[tar-ancalime]

It seems to me that the quotes from Peter Jackson in the second article were very carefully crafted statements. Jackson never says that he buried the moral themes of the story; he only says that he has "not an ounce" of interest in fleshing them out any further. Personally, I take this to mean that the story itself is so thoroughly imbued with the idea of good vs. evil that Jackson felt comfortable refraining from typical Hollywood heavy-handedness (at least for the most part--there are some exceptions to this; I felt a little preached-to when Gandalf made his "death in judgement" speech in Moria instead of Bag End; not sure why this change felt so unsavory to me). In other words, it's still in the story, folks, even if Jackson didn't choose to make it a surface feature.

Also, though the Professor wrote a story saturated with his own worldview (and how could he write it any other way?), by making morality thematic as opposed to a surface detail, he not only put it deeper into the story, but ensured that those billions of people in the world who think of their Creator differently than Tolkien did, could still understand his story and his messages. To insist that the morality of Tolkien's work is only a Christian morality treads very close to (a) claiming ownership over values that many, many people in the world share, and (b) creating a privileged class of audience for this story that excludes most of the people in the world because they call their morality by a different name.