Christianity. The other similarity between the two sagas is the spiritual nature of their ultimate magical item. In *The Lord of the Rings*, the object is the ring itself, each successive use of which is a step on the path to damnation - conferring power on Earth in exchange for another fraction of the user's soul, as witnessed in the various states of spiritual decrepitude of those who have succumbed to the temptation. In *The Book of the New Sun*, the most powerful item is the Claw of the Conciliator - the most valuable relic in existence, a gem that performs miraculous cures... forgives injuries, raises the dead, draws new races of beings from the soil, purifies lust and so on. All the things [the Conciliator] is supposed to have done himself. In other words, Tolkien's ring is the Devil ; Wolfe's Claw is God : an interesting symmetry. The texture of the two worlds, however, is very different. Middle Earth seems to be set in a distant past, barely threatened by the first premises of industrialization. Urth on the other hand is our own world millenia hence, a decaying planet waiting for a promised rebirth, frozen in some static medieval social order, incapable of producing any complex artefact except by magic, and borrowing fragments of more advanced technologies from its own past or from the mysterious hierodules, elusive offworlders who only have transactions with selected individuals on Urth and seem to be guiding the world's destiny in some occult