This is very good. As much as I like the movies for movies, I've always been uncomfortable with the Galadriel scene and the portrayal of the ring as necessarily evil. Reading this, he put words to those gut feelings. Even so, I plan to see the Hobbit, if I can get my act together. Sometimes it's ok to disconnect movies from the source literature; in fact, you must in order to be able to enjoy it.

I disagree. Tolkien's comments on allegory were intended to defuse allegations that Sauron represented Hitler and that his novels were a cryptic retelling of WWII.

Claiming that Tolkien does not use symbolism or allegory more generally beggars belief. Sauron is evil while the ring represents power. Nor when characters go "into the west" should we ignore the standard symbolic gesture (west as death, as with the setting sun) any more than miss the point of the ending, which shows the one character who resisted the ring return home to rebuild a garden on earth.