When Viggo Mortensen appeared on ''Charlie Rose'' last week to flog ''The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,'' the second of the three films by Peter Jackson based on J. R. R. Tolkien's beloved trilogy, he ended up talking mostly about politics. Mr. Mortensen, whose brave warrior knight Aragorn spends much of ''The Two Towers'' rallying the troops and leading them into battle against the forces of darkness, was wearing a homemade T-shirt with the slogan, ''No Blood for Oil.'' Although he opposes the Bush administration's prospective invasion of Iraq, Mr. Mortensen said he wore the shirt to protest something that hit even closer to home -- the interpretation he keeps hearing of the new movie, which opens Wednesday, as both an allegory and an endorsement of the invasion.

''I don't think that 'The Two Towers' or Tolkien's writing or our work has anything to do with the United States' foreign ventures,'' he told Mr. Rose, ''and it upsets me to hear that.''

Tolkien would surely have seconded that emotion. The ''Ring'' trilogy was published in 1954 and 1955, in the long shadow of World War II and as cold war tensions grew. It was hardly surprising if some readers saw Hitler in the evil wizard Saruman or read nuclear Armageddon into the Dark Lord Sauron's war to wipe out all the peoples of Middle-Earth. Enough readers did, that when Ballantine began to publish an American edition of the trilogy in 1965, Tolkien wrote a preface to set them straight. Insisting that his ''prime motive was the desire of a tale teller,'' Tolkien wrote that the trilogy ''is neither allegorical nor topical'' and pointed out that its composition began ''long before the disaster foreshadowed in 1939.''

Of course, the Nazi threat was evident before 1939, and Tolkien, a veteran of World War I, was sensitive to it. In ''Tolkien, Hitler and Nordic Heroism,'' an essay published last year and circulated on the Internet, R. J. Smirak quotes Tolkien's 1938 denunciation of the Nazis' ''pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.''