I find all the serious articles on the Lord of the Rings really fun to read. A few of my favorite excerpts:

That doesn't mean, on the other hand, that "The Lord of the Rings" is ever fully comfortable with heterosexuality. Its female characters are little more than idealized figures of inspiration or decoration; Eowyn, the warrior-princess of Rohan, is the only real exception. (Was her original a female graduate student who braved the pipe smoke and postprandial glasses of port?) Her courtship by Faramir of Gondor is stylized and awkward but at least has the flavor of real emotion. If you still believe that the book has no more explicit depiction of heterosexual activity than that, however, I suggest you take another look at the disturbing encounter between Sam and Shelob, the huge and evil female spider, at the end of Book Four.
--a salon article

The critics who got worked up about the bugs in Starship Troopers and the Orcs and Uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings fret over the explicit "dehumanizing of the enemy" involved in these respective stories quite a bit. What they leave out is that the enemies aren't humans being unfairly mischaracterized the way the Japanese were in World War II posters. The enemies in these movies are, in fact, non-human.
--a national review article

In the real world it's much more difficult to identify evil. It would be much easier to argue for toppling Saddam if he were a giant fiery eye ruling subhuman creatures bent on destroying all that is beautiful and enslaving all that is good. But, damn it, that's not the case.
--later in the same national review article