Tolkien on exegesis. You can see here how he approached Christianity as myth become fact. I find this particularly interesting in light of the incompleteness of modern biblical criticism and the subsequent turn to theological/literary exegesis in biblical studies. It's also a strong argument against the reductions of classical materialism.
"We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled...By the 'soup' I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by the 'bones' its source or material--even when, (by rare luck), those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not forbid, of course, the criticism of 'soup' as 'soup'."
"The picture [of a tapestry] is greater than , and not explained by, the sum of the component threads. Therein lies the inherent weakness of the analytic (or 'scientific') method: it finds out much about things that occur in stories, but little or nothing about their effect in any given story."
"I had no special childish 'wish to believe'. I wanted to know. Belief depended upon the way in which stories were presented to me, by older people, or by the authors, or on the inherent tone and quality of he tale. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in 'real life'. Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded."
"The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale---or otherworldly---setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophy, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
J.R.R. Tolkien, excerpts from his essay "On Fairy-Stories" in "Essays Presented to Charles Williams"
