Mark wrote; > W.r.t. allegory, Tolkien said somewhere that there is a world > of difference between what a reader reads into a work and > what the writer wrote into it. > > -- Mark A. Mandel Mmm! See also, Umberto Eco. Four walks in the Fictional Woods, Interpretation and Overinterpretation and other works. He talsk about a dialectic between intentio auctoris and intentio lectoris producing intentio operis. (Forgive me please if I misspelled those, but I think you gen get the gist. Casey