes the religious, specifically Catholic, dimension should we ignore that?

Davem, I was talking about the Foreword. I of course agree that the matters to which you refer (including one's personal response to the text) are entirely valid and relevant in any discussion of the book itself and the individual chapters that we will be working through. My point was that, in any analysis of the Foreword as a foreword, the emphasis should be on how Tolkien chose to use this opportunity to speak to his readers before they set about reading the story, ie what message he chose to convey to them in the Foreword, and on how we, as readers, respond to that message.