[Lindale]

For a term paper ages ago I did feminist critique of Tolkien... (and yeah, it was lame, I know, but I was a freshman stuck in a higher lit class!)

Sometimes I still toy with the idea of a Marxist interpretation of the text though. Everything from the beginnings of the Sil down to the last bits of LOTR. But then, it's been done for too long... But hey, since you've had your history units, this may also prove interesting. Not parallelisms with the author's life (that'd be a very risky thing), but parallelisms with the situations of what you may consider his influences (like the Nordic myths) and perhaps his own time as well.