Roderick Long wrote:

> By the way, in the foreword to LOTR, denying that the book is an
> allegory of World War II, Tolkien notes: "if [the war] had inspired
> or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring
> would have bene seized ans used against Sauron; he would not have
> been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been
> destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the
> Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found
> in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and
> before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to
> challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict
> both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would
> not long have survived even as slaves."
>
> That tells us something of what Tolkien thought both of the Ring and
> of both sides in WW2.

There's also a letter where he says that the difference between war in
Middle Earth and war in the real world is that in the real world there
are Orcs on both sides.

--
Dan Clore

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