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I've just finished reading the Lord Of The Rings for the second time. My first reading of it was about three years ago. Amazingly, (and I think this says something of the quality of the story itself) I would say I enjoyed it even more this second time around. It is so sweeping and wide that it still thrills, never losing any of its unpredictablity even if one is already familiar with the ending. Tolkien's Middle Earth is so immense, such an entire "sub-creation" (as the author himself referred to it)... complete with its own creatures, history, languages, and breathtaking landscapes... I believe it is without parallel in fantasy literature of any era. This book is myth, rather than allegory. By that I mean that there is not really meant to be any strict one-to-one correspondence to specifically theological, political, or psychological aspects of our own "real" world. No-one in Middle-Earth is named Mr. Worldly-Wiseman or Mr. Evangelist or Mr. Charity. No, here we meet people and things like Tom Bombadil, Gollum or Treebeard... hobbits, elves, dwarves, ents, orcs and yes, even Men. And yet, as with great allegorical works all of these characters gravitate to one of two poles or extremes that can be seen as "good" or "evil". The Lord of The Rings is truly about a grandiose struggle between the FORCES of good and evil. In Chapter 2 of Book 2 we read that "Good and ill have not changed... nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men." An interesting thing about the book is how Tolkien's brand of "dualism" very subtly points to the reality that ultimate Good or Evil is something yet greater (or beyond) any of the characters that try to perpetrate either of them. This is most clear in a statement by Gandalf in Book 3 during "The Last Debate" where he says "Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule." If Sauron (who throughout the book appears as the evil to be reckoned with) is "but a servant or emissary"... then we must consider the question... an emissary of what? Or whom? And similarly, if all of the "good" that the Fellowship of The Ring strives to achieve will yet not "master all of the tides of the world"... then where is this locus of ULTIMATE good? Gandalf makes it clear that their own "goodness" is limited to the years wherein they are set. At the end of The Lord of The Rings, the future yet belongs to the good AND the evil that lie beyond the powers of any of the characters that have played a part in the present conflict. Maybe we are supposed to wonder... who IS the Lord of the rings? Almost 50 years ago C.S. Lewis, a friend of Tolkien's, said of The Lord of The Rings: "Such a book has of course its predestined readers, even now more numerous and more critical than is always realised. To them a reviewer need say little, except that here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart." And I too, could go on forever about it, but my best suggestion is for you to quit reading this, and just read the book. Or re-read it! The best review would be terribly inadequate. Tolkien's Middle-Earth is as impossible to imagine before you go there as it is to forget about once you've been.