That the 'Lord of the Rings' was profoundly marked by the last century's two World Wars strikes me as evident, but I wouldn't read too much even into that. Anybody who does care to seek out a myriad sources and parallels can have several field days starting by buying the 'Proceedings' of a 1991 Tolkien Centenary Conference (Mythopoeic Society).
Bringing such a wealth of resources to the cinema and making a darned good yarn of them struck me as an impossible task before Jackson tried it. You may not agree with his vision, you can find holes in his direction or the acting.The Kid, for instance, adored Andy Serkis (warning: music ... of sorts) as Gollum, particularly the schizo dialogues, but thought Frodo as portrayed by Elijah Wood was a wet-eyed wimp, constantly looking as if he was about to burst into tears.

But unless one has no interest in fantasy at all, and I know plenty of people who've avoided the whole trilogy for that reason alone, I think we owe a very great deal to Jackson and the whole team for making these films, going through hell at times in so doing (as a host of sites describe, including the excellent QuickTime movies at the official one) and signally failing to screw it up beyond belief!

When I saw that the French edition of National Geographic magazine had joined the dozens of periodicals devoting a special to 'The Lord of the Rings', my imagination boggled.
But why not?
Just how long need we wait for the 'Playboy special: Women of the Rings' (nude feature)?

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*They don't want any direct reproduction of or "hot-linking" to the pictures there, so I won't.
The pictures I have stolen are credited, in order: © Metropolitan FilmExport;
totally unattributed by 'outnow' (Swiss/German); and Pierre Vinét - © 2003 New Line Productions.