I read the Lord of the Rings in approximately middle school (the late 1980s), and I am rereading it with my son now. It’s wonderful. Now, I think it is amazing that there are people called “Tolkien scholars”, and I am a fan of scholarship in general. But really, let’s not ruin Tolkien by overthinking it like this:

The Lord of the Rings seems immersed in racism (the superiority of the fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs), colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast of characters that is overwhelmingly male). There is also a generalized suspicion of democracy, cities, modernization, progress, cultural relativism, and materialism in favor of monarchism, agrarianism, stasis, fantasies of good versus evil, and a traditionalism that at times borders on religious fundamentalism (Tolkien himself was a pre–Vatican II Catholic). The Lord of the Rings is a series obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, the divine right of aristocrats, and a sense of history as a tragic, endless fall from grace.

I don’t take it this way, actually. The world of the Lord of the Rings is a simpler world where there is a clear dichotomy between pure good and pure evil. I think this is what Tolkien wanted to explore – essentially the “why do bad things happen to good people” problem. The answer to this question was clear in Middle Earth – because there are evil supernatural beings out there who are the source of all bad things, there is a constant push and pull between good and evil, and sometimes evil gets the upper hand. (There is a supreme being or god in the Tolkien universe, who seems to have intentionally created good and evil, and there is some mystery as to why. Tolkien was religious and probably wanted to wrestle with this question in his own way.) Orcs and trolls are just evil minions created by these evil supernatural beings. It is their nature to be evil and they are not deserving of our sympathy. I think he was well aware that this sharp dividing line does not exist in our real world. In fact, among all the “races” he invented, it is the humans alone who seem ambiguous in terms of being capable of both good and evil. So this sounds like our real world. And at the end of the Lord of the Rings, and especially if you read the Silmarillion, Tolkien transitions from the fantasy world back to our real world.

Maybe I’ll get into the “fair” elves and comical Scottish dwarves at some point, because although I like the movies I don’t think the way these “races” are portrayed are true to the books, or at best they are just one possible interpretation.