The recent film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings has confirmed the strong interest aroused in the contemporary world by J.R.R. Tolkien's literary use of myth. It has scarcely been remarked that the central issue to the work of this author is faith — this is what I would propose to examine and demonstrate in this contribution. In a letter to Father R. Murray, S.J., Tolkien once said that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” but he went on to say that “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism”. For The Lord of the Rings is not a religious allegory. It rather means to achieve what its author has called a “eucatastrophe”: “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argue is the highest function of fairy stories to produce).” He had said, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” that this peculiar characteristic of Fantasy literature is also a “recovery (which included return and renewal of health)”, a “regaining of a clear view.” Looking back in several ways to S.T. Coleridge, he explained that this is an extension of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” of which the great Christian romantic said that it “constitutes poetic faith”. In the story, this is reflected thematically, as this leap of faith leads to a protracted ordeal, ending paradoxically in successful failure. For the hero of the quest, Frodo, finally “apostatizes,” as Tolkien puts it, but at the same time he is saved in extremis by his “mystical belief in the ultimate value-in-itself of pity” and forgiveness.