Tolkien did what Christians have been doing since the beginning, namely, subsuming the non-Christian culture and baptizing it, jettisoning what was irredeemable and purging what could be salvaged.

Tolkien was not happy with the existing English mythology, such as the Arthurian legends: too fantastic and to explicitly Christian to meet the demands of his demands for mythology, namely, a secondary world worthy of the suspension of disbelief.

I believe we need to avoid thinking that because the literary forms Tolkien chose more often conformed to the Norse tradition than to the Christian one, that the values and metaphors contained there are more pagan than Christian. This is not the case.

That being said Tolkien considered the Norse tradition to be very poorly understood and maligned by those who completely misrepresented it, such as Adolf Hitler, whom he called a “ruddy little ignoramus.”

Which I find interesting in some pagan societies which were devoid of Christian Thinking.