[The Saucepan Man]

Mister U:

I’m not sure how or if “appreciation” comes into it, so I’ll leave that alone.

Bah! I always try to choose my words so carefully, and yet I always get picked up on them. By “appreciation”, I mean the experience that each person draws from reading the text, whether it be understanding, insight, inspiration, enchantment or whatever. I would be extremely hesitant about saying that one person’s experience of the text is necessarily more valid or valuable, from an objective point of view, than that of another.

I, for one, am not uncomfortable in condemning interpretations like those made by Stormfront.

Well, I think that we have to recognise that some of the concepts that they use to support their dreadful views are “correctly” interpreted because they are implicit in the text (examples would be the importance of the bloodline of Numenor and the superiority in some respects (longetivity, prowess, hardiness) of the Dunedain over other types of Men). But, to the extent that they seek to use those concepts to interpret LotR in a way which supports their view that one race can be inherently superior in all respects to another, I would condemn them too because I utterly reject that way of thinking. For me, therefore, their interpretation is “wrong”. And for the majority of people too, I suspect. Does that make it “wrong” on an objective level? Possibly it does, but only if one either tries to formulate some objective moral code against which to measure it (a tricky business) or takes the position that something is “wrong” if the majority believes it to be so. One thing is for certain though: Tolkien never intended his story to lend support to the views of those such as Stormfront since he too rejected such views (unless his private thoughts differed significantly to those which he committed to paper, which I somehow doubt).

And if there are patently wrong interpretations, doesn’t that imply that there are, indeed, right interpretations?

No. I don’t think that the one necessarily follows from the other. Even if there are “patently wrong” interpretations, we can still be left with a plethora of conflicting interpretations, no one of which is necessarily superior to the others (and all of which might therefore be said to be "right").

I do, however, agree with Sharon, when she says:

I do not insist that everyone who reads Lord of the Rings emerge with the interpretation that there is one God in charge of things, but I do believe there are certain boundaries the author has laid down with his own pen. These themes, whether you call them 'interpretations' or 'propositions' are inherent in the text …

This is what I was trying to get across when I said:

If you are simply saying that there are certain concepts which are “right” because they are stated in the text, and that we must accept them if we are to accept the text, then I agree with you.

To the extent that anything put forward by Stormfront, or Germaine Greer, or anyone else, clearly contradicts that which is expressly or implicitly stated in the text, then it cannot (in my view) be considered a valid interpretation of that text.