Tolkien talked in a radio interview yonks ago about the moral underpinnings of LOTR, and he stated quite clearly, I thought, that it was good versus evil and that although he personally was Christian, he wasn't trying to write religious allegory.

Unlike C.S. Lewis, of course, who was. Hell, I was 10 or 11 when I first read TLTWATW and even I worked out for myself what was going on. You'd have to be pretty thick not to spot the parallels if you'd been the good little Sunday school attender that I was at that time. But, like FF, I liked the books and didn't hold that against them.

Trying to read too much into an author's motivations is a bit like the Noddy books thing. Homosexual propaganda? Gimme a break! Enid Blyton wrote the damned things, not Rita Sackville-West!


The idiot also known as Capfka ...