[davem]

On Allegory

Don't know if this is relevant to the discussion, but at the beginning of the essay Tolkien wrote on Smith of Wooton Major he writes:

This short tale is not an allegory, though it is capable of course of allegorical interpretations at certain points.

Flieger (the editor) comments:

In fact, as Tom Shippey has pointed out, Tolkien used allegory frequently & to good effect....What he seems to have disliked & repudiated was ''moral'' allegory, in which the second level of meaning is related to a moral or ethical or religious or political position.

I don't think LotR (or any of Tolkien's writings) can be interpreted as 'allegory' per se, but certainly 'it is capable of allegorical interpretations at certain points'.

For all his proclaimed preference for 'applicability' over allegory, he certainly took things from his experience of the primary world & presented them in a new form in his secondary world, but the point is, once they had entered the secondary world they became part of it, & no longer required a knowledge of the primary world inspiration to give them meaning.

LotR (or parts of it) can be read as primary world events 'seen through enchanted eyes' (Garth's phrase: 'Tolkien & the Great War). Whether The Fall of Gondolin (BoLT) is an 'allegory' of the Somme, with its 'iron dragons' destroying the Elven city = the tanks which had just appeared on the battlefield & the Balrogs with their whips of flame = the German infantry with their flammenwerfers (flamethrowers) depends first & foremost on whether the reader knows anything at all about WWI - if he doesn't then he won't come up with an allegorical interpretation, obviously.

I do wonder whether Tolkien wrote FoG to be read as an allegory, & even if he did, whether the older Tolkien still wanted it to be read in that way. Applicability is about the freedom of the reader to find whatever meaning they wish in the text - even, one assumes, an allegorical one.

I think Tolkien's objection to an allegorical interpretation wasn't so much that he was offended that a reader would do such a thing, but more that he didn't want to get lumbered with the responsibility for what the reader 'found' there.