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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salthanas" data-source="post: 1213800" data-attributes="member: 9689">Another point on this topic, if people really want to look for Tolkien's message as such they should rather read the Silmarillion and his various essays on Middle Earth.  Thats where the philosophy behind his creation lies and its outlined alot more clearly. In fact looking at most of Tolkien's remarks and also his various writings on Middle Earth merely serves to illustrate just how off base Melville is. Lord of the Rings as a standalone book is simply not the place to go to get a really clear idea regarding what Middle Earth is about IMO. Political strutures in Middle Earth are not their because Tolkien might have had a preference for them, they are their because those were the structures that he figured would exist in a medivial setting, and as he was a professor of Anglo -Saxon studies who am I to argue with him  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> He expressed two favoured forms of goverment in his letters, either total anarachy or a monarch with total power who hardly ever exercised it ( a model you can see in both Aragorn and Manwe). It was all the forms inbetween that he was suspicious about. As for Tolkien trying to glorify war this is patently absurd seeing as how the central character is essentially a pacifist who by the end of the book has a problem with even wearing a sword. The fact is that some medivial societies did glorify war, the vikings considered death in battle as the only way to go. And what a surprise Tolkien incorperated some of this in his work.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> As for Tolkiens quote about the book being a fundamentally religious work, well I take that in the same vein as I took his quote about it being deviod of allegory, particually as that quote came after the book had been written. I don't see how people can argue that you can't take Tolkien's remark about allegory seriously and that you have to consider only the text and then raise a quote he came out with afterwards as some standard of proof. You can't have it both ways, you either ignore all comments he made about the book and just concentrate on the text( which won't get you very far because you have to look at the whole body of work on ME not just the LOTR) or just accept that as his perspective changed so to did his ideas about the book, which is why some of his remarks are contradictory.  He changed his mind about a number of things regarding the book so that would be nothing new. If he definetly knew it was a religious message I probably think he'd have been aware of this at the time. It also flies in the face of what he has said on more than one occassion that the book is fundamentally about death, a topic he says that any book having the virtue of being written by a man will ultimately be about.</blockquote>

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