Justin Ohms
2 min readOct 8, 2022

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Wow a lot of supposition about what an author that you didn’t know and never met intended. While his approach as an ancient historical recounting is well known it’s impossible to know fully what was in his mind outside of what he wrote on the page. And just because an author writes something it doesn’t mean their beliefs coincide 1:1 with what is there. Many people will interpret his work, just as you have, with their own bias. This happens to all authors. It’s nothing special and neither was Tolkien. He was a great story teller and a so-so philosopher. He never had the courage to actually put his philosophical ideas on to paper without hiding them in dense layers of allegory so we will never really know what he truly believed. Tolkien gets to much credit for all these philosophical takes on his work considering they have been hoisted by many different people to support their ideas. Your take is nothing new in this regard. Just another interpretation of a dead writers work bent to whatever prevailing whim you see fit. People have been doing this for thousands of years with works by every author imaginable. From Shakespeare, and Nostradamus to the Bible. Interpretation and reinterpretation is nothing new or clever. Jackson’s movies are a perfect example of this. So what if his movies were meant to make money and entertain? That’s the point of movies and that is the point of stories. There is nothing to say that Jackson’s take on LOTR or yours is more “right” since that is meaningless. You will read whatever you are predisposed to read into anything you read and Tolkien understood this. At the end of the day Jackson did a fantastic job bringing Tolkiens story to life for audiences that would never have taken the time to read such an intimidating book. While it’s not perfect it doesn’t have to be. It’s not Tolkien’s movie. It’s Jackson’s movie telling Tolkien’s story.

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