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. 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. The ''Ring'' trilogy was published in 19, in the long shadow of World War II and as cold war tensions grew. Tolkien would surely have seconded that emotion. ''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.
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.
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. Tolkien's beloved trilogy, he ended up talking mostly about politics. 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.