With the reconstruction of the young Tolkien’s prehistory of Middle-earth, we discern a far broader purpose: to recast as tragedy the heroic myths of pre-Christian peoples, in which the tragic flaw is the pagan’s tribal identity. Tolkien saw his generation decimated, and his circle of friends exterminated, by the nationalist compulsions of World War I; he saw the cult of Siegfried replace the cult of Christ during World War II. His life’s work was to attack the pagan flaw at the foundation of the West.
It is too simple to consider Tolkien’s protagonist Turin as a conflation of Siegfried and Beowulf, but the defining moments in Turin’s bitter life refer clearly to the older myths, with a crucial difference: the same qualities that make Siegfried and Beowulf exemplars to the pagans instead make Turin a victim of dark forces, and a menace to all who love him. Tolkien was the anti-Wagner, and Turin is the anti-Siegfried, the anti-Beowulf. Tolkien reconstructed a mythology for the English not (as Wainwright and other suggest) because he thought it might make them proud of themselves, but rather because he believed that the actual pagan mythology was not good enough to be a predecessor to Christianity.
Or Tolkien’s son edited the work to make the protagonist a conflicted anti-hero, an archetype more commercially palatable to contemporary audiences.
For someone who surreptitiously sought to undermine Anglo-Saxon paganism, Tolkien sure did a great job of fooling us all by lovingly and devotedly merging it with Christian themes and imagery in Lord of the Rings.
I find Goldman’s writing extremely interesting and valuable over the long haul, but one really has to take him with a grain of salt.
With the passage of time, more and more of his oeuvre is devoted to exalting his particular choice of tribal affiliation and mythology while denigrating everyone else’s.
[Please allow me to stress that this is far from my usual vein of comment on this or any other site. But the thought is inescapable when reading Goldman on this sort of topic, or most others, and he usually makes it pretty explicit. It's a bit tiresome when one doesn't start from the position of assuming his mythology is true where the others are false.]