[Marileangorifurnimaluim]

I'm sympathic to spiritual perspectives, for obvious reasons, and not surprised at all that so many Tolkien fans are deeply spiritual. Not surprised one bit.

But given Tolkien so openly disliked allegory, and made it undeniably clear that such was not his intent, we are then extrapolating what we wish to see in his books. Fair enough.

But opening that particular door is opening
Pandora's box.

We are obliged then to allow other prevarications that have only a tenuous, tangental, purely theoretical interpretive relationship to the Lord of the Rings. In a word: we'd need to bring back Eve. And not complain about it. At least with homoerotic subtext there is no direct quotes from Tolkien emphatically denying it. Although I'm sure there would be, if someone had thought to ask. If we're gonna 'blue-sky' here, and have some spiritual fun (face it, you guys are having a blast picking out the quotes from Matthew) we'll just have to respect other unsupportable blue-sky theories. Including implausible ring-representing-marriage theories, WWII theories (which Tolkien has also emphatically denied), race theories, you name it.