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Thankfully, there is an extremely simple way to prove that The Root of the Boot (in its original form) must be allegorical, as you propose in your last paragraph to me: simply demonstrate the same thing for the other Tolkien poems in the volume! I've dorectly linked 'From One to Five' and 'Natura Apis', and my link to the original 'Root' also includes 'Lit and Lang'. A demonstration tha all of these are allegories for specific events related to Eng Lang (or Lit, since the Root apparently is - Shakespeare, for philologists?!} would surely be a feather (swan or otherwise) in your or Ms. Seth's metaphorical cap.
(One other point: shin/Tim may not be a perfect rhyme, but it's a darnsight better than leg/John. The verse needed a rhyme - that line has an internal rhyme (which we know Tolkien was fond of - 'Errantry', probably his most complex poem, is built entirely on internal rhymes and half-rhymes!) in every verse - and it needed to rhyme with 'shin' (to work with 'kin' later on). There can't be that many monosyllabic named ending in -in or something close to it - and the Tim/Tom pair has a great appeal in its own right! Either way, whyever he chose Tim, it's abundantly clear that the name had to change to fit the rhyme.)
hS
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