[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I think we may be talking at cross purposes. Censorship (being the removal of material from a work to make it acceptable to the censoring authority) is something with which I take issue as an act of vandalism that can pervert the message of the original piece. I'm all in favour of restriction of access to certain material on the grounds of age, but only insofar as it prevents children from coming into contact with aspects of the adult world that will result in their being frightened or upset, not in an attempt to pre-emptively attack some nebulous action that they may or may not take as a result of contact with particular ideas or phrases. Certainly not because in some people's opinion the censored material encourages irreligious behaviour. That verges on the medieval. One might as well ban the study of all world religions on the grounds that each offends the doctrine of one of the others in some way.

In the case of literature we're lucky in that the really frightening ideas tend to be couched in language of sufficient complexity to exclude the very young from their readership. Not that I'd advocate stocking the works of Friedrich Nietzsche or the Marquis de Sade in an infant school (what would be the point anyway? None of the pupils would understand most of what they had to say), but it seems somewhat extreme to exclude all literature of a certain genre from the very premises of an educational establishment. What did they think? That older pupils would try to start an anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary cell among the juniors? That the school would end up with a cadet branch of the Church of Satan meeting on its grounds? Personally I'd be looking at the sanity of the people who come up with these possibilities.

I'm also not too sure about manner in which the word "indoctrination" is being bandied about in this thread: indoctrination is the process of teaching someone what to think; of imposing the opinions that one would like them to hold without the truth of the ideas imposed becoming an issue.

None of which has any relevance whatsoever to J.R.R. Tolkien, whose work encourages the best aspects of the human character, not to mention being an excellent improver of the vocabulary and a good introduction to the study of mythology. In order to desire the censorship of his works one would have to object to a theme that would not have seemed objectionable to an orthodox Catholic born in the Victorian era, or to a British publishing house in the 1950s. If you chuck Tolkien out on his ear then Byron and Coleridge and John Webster, to name but three, ought to go first. It would probably end in all the books being empty and all the minds closed.