Tolkien inspires Iranian protesters

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man

I came across this today and, immediately thinking of my old haunting ground here on the Downs, felt the need to share it here.

Hah! So nice to hear from you SPM! We've been missing you!

And thanks for the link. I have been following the situation in Iran with great interest having all my thumbs, other fingers and toes up for the civil society to prevail...

An interesting connection indeed. Did the establishment think the LotR was conservative enough while at the same time being interesting enough to keep people home? And the blogger just made interpretations the religious leaders just hadn't thought of?

Or was someone trying to fire up the protest by consciously choosing those films to be shown to boost the resistance?

It's hard to say as one not knowing the culture from the ground and thence not able to see what kind of interpretations people would make there.

Fex. to me it was first a total surprise that Tolkien's works are loved by the Evangelical movement in the US. as I have always interpreted them more like from the European hippie-context... Okay, I can now see why it is so in the US., but how would Iranians interpret the books (the movie)? Is that blogger a rare intellectual looking at them that way or is that a self-evident way they would all interpret it?