Thread: LotR - Foreword
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Old 06-11-2004, 09:52 PM   #71
Son of Númenor
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What I was most interested in when re-reading the Foreword was the passage that describes what The Lord of the Rings would have been like if Tolkien had written it as an allegory for World War II.
Quote:
The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves" (The Lord of the Rings, "Foreword to the Second Edition," xv).
The allegory described in this alternate tale is pretty straightforward and does not require explanation for the purpose of my post. What was interesting to me in this passage was not the content, but the bitterness with which he describes this bizarro-Lord of the Rings - the wholly negative outcome of the work if it had followed Tolkien's views on WWII. It made me wonder. Though Tolkien stated that any allegorical connection to WWII was out of the question, and that the First World War affected him far more than the Second, what effect did World War II really have on The Lord of the Rings?

Earlier in the Foreword, Tolkien says:
Quote:
The delay was, of course, also increased by the outbreak of war in 1939, by the end of which year the tale had not yet reached the end of Book One. In spite of the darkness of the next five years I found that the story could not be wholly abandoned, and I plodded on, mostly by night, till I stood by Balin's tomb in Moria. There I halted for a long while. It was almost a year later when I went on and so came to Lothlórien (xiii).
In this account of the writing of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien fails to mention a crucial part of the novel: the fall of Gandalf in Moria. While he is quick to note in the Letters that Gandalf had to pass through death to become powerful enough to deal with Saruman, Théoden and Denethor, he also notes that
Quote:
...the return of G. [Gandalf] is as presented in this book a 'defect', and one I was aware of, and probably did not work hard enough to mend" (Letters 203).
Why didn't he work to fix this 'defect' if indeed he was aware of it? Could Tolkien, in the 'darkness' of the time that he wrote the chapters concerning Moria and Lothlórien, have initially intended for Gandalf's death to be permanent? Could he have lost faith in the ideals that Gandalf represented, only to realize later that his reincarnation was vital to the work as a piece transcendent of contemporary comparison or accusation of allegory? Did Gandalf 'represent', to some extent, the values that Tolkien held? Was Gandalf's fall in Moria (unconsciously) a reflection of Tolkien's disillusionment with those values during the World War II years, and his rebirth a way for Tolkien to make the work transcendent of politics and conflict, and make it what he truly wanted it to be: an enjoyable story with a pleasant, unambiguous, traditional morality behind it?

I'm sorry to pose all of these questions without bothering to answer any of them. Of course gaps and antitheses abound, some of the latter posed by the Professor himself, but I would still like to know what you think of my little....erm...shall we call it a lengthy suggestion?

Edit: Sorry. I took such a long time trying to get out what I was trying to say, agonizing over how on earth I was going to say it, and writing it in a way that made some kind of sense to me (not sure if I succeeded; I'll have to read it again in the morning when I've forgotten what I wrote, and when I'm less delirious from cold medication), that I did not get a chance to read Aiwendil's post. Nor did I continue on the thought track that has been at the forefront of this thread.
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Last edited by Son of Númenor; 06-11-2004 at 09:57 PM.
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