LotR - Foreword

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

OK, I admit, I am at least partially responsible for having set off the debate around terminology, for which I am profoundly sorry. Bethberry is, as so often, entirely correct that we shouldn't get bogged down in a discussion of definitions -- using the correct words is important, sure, but I'd be far more interested in seeing what Tolkien's book does and how it does it, than worrying about what to label it.

So, whether we call Tolkien's style "myth," "allegory," "epic" or "Fred", what's the effect of that style on our interpretation of the whole?

In other words -- what Durelin said!

In an effort to open this thread up a bit further (and avoid heading once more down the canonicity road. . . ) -- I would really like to hear what other people think Tolkien is identifying in the Foreward as the important themes of his work. As has been pointed out here, this foreward was written about 10 years after the appearance of LotR: what in that time has Tolkien decided his book is 'about'??

[Kransha]

Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle

In an effort to open this thread up a bit further (and avoid heading once more down the canonicity road. . . ) -- I would really like to hear what other people think Tolkien is identifying in the Foreward as the important themes of his work. As has been pointed out here, this foreward was written about 10 years after the appearance of LotR: what in that time has Tolkien decided his book is 'about'??

At last, an attempt to slide oh-so-secretely back into this debate. The theme of this 'thematic epic' is again stated with uncharacteristic bluntness, and the odd lack of Prof T's usual eloquence. He states, in one of the first paragraphs of the Foreward, his generic motive, not quite as grand as some may have speculated, which I could use as inadvertant defense for my last ill-stated point. Mon amis, Observe:

The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of the readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or greatly move them.

So, thus is the desire of so many of the world's simple authors. The desire, at least that conveyed in the Foreward, was simply to be an appealing work of dramatic, and now considered epic, fiction. Holding attention was an easy feat, though I suppose the humble professor didn't consider his achievement so great. Now, as I said, and continue to say, again and again, with utter resoluteness, there have been those who think more, or less, or in between of Prof. T's motives may simply look to this phrase. It has a curt simplicity, does it not? Though it is phrased with so much less of the dramatic, and often melodramatic flourish we might be used to (i.e. to try his hand at a really long story: Does that not sound somewhat less contived than the accustomed), it has a similar beauty, considering. When one thinks that the man who 'contrived' such a world, had such a simple notion originally in mind. The mind boggles (or, at least, mine does).

P.S. Estelyn, I believe the above quoted was a misplaced paraphrasing of my own. The point was the one I'd intended. Thank you for pointing that out, since the whole tirade does sound foolish with the wrong quote attached to it. Wait, does that make an ounce of sense? I'm not entirely sure myself. Must rummage some more, for I have bewildered myself. The correction is there, but I know not where exactly there is.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Going back to the text of the Foreword, a side-note occurred to me on Tolkien's use of the word "ten-fingered" in connection with LotR. The book has two characters who were not "ten-fingered" - the Ringmaker and the Ringbearer! I wonder if he made that connection consciously?

"Ten-fingered" implies nimbleness, dexterity - the loss of a finger would diminish that. Now, to take that train of thought around a corner - would Tolkien identify himself with a "nine-fingered" person, since he is not "ten-fingered"?!

(I know - the opposite of "ten-fingered" is, where typing is concerned, "two-fingered". Still, the thought is intriguing, isn't it?!)

[davem]

It almost seems that Tolkien is saying its not about anything - or at least he's denying its about whatever any reader thinks its about. Whatever suggestion was made to him he seemed to take particular delight in disabusing them of the notion. In fact the only interpretation of it that he didn't reject was that it was a Christian work.

He 'seemed' not to want it to mean anything, or relate in any way to the primary world - at least the primary world as it was when he lived. Yet he acknowledged it could be applied to events in the primary world - yet every single attempt anyone made to apply it in such a way was instantly refuted. Applicability = a good thing in Tolkien's eyes, yet when people 'applied' what they found in the work to WW2, or to atomic power, he instantly corrects them & shows them they are 'wrong' to interpret it that way. Yet, if it is NOT applicable to 'x' or 'y', if Tolkien repeatedly refutes these interpretations as wrong he must have some idea of what it does mean. Why can't a reader 'apply' the events of the War of the Ring to the events of WW2? Why does Tolkien keep feeling it necessary to deny 'free' individuals interpretations? He doesn't want to 'dominate' the reader's interpretation, yet he'll tell them in no uncertain terms that they're WRONG if they claim its an allegory of WW2, or that the Ring is the Bomb. Maybe he's not attempting to dominate their thinking by presenting them with an allegory, but he'll damn sure dominate them by telling them what it doesn't mean, & showing them that their attempt to apply it is mistaken. He'll even construct his own 'allegory' (much though he hates it!) to show them what a real allegory of WW2 would be like.

In short, I don't believe him when he says its just a fairy tale & should be read by the individual reader who should take from it what they will, because he just keeps on telling them exactlywhat it doesn't mean & why they're all wrong. Why shouldn't I interpret it as being about WW2 if I want - why shouldn't I find such applicability in it? He isn't offering it to the reader to interpret as they want. He wants us to interpret it in a specific way, it seems to me, but he seems very reticent to tell us in exactly what way.

Sorry, being a bit controversial & provocative, but I don't believe he spent 12 years writing a story simply to entertain - if he had he wouldn't care how people interpreted it as long as it entertained them. He at least had a moral agenda - as Garth shows in Tolkien & the Great War, & he reinforced that 'agenda' in his letters, & in his references to men with chainsaws as 'Orcs', the devil as Sauron, etc. He won't stand by & see readers apply events in the book willy nilly. Those who destroy the natural world are 'mythologised' into Orcs, & then the term 'Orc' is 'applied' to those who destroy the natural world. And the reader is NOT free to apply the term or concept Orc to anyone behaving in any other way, not if Tolkien has anything to do with it.

He will attempt to 'purposely dominate' any reader who interprets the Ring as the Atomic Bomb, because he knows the Ring isn't the Bomb, its Sin, the Machine, will to power, etc. Its not 'strict allegory', of course, more a case of 'What's it got in its pocketses?Not string, but not nothing, precious'.

[Orofaniel]

As has been pointed out here, this foreword was written about 10 years after the appearance of LotR: what in that time has Tolkien decided his book is 'about'??

That is an interesting question. Although I've read the foreword several times, I cannot quite find an answer.

As Alatariel said, that Tolkien wanted to write a background history for his Elvish tongues is rather interesting. I think it's interesting because it shows how dedicated he was to his works. We all knew that he was dedicated, but by writing this I'm even more convinced. It's spectacular how he wanted to write a background history for the languges he created, if it really was why he wrote it.

It's written later in the foreword that Tolkien himself used a long time writing this story. He says:

In spite of the next five years I found that the story could not now 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.

This was certainly not a book that was written in a rush, something we already know. However, I think this means that the history wasn't fully definite before actually writing it. Since there is obviously a long time by each of his "writing-periods" I see nothing but that he has been a bit influenced by his own life - for then maybe to use that in his story? I'm not quite sure. He writes this later though:

An Author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Before I proceed with this post's intended subject, I should like to share with you an excerpt from Letter #109 (31 July 1947), in which Tolkien offers a concise and convincing resolution to the debate over allegory and applicability. In my opinion, Bêthberry has almost certainly hit the nail on the head by suggesting that Tolkien was trying to walk a very fine line between on the one hand, debunking the more egregiously foolish interpretations that had been placed on his work, and on the other letting his readers know that he was not about to tell them what The Lord of the Rings means.

Perhaps this is why the following comments are not echoed so explicitly in the foreword to the second edition, which is that normally printed with the work today (more on that later). In any case, they allow a great deal more latitude for the term 'allegory' than the later foreword, while more fully explaining why his book should not be considered as such.

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read 'just as a story'; and the better or more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory for our time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed.

That's quite enough allegory for me for one evening, so now I should like to provide an alternative to the foreword under discussion, if that isn't verging on the off-topic. I'm fortunate enough to have in my possession a copy of the first edition, the foreword to which I find in many ways to be more enjoyable than the later, more serious version. Bear with me: it's a long one.

This tale, which has grown almost to be a history of the great War of the Ring, is drawn for the most part from the memoirs of the renowned Hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo, as they are preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch. This chief monument to Hobbit-lore is so called because it was compiled, repeatedly copied, and enlarged and handed down in the family of the Fairbairns of Westmarch, descended from that Master Samwise of whom this tale has much to say.
I have supplemented the account of the Red Book, in places, with information derived from the surviving records of Gondor, notably the Book of the Kings; but in general, though I have omitted much, I have in this tale adhered more closely to the actual words and narrative of my original than in the previous selection from the Red Book, The Hobbit. That was drawn from the early chapters, composed originally by Bilbo himself. If 'composed' is a just word. Bilbo was not assidious, nor an orderly narrator, and his account is involved and discursive, and sometimes confused: faults that still appear in the Red Book, since the copiers were pious and careful, and altered very little.
The tale has been put into its present form in response to the many requests that I have received for further information about the history of the Third Age, and about Hobbits in particular. But since my children and others of their age, who first heard of the finding of the Ring, have grown older with the years, this book speaks more plainly of those darker things which lurked only on the borders of the earlier tale, but which have troubled Middle-earth in all its history. It is, in fact, not a book written for children at all; though many children will, of course, be interested in it, or parts of it, as they still are in the histories and legends of other times (especially in those not specially written for them).
I dedicate this book to all admirers of Bilbo, but especially to my sons and daughter, and to my friends the Inklings. To the Inklings, because they have already listened to it with a patience, and indeed with an interest, that almost leads me to suspect that they have hobbit-blood in their venerable ancestry. To my sons and my daughter for the same reason, and also because they have all helped me in the labours of composition. If 'composition' is a just word, and these pages do not deserve all that I have said about Bilbo's work.

For if the labour has been long (more than fourteen years), it has been neither orderly nor continuous. But I have not had Bilbo's leisure. Indeed much of that time has contained for me no leisure at all, and more than once for a whole year the dust has gathered on my unfinished pages. I only say this to explain to those who have waited for the book why they have had to wait so long. I have no reason to complain. I am surprised and delighted to find from numerous letters that so many people, both in England and across the Water, share my interest in this almost forgotten history; but it is not yet universally recognized as an important branch of study. It has indeed no obvious practical use, and those who go in for it can hardly expect to be assisted.
Much information, necessary and unnecessary, will be found in the Prologue. To complete it some maps are given, including one of the Shire that has been approved as reasonably correct by those Hobbits that still concern themselves with ancient history. At the end of the third volume will be found some abridged family-trees, which show how the Hobbits mentioned were related to one another, and what their ages were at the time when the story opens. There is an index of names and strange words with some explanations. And for those who like such lore in an appendix some brief account is given of the languages, alphabets and calendars that were used in the West-lands in the Third Age of Middle-earth. Those who do not need such information, or who do not wish for it, may neglect these pages; and the strange names that they meet they may, of course, pronounce as they like. Care has been given to their transcription from the original alphabets and some notes are offered on the intentions of the spelling adopted* But not all are interested in such matters, and many who are not may still find the account of those great and valiant deeds worth the reading. It was in that hope that I began the work of translating and selecting the stories of the Red Book, part of which are now presented to Men of a later Age, one almost as darkling and ominous as was the Third Age that ended with the great years 1418 and 1419 of the Shire long ago.

* There is a footnote at this point explaining some minor points of pronunciation that are covered in the Appendices.

*****

I find Tolkien very entertaining when he writes as translator and editor. I think that in the original foreword, although less is said in the way of guidance as to the book's meaning, one gets much more of a sense that this is intended to be an enjoyable story. The complicated details often beloved of fans are dismissed (although not so completely that they may be entirely overlooked) and the foreword itself becomes a part of the mythology, giving it shape and context and beginning, before even the prologue has been reached, to tell the story. The tributes to the Inklings and to his children therefore weave them in with the history of the text, making them almost a part of the story themselves. My time is short, so I shall leave you to make of this alternative (shall we say 'A'?) foreword what you will.

EDIT: My apologies to all those with whom I've just cross-posted. Hopefully I've managed not to break up the flow too much by taking so long to finish.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Squatter,

Thanks for putting the first foreward up.

My own response to the "two" forewards is similar to your own. (I have an old set of the first American edition with the funky covers.)

The two forewards leave such different impressions! In the later one, Tolkien is distanced from his audience. He is looking back on the publication of the book from a space of ten years. He talks about "meaning" and those who do not care for the book, the history of the actual publication and the issue of applicability versus allegory, almost as if he's trying to answer all those questions that had been sent to him in letters over so many years. I always wonder how much of this was in his head when he actually finished the book and how much floated in during that ten-year interval. It's as if the professor is giving a general audience a polite but somewhat formal lecture.

When I read the first foreward, I'm left with a different feeling. You actually have a sense that Tolkien really did not expect his book to generate a wide audience. Instead, he seems to be talking to people he personally knows -- family, friends, members of the Inklings, and to those "admirers of Bilbo" who'd already crossed his path before. He also addresses Bilbo as the original composer of the early chapters, maintaining the fiction that the book is truly history and derived from earlier sources. Whenever I read this forward, I feel as if a secret door had opened and I've somehow managed to slip inside a private club where Tolkien is complimenting the Inklings on their Hobbit ancestry!

Tolkien was so private about many aspects of his life. He was ambivalent about any possible biography, noting that such studies could yield only a "vain and false approach" in terms of his own work. He understandably did not like the attention showered on him by the crazy American college students of my day who came pounding on his door. So any personal glimpse we get of him, especially from his own pen, is indeed a treat. And that is how I read this early foreward. It carries a tiny hint of what the man himself was like: his natural grace and ease of expression when dealing with friends.

[Durelin]

These 'first American edition with the funky covers' (a very nice description, btw, Child!) – which funky covers do you speak of? I myself have several copies of each book of what I believe to be the ‘first American editions with the funky covers’, but I found that the foreword contained within was the same as the one found in my single movie cover copy… Now I feel that I have failed in being official!

But on to my ramblings…

I think some of what spurned Tolkien's 'lecturing' of the reader was all that thought in the ten years since he had first published the novels. He obviously had received a great number of comments, and most that reached him were probably bad ones, if at least attempts at constructive criticism. It is my thought that Tolkien, with all of this, and most likely because he did doubt that the book would be at all popular, he became a grumpy old man! This, in my mind, was not the wish of such a man as Tolkien: fame. Though, truly, he still seemed able to find amusement in much of the questions, popularity, and assumptions.

As has been pointed out here, this foreword was written about 10 years after the appearance of LotR: what in that time has Tolkien decided his book is 'about'??

Right, lets see about this...

I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues.

Interesting... He wrote for his own fulfillment, and did not believe that much of it would be wished to be read. Could this be applied to The Lord of the Rings itself? Or is this specifically speaking of the works later published, that he did not seem to think were worth publishing?

[quote]I went back to the sequel (the sequel = LotR), encouraged by requests from readers for more information concerning hobbits and their adventures.[/b]

Wow! This was the simple beginning? Obviously this 'sequel' became much more.

But the story was drawn irresistibly towards the older world, and became an account, as it were, of its end and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told.

The older world: He is referring to the 'older world' of his world. It seemed that the histories he had written for the Elvish languages were becoming a part of this sequel, and this told of an end to those histories. And when he speaks of it ending before it began, was he speaking of the entirety of The Lord of the Rings as an end to his history/mythology, or did he actually, physically write (or at least devise) the ending to LotR first? It really was an end, if not the end. Since he was writing a history/mythology of this world, there really wasn't any final end, except the end of time. This sequel to the Hobbit brought to an end the evils in Middle-Earth, and ended the old world. It brought the time of elven domain in Middle-Earth to a close, and left it as a world of Men. The old word had come to an end by the beginning of the Fourth Age (to the extent that the Roman Empire fell on a certain date).

In spite of the darkness of the next five years, I found that the story could not now be wholly abandoned, and I plodded on, mostly by night, till I stood by Balin's tomb in Moria.

I can just imagine him plodding along with the Fellowship on their journey! Odd that a dark time in his life paralleled with the darkness of the Fellowship's travels in Moria.

Continuing that idea...

It was almost a year later when I went on and so came to Lothlorien and the Great River...

Tolkien started writing again, and The Fellowship's spirits are lightened and overcome the loss of Gandalf. I wonder just how much his daily life affected his writing, since it was done in such great intervals...

The prime motive was the desire of the tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.

This has been described several times in the discussion, but it is smply a motive, and he has yet to speak of 'concerning...the meaning of the tale.'

As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches; but its main theme was settled from the outset of the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit

This 'main theme' he describes, though, is, of course, no enough for the reader. First of all, he does not even directly say what the main meaning is, only what it is outset from is described. These unexpected branches were inevitable, and made it inevitably impossible for any main theme that a reader might desire to be displayed to actually be present in the author's mind or purpose. What is in the mind of the reader, though, is up to the reader.

And so Tolkien points out...

I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

And so do I think, as well. Could Tolkien perhaps think of The Lord of the Rings as 'feigned history'? Or is he merely trying to include history in its many forms?

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex...

Well Tolkien just summed up my whole spiel in my former posts in the two above quotes...

...but as the years go by it seems now often forgot that to be caught in youth by 1914 was not less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939...the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever. It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender...and much further back.

Now he tells of what did influence him, to get rid of all assumptions that all these similes and metaphors must be referring to the large crisis in which it was published. But, going back to what Tolkien said concerning applicability, the readers were taking their experiences and interpreting and applying. What Tolkien did not want them to think was that their experiences necessarily paralleled with his own, and so were the only way to 'apply' his, or any authors, works. That borders on the most loathéd idea of allegory.

I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.

Ever in his witty way, Tolkien expresses the fact that he did not go that deeply and try and express his experiences in his writing. They merely influenced him, as inevitably they would, and so influence his writing.

Well, I went through it all, and probably overdid it on the quotes, but I still covered so very little. But now I am out of time, as Tolkien came to be.

But still, I shall return to continue at another time. It is very wise to take this in intervals, as well.

-Durelin

[Bêthberry]

Let me echo Child's applause for Squatter's quotation of the first British foreward. What a difference ten years (or so) makes!

Rather than repeat some of the very interesting differences between the two Forewards, what I would like to do is consider some of the well-taken contributions made by others, particularly as they relate to the question of history.

Orofaniel, you suggest, if I have understood your post correctly, that Tolkien, when faced with some of the 'fallow' periods in the writing, would have turned to his own life's experience for inspiration. This is, I think, tempting, but two points make me hesitate to accept such a possibility for a writer like Tolkien. This first is how he talked about 'what gets into the cauldron of story' in his essay "On Fairy Stories". I know we should limit our main discussion here to the text of the Forewards, but I think it is valuable to recognise that for Tolkien, story or narrative had a life or purpose or MO of its own, separate from any private personal experience. (Think of his funny line about the bishop and the banana peel.) If anything from his private life, which, as Child says, he
treated modestly and reticently, did get into the stew, he would, I am sure, include it only if it made sense in terms of the story, not in terms of personal self-expression. Certainly the way Tolkien defended the poem Beowulf as a unified work of art in his "Monsters and the Critics" essay suggests that he valued narrative as artistic expression rather than as personal expression. I think it is us in our post-Freud, post-psychoanalytical age that wants to reduce everything to an author's psyche, but this perspective is only a recent one of the last hundred years and does not represent the kind of understanding of philology or of ancient literature with which a scholar like Tolkien would be familiar.

That Letter provides interesting correlation, Alatariel Telemnar for Tolkien's claim in the Second Foreward that LOTR was "primarily linguistic in inspiration and begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues." Thanks for providing it here. Being a great fan of words and language myself, I am not sure that this necessarily downgrades the value of his desire to write a good story. It would think they would be complementary. He would want the best story to highlight or reflect his created languages to their best advantage. For Tolkien as a philologist, everything began with words and structures of language, which then moved out to create patterns and order in stories.

Durelin's point about history and epic can, I think, be considered in light of a very interesting historical discovery made in 1884. An entrepreneurial fellow by name of Heinrich Schleimann, acting apparently on suggestions from one Frank Calvert who owned property in Turkey, discovered the ruins of the ancient city of Troy from Homer's Iliad. There are, in fact, nine successive cities on the site. The discovery at the time astounded the nineteenth century world for it showed to people then that Homer's civilization was not entirely fictional but had some basis in historical fact. The new study of archeology was uncovered! It was into this exciting new world view that Tolkien was drawn, as he studied the histories and dvelopments of ancient languages. There was a scholarly impetus to making his mythology appear, as he claims in the First Foreward, as a true history, transcribed by several hands. After all, one way of understanding the word 'mythology' has been to call it linked narratives in a religion that was once believed in, as were the Greek and Roman pantheons of gods and goddesses or Norse ones as well.

Well, I hope this post adds a new flavouring of 'thyme' to the cauldron of our own discussion here. (covers ears to hide from the groans on that one)

Edit: cross posting with Durelin, so I've been referring to the earlier posts and not the most recent.

[Mister Underhill]

Thanks for that, Squatter. For my part, I'm glad we have both versions of the foreword. The first edition version is delightful for all the reasons mentioned, but I also like the glimpses inside the writing process that the second one affords.

I've always meant to start a thread that focused on Tolkien's working methods, and any such thread would certainly have to start here with the second edition foreword. I think it's great that Tolkien wrote the book mostly on instinct and without a clear outline. It seems you can divide writers into two groups -- those who plan, outline, and structure aforehand, and those who dive right in and trust to gut instinct, inspiration, and blind luck to carry them through. The latter method seems to me to be the most romantic and pure sort of writing. One can picture Tolkien in his study, bathed in the orange glow of a crackling fire, scratching away furiously into the deep watches of the night, pausing only to throw another log onto the hearth when the embers burned low.

And then, those long dry spells when "foresight had failed". Reminds me of some verse in Kipling:

This is the doom of the Makers -- their Daemon lives in their pen.
If he be absent or sleeping, they are even as other men.
But if he be utterly present, and they swerve not from his behest,
The word that he gives shall continue, whether in earnest or jest.

I also sense a note of wistfulness in the line, "...the tale was brought to its present end." Present end. As if somewhere deep inside him there's still that irresistible pull to revise and perfect it some more.

As to Tolkien's "lecture" on the meaning (or lack thereof) of the story, I think davem is right in that Tolkien falls prey a bit to the false modesty characteristic of authors' forewords (I could swear there's a letter in which Tolkien criticizes the practice, but for the life of me I can't find it). The most amusing specimen I know of is T.E. Lawrence's introduction to his Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

Half-way through the labour of an index to this book I recalled the practice of my ten years' study of history; and realized I had never used the index of a book fit to read. Who would insult his Decline and Fall, by consulting it just upon a specific point?

I am aware that my achievement as a writer falls short of every conception of the readable: but surely not so far as to make it my duty, like a Stubbs, to save readers the pain of an unnecessary page. The contents seem to me adequately finger-posted by this synopsis.

Maybe "false modesty" isn't quite right. I think he has an agenda of sorts when he protests that LotR is only a story. I'm reminded of Letter 131: "[The Arthurian mythos] is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal." I wish he would have elaborated, but I think we can get the gist of those reasons. To call attention to any meaning of his story is to transform it instantly into a sermon or a lecture, and so he says in effect, hey -- it's just a story; take from it what you will.

But lurking under that is some ambition. Letter 153: "I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments, that may tend to 'bring them home'."

EDIT: Cross-posting on this fast-paced discussion has put me after a string of posts leading in different directions. Apologies for disrupting the flow from me too.

[Saraphim]

Here I go...wish me luck. I am not terribly good at expressing my views on this subject.

Allegory. Alright, we know that Tolkien hated it. But he also said this:

An Author cannot of course remain wholly unnafected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadiquate and ambiguous

In this lovely sentence, Tolkien admits that his own personal experiences are imbued into what he writes, as it is with everyone who takes up a pen. He also says that it is impossible to find where and how a specific bit in the story correlates with the specific bit in the memory, be it him or anyone else trying.

I much prefer history, true or feined, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers

It is here that he gives us, the readers, free reign over what we make of the story. We don't read this book, this book reads us. It touches the parts in our mind, the thoughts and emotions and memories that are unique to everyone, and gives everyone a different perception on what things mean that are read, even though we read the same words.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Thank you very much for the text of the First Foreword, Squatter! We definitely want to discuss it as well, and comparing the two in light of the time that passed between the writing of them is highly interesting! It looks like the terms "First Foreword" (1950s) and "Second Foreword" (1960s) have evolved on this thread, so we'll continue to use them. I have added a footnote to the opening post on this thread, pointing the way to Squatter's post so that those who (like myself) only have the text to the Second Foreword can read and discuss it.