[littlemanpoet]

I'm not familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell, please tell me why I should be.

Should be? That may be saying too much. My question to you was engendered by this:

The mind becomes conscious as it travels to Mordor. There it faces its ultimate negation, death. But in order to become selfconscious it has to return to where it came from. Only then it is Geist.

Joseph Campbell wrote a book entitled Hero With a Thousand Faces. In it, he described how all myths can be boiled down to a few psychological types with which humans deal. His theories have been exploded lately, but that does not lessen his impact on the educated public during his lifetime.

Tolkien considered Campbell's idea frankly spurious. Humbug, even. His thought was that though many mythic stories had similar ingredients, the specifics in each one were at least as important as the similarities between them.

I'm not saying that you think like Campbell. I just noticed your psychological reading into LotR, and wondered if you were familiar with the most famous pyschological reader-into-myth. I would guess that Campbell was well versed in Hegel. You see, consciousness and death were two of Campbell's key "types" in myth.