[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

To my knowledge, no school that I have attended has ever issued a specific ban against particular authors or titles. Indeed, when I read above that books had been banned from school premises because they were considered to promote demon-worship I had a nasty feeling that I had somehow slipped into the wrong century. I was living under the blissful misapprehension that people simply didn't do that sort of thing any more.

People who would restrict the distribution of literature would be well advised to have a good long read of Mein Kampf, the author of which wasn't averse to a spot of book-burning himself. Come to think of it, he was also a professed Christian, a decorated war veteran, a teetotaller and a vociferous detractor of both liberalism and journalists. His magnum opus is a turgid outpouring of dull, half-baked philosophy; petty-bourgeois morality; historical myth and nauseating patriotism. They might find a lot to their liking in such an execrable scrawl, which should serve as a warning to us all.

The only amusing aspect of the whole sorry tale is that by the standards quoted above, the Bible ought to be a prime candidate for restriction: it contains incest, fratricide, apocalyptic prophecies of doom, graphic violence, betrayal and exhortions to sell disobedient children into slavery. It's been linked to violence, discord and oppression, and may well have prompted the burning of a major European city. I'm not suggesting that the Bible ought to be banned, merely pointing out the rather obvious double-standard at work in the minds of many moralists.

Essentially, then, I simply can't think myself into the mind of someone who will place a hopelessly vain ban on a work of literature for the most banal reasons, whilst encouraging the study of other more disturbing works (was Macbeth banned, I wonder?) on the grounds of their great age or religious significance.

In the end what does or does not constitute a harmful idea varies between individuals; what is or is not offensive varies over time and an educator who prevents the spread of ideas has begun to slide into indoctrination. By all means prevent pupils from reading Tolkien in lessons (the political history of Gondor isn't going to help in an examination on Chemistry or the French revolution); go ahead and keep badly-written, poorly-researched or intellectually-barren texts out of a school library, but spare us all from uninspired bureaucrats and their bizarre system of ethics. If I can't even think of a good reason for restricting access to Anton LaVey, or even Corporal Schicklegruber, how likely is it that I can think of a reason to put a philosophically-inoffensive author like Tolkien on the forbidden list? Actually I can think of one: there's nothing like a good banning to get the kids interested in something, as has been mentioned above.