Seventy years ago, in January or February 1956, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a letter to Michael Straight, editor of New Republic, in which he mentioned a “ferocious” letter he had received some time before. His correspondent had argued that Frodo, the protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, should have been executed as a traitor, not praised. “The ‘salvation’ of the world and Frodo’s own ‘salvation’," Tolkien replied, “is achieved by his previous pity and forgiveness of injury.”