“Until a great feast of love is celebrated as a festival of peace amid hot tears upon smoking battlefields. Only religion can waken Europe again, and reassure the people, and install Christendom with new splendor visibly on earth in its old peace-establishing office.”
“Blood will wash over Europe until the nations perceive the fearful madness which is driving them about in a circle; until, arrested by holy music and soothed, they approach former alters in multi-hued fashion and undertake works of peace”
Novalis
Discovering how you think is the same as thinking, for in each act of thinking about anything really worthy thinking about, how to think about that thing differs in no way from the thinking about that thing.
'By all traditional data we know that we have been in the Kali-Yuga for a long time already; and we can say without fear of error that we are in an advanced phase' (René Guénon, Études Traditionnelles Oct. 1938)
“Christendom must come alive again and be effective, and, without regard to national boundaries, again form a visible Church, and the task of awakening will be prosecuted according to a comprehensive divine plan.”
―Novalis, Christendom or Europe
“I am really alarmed at the hysteria in this country. It may well be a prelude to mob-rule!… Dons yelling ‘fascist’, at high table, at colleagues who in mild voices venture to disagree with them. What a rot and stink is left by liberalism devoid of religion!”
J.R.R. Tolkien
Almost all of these just-so explanations of what LOTR is Really About do the same thing which is turn individual arcs into representative summaries. The One Ring is said to represent power simply hence the ringbearer's arc is “Anglo-Liberal” messaging about ensuring no one can "wield power," and yet, the world of men is saved not by a checked and balanced constitution but by the return of the rightful and self-affirmed king of Gondor and his army of spirits who were damned for their disloyalty to his royal ancestors and called into service with their reforged sword. LOTR has "black and white morality" and yet the books are full of moral ambiguity, complex characterizations, discord between friends and allies, secrecy, deception, competing and overlapping conspiracies. I understand the impulse to neatly categorize but the world Tolkien made is as complex as our own and doesn’t really lend itself to that.