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Here is another list of changes. We have had this one up for a couple years now. Some of it has not been updated in a while, but, it is rather complete.

While The Lord of the Rings certainly isn't a retelling of the gospels, it's not only explicitly Christian, it's explicitly Catholic. I did a paper on this long ago, but you can find a brief summation of it at Tolkien Online.

While your warning is generally valid (about separating stories from authorial intent), serious themes generally aren't added just to make a story "more interesting to viewers," they're explicitly developed in the story's background. This isn't to say that the author is consciously explicating his religion or philosophy, but that an author who holds very strong beliefs about the way life "should be" can't help but let those ideas influence any work of sufficient scope that they're involved in. This is definitely the case of literary-minded writers from Tolkien to Ayn Rand, on through modern-day authors like John Crowley and Barbara Kingsolver.

And, hey, it sounds pretentious to talk about this in terms of something so Uber-Pop-Culture as The Matrix--but hell, a lot of people have commented on how very Mormon Battlestar Galactica is. That ain't a coincidence, either, and chances it wasn't done because Glen Larson consciously thought "Hey, I bet Joseph Smith in space is a surefire way to get a primetime series!"

Here is a link to the description of the ballet before it was pulled from the website.

If anyone stayed until the end to see the credits, near the end of the credits there where some words I didn't recognize. It was a normal font, but it looked almost elvish? Anyone else notice this? Anyone knows what it means, elvish or not?

To answer my own question:
Toward the end of the credits, there are some lines in Maori, thanking the people of New Zealand, where the movie was filmed.:
He mihi nui hoki ki nga tangata whenua o Aotearoa. Ma rangi raua ko papa tatou e manaaki, e tiaki hei nga tau e tu mai nei. (source)

Perhaps someone has an accurate translation.

Did you actually read the whole interview?

"Tolkien disliked allegory because he saw it as a rather crude literary form. In an allegory, the writer begins with the point he wishes to make and then makes up a story to make his point. The story is really little more than a means of illustrating the moral.

Tolkien believed that a myth should not be allegorical but that it should be "applicable." In other words, the truth that emerges in the story can be applied to the truth that emerges in life.

There is, therefore, a good deal of truth in "The Lord of the Rings" even though its author never set out intentionally to introduce it allegorically. This is, perhaps, a subtle distinction but one which Tolkien believed was important."

I think maybe you are making it a little more applicable to the bible than the author intended.

• A larger picture of the cover [Amazon].
  
  
• A Table of Contents [Barnes & Noble]
  
  
• Some Samples [Tolkien Online]