This is a marvelous thread. I'd like to throw in some quotes from Tolkien's Letters, which I have been reading with great pleasure-- particularly the second half of the book. (Sometimes it's almost like having more Gandalf to read.) Tolkien seems to display a violent reaction not just to allegory but to any reductive analysis-- he constants argues for viewing the book as a complete, living, indivisible thing. Letters, #329
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when they have read it, some readers will (I suppose) wish to 'criticize' it, and even to analyze it, and if that is their mentality they are, of course, at liberty to do these things -- so long as they have first read it with attention throughout. Not that this attitude of mind has my sympathy: as should be clearly perceived in Vo. I p. 272: Gandalf: 'He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.' ... Affixing 'labels' to writers, living or dead, is an inept procedure ... a childish amusement of small minds: and very 'deadening', since at best it overemphasizes what is common .. and distracts attention from what is individual (and not classifiable) in each of them, and is the element that gives them life (if they have any).
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He hated any attempt to extract elements from the book and equate them with something else-- the story was a living thing to him, and must not be 'dismembered.' However, I see consistently warm reactions to anyone who asks or speaks of influences and sources, or share a personal reaction to the book.
My favorite of his various glosses on the influence of Christianity in his book is the visit from 'Gandalf.' Even though it is lamentably long, I've got to quote it, I can't resist. Letters, # 328
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It was written slowly and with great care for detail, & finally emerged as ... a searchlight ... on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space. Very well: that may explain to some extent why it 'feels' like history; why it was accepted for putlication; and why it has proved readable for a large number of very different kinds of people. But it does not fully explain what has actually happened. Looking back ... I feel as if an ever darkening sky over our present world had been suddenly pierced, the clouds rolled back, and an almost forgotten sunlight had poured down again. As if indeed the horns of Hope had been hear again, as Pippin heard them suddenly at the absolute nadir of the fortunes of the west. but How? and Why?
I think I can now guess what Gandalf would reply. A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have forgotten ... He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time. ... I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of literature and languages. When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before ... he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Sudddenly he said: 'Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?'
Pure Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G. to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said: 'No, I don't suppose so any longer.' I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should puff any one up who considers the imperfections of 'chosen instruments', and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.
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