In a famous lecture delivered in 1939 at the University of St. Andrews, On Fairy-Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien stated one of his profound convictions: “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-story.” Tolkien’s idea anticipates Northrop Frye’s theory from The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, which states that all universal literary “archetypes” are contained within the Holy Scriptures. This thesis prompts us to reflect on the possible influence of the Bible in general, and the Gospels in particular, on Tolkien’s literary creations.
