Worship (in the time of the LOTR)

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Basically what radagastly had said.

Originally Posted by radagastly

I don't have Letters, but I think Tolkien deliberately avoided any overt displays of religious ritual, though I can't recall the reason. Being a devout Catholic, he probably did not want to risk any perception of satirizing the Sacrament of Mass by adapting it into a subcreated fiction, though I don't know that for sure.

I believe Tolkien simply felt a bit "shy". Had he decided to put the faith element into the world more strongly, he would basically have had two options: either make a world with religions totally different from our own, totally fantasy and totally unlike - in his belief - that of ours. That he probably had not dared to do. Or - the second option - make the explicit religion there purely Christian. Which he also dared not to do, unlike his friend C. S. Lewis. So he did the, in my opinion very admirable thing, to leave the matter "hidden". Almost no talk about religiosity whatsoever, with a few exceptions here and there. The closest he got to the explicit description of Middle-Earth rituals in the Third Age is the part radagastly mentioned, the "looking westwards" of Faramir and his company. In Second Age, there is the really strong and even more explicit description of the ritual of the Kings of Númenor praying and giving thanks to Eru himself (! the only instance I'm aware of something like that happening in the Legendarium) on top of Meneltarma three times per year.

The only thing I recall about Valar-worship, or straightforward Valar-worship, is the Dwarven reverence of Aulë (or Mahal, as they call him) as their maker. There are of course things like praise to Elbereth otherwise, however once again, it seems to me that Tolkien is very careful about making this a god-worship. At most, it might resemble, say, Catholic prayers to saints. (There are all those talks about the parallels of praise to Elbereth and Catholic prayers to Virgin Mary.)