But is all this fantasizing really good for us? Should we worry about all these strapping men poking each other with sharpened phallic symbols? After all, on the political correctness meter The Lord of the Rings is radioactive. Where are the women? Peter Jackson filled out Liv Tyler's role for the movies (it's much less prominent in Tolkien's version), but the Fellowship is still as much a boys' club as Augusta National. And whiter too. Don't let all the heartwarming Elf-Dwarf bonding between Legolas and Gimli fool you. The only people with dark skin in Middle- earth are the Orcs.

The clarity and simplicity of Middle-earth are comforting, but there's also something worryingly childish, even infantile, about it. Things are too simple there. Everyone has his class and his place—funny how feudalism works that way—and he's either good or evil, with no messy gray area in between. "Just because something is reassuring, comforting and seductive doesn't mean that it's offering you what you need," points out Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at M.I.T. "The question is whether that prepares us to live in a world that's complex, where we need to be able to work in a structure where there are no rules and where we have to be really attentive to other people's cultures and other people's ways of seeing things."

The question is, Are we running away from reality when we indulge in fantasy? Or are we escaping reality just to find it again and wrestle with it in disguise? Not everything is as simple as it looks, as Gandalf found out when he tried to open the door to Moria. Let's not forget that the characters in The Lord of the Rings are themselves nostalgic for an even earlier age. The novels are set in the waning hours of the age of magic, with all those rather attractive Elves departing the scene, leaving men to their mundane, Mugglish devices. If The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy, it's ultimately a fantasy about growing up and putting childish things aside.

And at its core, The Lord of the Rings isn't a story about frilly shirts and talking frogs; it's a tale about temptation. Frodo isn't a knight in shining armor; he's not even a wizard in a pointy hat. His only claim to fame, his sole superpower, is his uncommon ability to resist the seductive, corrupting temptation of the all-powerful Ring he carries. And as hard as he fights against that temptation, in the end he fails.

Is there a message there for contemporary America? As the world's only superpower, we're carrying the Ring on behalf of an entire planet, and our burden is every bit as heavy as Frodo's. Seen in that light, The Lord of the Rings looks like a very grownup story indeed, one that can't be told often enough. Frodo lives.

—Reported by Mike Billips and Marc Schultz/Atlanta, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis, Sonja Steptoe/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York

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