[davem]

Fordim\

I don't mean that we can't try & relate what we experience in Faerie to our lives in the primary world, what I mean is any 'meaning' or 'relevance' we may find is entirely subjective, & events & characters in the secondary world have no direct intentional relationship to the primary world - because that would be to treat the secondary world merely as an allegory of the primary world. Applicability is subjective. What I find applicable will not necessarily be what you find applicable. Applicability is subjective, Allegory is 'objective' - in the sense that the 'meaning' is imposed by the author of the story, & that 'meaning' is always the author's intended meaning. So, while Stormfront may find support for their racial ideology in LotR, it was clearly not the intent of the author to put it there. LotR was not written as a Nazi allegory, so Stormfront cannot claim to be such. So there is no intentional meaning written into LotR. The 'meaning' of the story lies in the story, not outside it, in the primary world. Stormfront are effectively claiming to find a primary world relevance in Middle Earth, which was not put there by the author. Middle Earth in that sense has no relevance to this world, & from the point of view of this world, the story is 'meaningless'.

(note, it is not without internal meaning, & when we enter into Middle Earth we will find it meaningful - there are reasons why the characters do what they do - they don't behave randomly - but the reasons they do what they do are inspired by events & circumstances to be found within the secondary world, not in the primary world. So whatever the Numenoreans' reasons/motivations for their claims to superiority within Middle Earth, those reasons have nothing to do with the reasons/motivations put forward by Stormfront for their claims to superiority, because that world is that world & this world is this world. If any member of that organisation could prove scientifically that they are decended from Elros then their claims would have to be considered - though we could point out to them that the Numenorean's sense of superiority lead repeatedly to disaster, from the fall of Numenor down to the loss of Arnor & the Kin Strife & beyond, so the ideal of 'racial superiorty' is something they should consider forgetting. We could also declare them undesirable aliens, & tell them to get back to their own world & stop making nuisances of themselves in our world).

As to what we can bring back from Faery, well, we can only bring back memories, which may inspire us to make ourselves & our world a 'better' place. But applicability is not about 'bringing something back' as such, because that's about doing something with what we bring back. I can say 'well, seeing Aragorn's struggle has inspired me to do such & such' but all I have brought back with me fro Middle Earth is the memory of Aragorn. How I apply it is down to me, & any meaning I have found in it, any rfelevance for my life here, is all down to me. The 'experience' was given to me, the meaning I find in it is all my own. Tolkien is telling me a story, not what it means - or if he does try & tell me what it means he is changing his role, from storyteller to teacher, & making his tales into allegory - which he has said they are not. So, again, any 'meaning' we think we have found in Tolkien's stories is our own - as Aragorn tells Boromir that if a man finds peril in Lorien its because he brought it there himself. If we find meaning or relevance for the primary world in Middle Earth then we are the ones who imposed it. We may learn something there which we didn't know before, which may change the way we think about ourselves & our world, but that discovery would be our own, & whatever it means the meaning is our own - applicability, not allegory. I've come to lots of realisations about myself & the world through 'applying' examples form Tolkien's stories to my own life, but that's 'me', not Tolkien.

So, MrU quote:

' If there’s no meaning that we can relate to our own lives and situations, what Tolkien called applicability, then a tale may serve to give us a few hours’ reading enjoyment, but won’t have much more impact. I would argue that a large part of LotR’s enduring appeal lies in its profound depth of meaning.'

Where does that depth of meaning lie - in the secondary world or in ourselves? LotR will mean nothing to some, less than nothing to others, be nonsense to others still. And to some of us it will contain profound truth. But all that meaning & profundity (& beauty & sorrow & longing) are all contained in Middle Earth, & only exist for us in this world if we bring back our memories & experiences of that place, and then apply them to ourselves & our world. And the way in which we apply them will determine whether we end up with 'profundity' or nonsense, or something deeply wrong & dangerous. We may learn from our time in Middle Earth, but Middle Earth is not there to intentionally teach us anything - certainly not about this world - it may teach us about itself, & we may find a way to apply what we learn there to this world, but that wasn't the' intention of the place & people' we encountered there.

Who says SoWM was intended to have an allegorical meaning - & even if it did, can we say that's all it is - that its just an allegory & nothing more. In fact, as I said, Tolkien only offers an allegorical explanation for the 'human world' of Wooton Major. If he had intended the story simply as an allegory & nothing more, why not just tell the story of that place & leave out what happens to Smith in Faery? Faery in the story is not an allegory. What allegorical meaning could the episode with the Elven Mariners have, or the Birch tree (yes, I know Shippey attempted to 'decode' that particular episode, but without any success IMO), or Smith's dancing with the Faery Queen? What allegorical meaning is there to our sense of wonder, yearning & loss of something we can't even remember, which comes through when reading the story? If SoWM was written as an allegory its a very bad one, because no-one so far has been able to come up with a one-to-one correspondence between it & the primary world. It may have allegorical parts, scattered here & there throughout it, but the problem with allegorical fairy stories is that the 'magic' they appear to contain, or give access to, is not true enchantment, because when you translate the allegory the magic disappears. Smith moves us precisely because it is not allegorical as a whole. As a whole it is something else, & whatever that 'something else' is, it will never be translated into the language of this primary world, because it is what it is & can't be translated into something else, because it wasn't written to disguise the 'truth' but to reveal it.