ideological stance may to some degree be evaluated by the fact that he chose to dedicate his collected works to Arthur de Gobineau, the father of Aryan racialist theory—a theory that Tolkien correctly rejected as being as intellectually ridiculous as it was morally repellent To Tolkien’s credit, he saw from the beginning the nature of the Nazi obsession with Wagner’s Ring Cycle What appealed to the Nazis in the ring quest was an idealization of the pursuit of power for its own sake Tolkien appreciated the ring quest tradition on many levels, but having already lived through one World War, he understood the nature of the curse of the “ring of power” as well as any man could He believed that even for the good man the pursuit of power was in itself an evil that would enslave the human spirit and soul And, in the Third Reich, there were not many “good men” to start with There can be little doubt that part of Tolkien’s deeply felt motivation in writing The Lord of the Rings was a desire to set the record straight by reclaiming the ring quest tradition, and presenting the “noble northern spirit” of Europe in its “true light.” Just as Tolkien chose on minor points to “challenge” Shakespeare’s use of myth and history in Macbeth (1605), so on a much grander scale he “challenged” Wagner’s use of myth and history in his Ring Cycle operas by writing The Lord of the Rings Tolkien understood the deep moral crisis at the center of the ring quest as Wagner perceived it He saw the devastation that the Iron Age mentality of the ring quest had wreaked in the world, and chose to reshape the ring quest fundamentally for the twentieth century He did this by turning the quest on its head The ring of power was “unmade” by reversing the spell The hero of the quest does not seize the ring but destroys it by dropping it into the inferno where it was made In 1937, Tolkien began to forge his “One Ring” imaginatively as a symbol for an absolute power that morally and physically contaminated all who touched it He could not even have guessed how soon history would catch up with his dark vision and make his tale appear almost prophetic He certainly could not have imagined how the scientists of the real world would soon create something that was every bit as powerful, evil, and contaminating as the “One Ring” of Sauron the Dark Lord Although The Lord of the Rings was largely written during the war years, it was not published until 1954, and, by this time, the atomic bomb had seized the popular imagination The public was less likely to equate Sauron with Hitler than the One Ring with the Bomb It was difficult for many to believe that the idea of the One Ring was not inspired by the Bomb Surely, some suggested, no place could look more like a nuclear testing ground than the ash-laden land of Mordor? There is no doubt that Tolkien was very much against the atomic bomb On August 9, 1945, he wrote to Christopher: “The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to such work for war purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world!” Still, Tolkien was at pains to point out that the One Ring was fully formed long before he had any idea of the activities of atomic scientists In a letter written in 1956, he found it necessary to state: “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination).” However, he had to acknowledge that in a larger sense the message or moral of his novel certainly did not exclude atomic power Indeed, Tolkien’s views on nuclear weapons would not have been at all out of place at any CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, begun in the UK in 1957) or Ban the Bomb meeting or protest march “Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose [bombs] But they need not be They need not be used at all If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done This seems to me wholly false The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in abnegation “When you say Atomic power is ‘here to stay’ you remind me that Chesterton said that whenever he heard that, he knew that whatever it referred to would soon be replaced, and thought pitifully shabby and old-fashioned So-called ‘atomic’ power is rather bigger than anything he was thinking of (I have heard it of trams, gaslight, steam-trains) But it surely is clear that there will have to be some ‘abnegation’ in its use, a deliberate refusal to do some of the things it is possible to do with it, or nothing will stay!” Even retrospectively, however, it still seems very unlikely that such a self-confessed “old fogey” of an Anglo-Saxon professor, writing about a remote imaginary world filled with an