Can atheists appreciate/understand Lord of the Ring?

[IxnaY AintsaY]

Originally Posted by demnation

I'm also agnostic, but I have to say that I find LOTR to be almost devoid of any faith or divine inspiration, at least in any obvious way.

By divine inspiration, I mean things like Gandalf and Elrond deciding that Merry and Pippin tagging along with the Fellowship was a good idea; or Gandalf again, suspecting Bilbo's ring to be The One and that Sauron would be a-hankering after it, concluding it would be safe enough with an unwitting Hobbit for a couple of decades.

Miracles.....maybe, but only a few. Unless you were talking about subtext, in which case I would say it's debatable!

Hmmm, I'm not sure how sub into the text you have to get. Let's put it this way: counting the history in "The Hobbit", the storyline of LoTR can be seen as bookended by two events. The first is Bilbo blindly putting his hand on the One Ring while lost under the mountains. The second is Gollum biting it from Frodo's hand at what would otherwise have been the moment of his ultimate ruin and the ultimate triumph of Sauron. But as Inziladun said, the tale is rife with miracles.

You know though, "providence" would have been a finer fit to my meaning than "miracles", since I wasn't talking about flashy talking-topiary type stuff.