In the 1990s, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was selected in four separate polls as the ''greatest book of the century.'' Now, with the first installment of Peter Jackson's epic three-part movie making a bid for Academy Awards, Tolkein seems assured a place in the 21st century, too.

''The Lord of the Rings'' is a classic story of good and evil - power, ambition, greed, courage and heroism. On the face of it, it is a magical tale set in a fantasy place in a mythic past, but that hasn't stopped any number of interpreters from finding in it lessons for our time. Tolkien wrote the Ring as his beloved England waged war against a Nazi empire that threatened to drag all the world into darkness. It is tempting to identify Sauron, the book's embodiment of unmitigated evil, with Hitler.

But another character from the trilogy, perhaps more than Sauron, has contemporary relevance - the wizard Saruman, Gandalf's traitorous counterpart.

Saruman professes to be interested in knowledge, but his real objective is control. Language and meaning are slippery on his tongue. Ends justify means, and he is willing to make an alliance with evil if it serves what he believes to be the greater good.

When Saruman speaks, ''mostly [his listeners] remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves.'' One might be talking about the councils of Enron (a good Tolkienesque name if ever there was one) and the bubble of self-serving promotion that was that Houston energy giant before its collapse.

''We can bide our time,'' Saruman says, ''we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order, all things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak and idle friends.''

Hubris, moral pragmatism, and high-sounding doubletalk. Sauron, the Dark Lord, is the enemy we contend with abroad; Saruman, who calls himself Wise, is the enemy within ourselves.

Not least in science.

Knowledge, rule, order: These are the goals of science and its handmaiden technology. Worthy goals, too: Saruman's professed goals. As Tom Shippey noted in his study of Tolkien, Saruman is the consummate technologist. His name derives from the Old English searu, which means cunning, with connotations of metalwork and craft. Treebeard the Ent says of Saruman, ''He has a mind of metal and wheels.''

In Saruman, the wheels spin out of control. Shippey writes of Saruman's treason: ''It starts as intellectual curiosity, develops as engineering skill, turns into greed and the desire to dominate, corrupts further into a hatred and contempt of the natural world, which goes beyond any rational desire to use it. Saruman's orcs start by felling trees for the furnaces, but they end up felling them for the fun of it.''

Saruman's dream, which is often our own, is of a future techno-utopia contrived by human cunning. What we often get instead are fouled wildlife refuges, nuclear waste dumps, poisoned rivers, unbreathable air.

Tolkien's answer to Saruman is the folksy Shire, home of the hobbits with fuzzy feet, a sort of pre-Industrial-Revolution English countryside untouched by the curse of iron or gold. But, of course, there can be no going back to a pretechnological past. Knowledge once learned cannot be unlearned. What can be done, will be done. As Gandalf says: ''It is wisdom to recognize necessity.''

Sierra Entertainment, Inc. Announces Development of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit Videogame for Nintendo GameCube
PR Newswire

BELLEVUE, Wash., Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Sierra Entertainment, Inc., a studio of Vivendi Universal Publishing, today announced development of "The Hobbit," a videogame based on J.R.R. Tolkien's worldwide best-selling novel. The game is due to be released in 2003 for the Nintendo GameCube.

      "The Hobbit," developed by Austin, Texas-based Inevitable Entertainment, is a third-person action/adventure game set in the world of Middle-Earth. In the game, players take the persona of Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming hobbit who has been unwittingly thrust into an epic adventure. "Bringing the epic worlds described in Tolkien's works to life through a video game has been an amazing experience," said Russell Byrd, managing director at Inevitable Entertainment.

      "The Hobbit is one of the pre-eminent fantasy works of all time and is perfectly suited to be the inspiration for a great game," said Mike Ryder, president of Sierra Entertainment, Inc. "The book provides a tremendous amount of rich material from which we expect to make a fantasy game that lives up to the extremely high expectations of Tolkien's fans worldwide."

      Under its multi-year deal with Tolkien Enterprises, Sierra has exclusive rights to create video games based on J.R.R. Tolkien's literary work The Hobbit.

      J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have set the standard for fantasy writers and creators of epic worlds. The novels are massive best sellers, having sold close to 100 million copies worldwide and been translated into 26 different languages. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the subject of three movies being created by New Line Cinema, the first of which, The Fellowship of the Ring, was released on December 19, 2001 and is one of the hottest movies of 2001/2002.