Haz al-Din has led the charge against the soy series - the big three: Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings. I enjoyed LOTR as a kid, and a simple narrative of good vs evil is nice. But looking deeper, Tolkien is an anarcho-liberal idealist, with the same message as George Orwell.
We are told Sauron is evil, but we never learn his actual goals beyond industrialization, supposedly for the military. Sauron is advancing the productive forces of mankind and centralizing like the Mongol Empire at the expense of obsolete feudal classes (the elves) insistent on playing kumbaya in the woods (like the blue people in Avatar).
In Letter 246, Tolkien essentially argues that power is inherently evil. Even if the Ring was transferred to a righteous ruler, the Ring (power) would have been "the master". The confusion of the means (power i.e. the state) with the ends is the same lie that George Orwell promotes in Animal Farm and 1984 (O'Brien: "We pursue power for power's sake"). In both cases it serves to demonize communism.
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>[If a good angel obtained the ring, they] would have proceeded in the policy now adopted by Sauron: they would have built up an empire with great and absolutely subservient generals and armies and engines of war, until they could challenge Sauron and destroy him by force...
>If Gandalf proved the victor, the result would have been for Sauron the same as the destruction of the Ring; for him it would have been destroyed, taken from him for ever. But the Ring and all its works would have endured. It would have been the master in the end.
>Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained 'righteous', but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for 'good', and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great).
>Thus while Sauron multiplied evil, he left "good" clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil.
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Tolkien states outright that ruling things for good is actually bad because it requires rule. Hence, he is an anarchist idealist.
In this letter, Gandalf's rule is a metaphor for the USSR; Sauron's for Nazi Germany. According to Tolkien, the USSR is actually worse than Nazi Germany, because it exercises power in the name of good, and power is always bad, and this confuses people (in reality: enlightens them and destroys liberal idealism). He should've read On Authority.
Tolkien goes deeper than Orwell to oppose not just the state, but the productive forces themselves which underly the strength of the state. Tolkien correctly sees that the productive forces make authority inevitable (as Engels saw in On Authority). Lord of the Rings is an ode to primitive tribes (walking trees) and peasants (hobbits). The peasants are alright, but Tolkien refuses to accept material advance beyond that, just like Ted Kaczynski. Thus, while Orwell is merely counter-revolutionary, Tolkien is reactionary.