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Really interesting! For myself, I must confess, on my first reading of LotR the apparent allegory was Sauron=Hitler, Saruman=Stalin, since he was at first allied with those who were fighting the Enemy but then became their little Enemy by himself. Of course, I was very, very young back then. Also, I bumped then into the problem with this allegory, I remember very well, because it didn't seem logical to me to make the "Great Enemy of the First War" the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Somehow it didn't seem to scale that way, from Morgoth-poor Franz Josef towards Hitler-Sauron... obviously my mind back then, in primary school age, would not think in the bigger picture of (if I already had to make this an allegory) applying the Enemy rather to the phantom of power in general, recurring in many shapes throughout the history...
Nonetheless, enough of my nostalgic memories; great find, Squatter. If there's more, it'd be certainly interesting if you kept us updated on similar unusual finds. What I also like about the quote is that it is an unusual witness to a specific early reader's preferences - and naming Gimli, of all members of the Fellowship! Sufficiently random. (Then again, what to expect from a man who sees Rohan as France. Post-war Germany as Gondor is brilliant though, food for thought how could one imagine that parallel to work...)
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories
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