It’s already started. Every day I see another article from someone claiming that The Two Towers is ‘really’ about racism. If I learned one thing while I was studying to be an English professor (I finished a master’s degree in English before jumping ship), it’s that that point of interpreting literature isn’t to get at the ‘real’ meaning of it. There’s no such thing as the ‘real’ meaning of any significantly complicated work. Can you look at The Two Towers and do a facile mapping of men, elves, dwarfs, hobbits, and orcs to real-world counterparts? Sure you can. Is that evidence of your literary-critical acumen? I certainly hope not. Racists in the real world assume that people from certain ethnicities are sub-human. That’s a grave mistake, and one founded on fear and hatred. In Tolkein’s imaginary world, orc really are a different (and sub human) race. Tolkein said his own work wasn’t allegorical, but I’ll offer an allegorical reading: races in The Lord of the Rings can be seen as representing different aspects of (real-world) human nature. The elves represent intelligence and cool reasoning. The hobbits represent good natured familiarity and community. The dwarves represent mechanical skill. And humans represent a mixture of all these things plus a good dose of Hamlet-esque self-doubt thrown into the mix. Together, these races represent different aspects of the human psyche. Opposite these, you have the orcs and their kin, along with their evil leaders. These represent (real-world) humanity at its worst: as brute power and desire untempered by love or intelligence (in the case of the orcs) and as intelligence turned to selfish, evil purposes (in the case of their malevolent readers). This could be fleshed out, but that’s my basic take on it, useful for those days when you can’t just loose yourself in the story and enjoy it as a story, rather than as a roman a clef. But we’d all do well to get rid of the idea that a story (or a movie or a novel or a painting) is a secret waiting to be told rather than (what more progressive critics have always maintained) a box of possible (possibly infinite) meanings waiting to be detailed and presented backed up with argument. The key in literary criticism, as in science, is that all conclusions (all readings) are hypotheses. None is ever the final answer.