The Tolkien critic Richard C. West writes that the story of The Lord of the Rings is basically simple, the hobbit Frodo Baggins's quest to take the Dark Lord Sauron's Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it. He calls the quest primary, along with the war against Sauron. The critic David M. Miller agrees that the quest is the most important narrative device in the book, but adds that it is reversed from the conventional structure: the hero is not seeking a treasure, but is hoping to destroy one. He notes that from Sauron's point of view, the tale is indeed a quest, and his evil Black Riders replace the traditional errant knights seeking the holy of holies, while the Fellowship keeping the Ring from him cannot use it: thus there are multiple reversals. The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey concurs that it is an anti-quest, a story of renunciation. He writes that Tolkien had lived through two world wars, the routine bombardment of civilians, the use of famine for political gain, concentration camps and genocide, and the development and use of chemical and nuclear weapons. Shippey states that the book raises the question of whether, if the ability of humans to produce that kind of evil could somehow be destroyed, even at the cost of sacrificing something, this would be worth doing.