- Self - Biographer: [Tolkien] was a very deep, profound Roman Catholic, and this comes out in his books. Now, The Lord of the Rings is not a religious book in that it's not about God and the angels and so on. But in fact it's a very religious book in tone, and he knew this while writing it. It's a book which tries to convey the feeling of religion to a world which is not actually a believing world, a non-religious world. This, I think, is largely why it's been so popular in America, in what is on a whole a kind of godless modern world. It particularly appeals, because it's bringing religion back into fiction.