Tolkien and Catholic Saints

[burrahobbit]

mark12_30, you may have been able to deduce from my posts here that I particularly dislike toads, and you would be correct in this. But I havent written anything that I meant in a roundabout way to represent my dislike or toads.

Bethberry,

burrahobbit, this stricture against Allegory is an old chestnut always dragged out whenever the possibility of figuration is discussed in Tolkien's work.

That is because it is a stricture SET DOWN BY THE AUTHOR, and is not the interpretation of anybody else. It is an explicitly stated by the author that he abhors allegory. I think that pretty much mens that he didn't use it. I know, for instance, that I don't use toads for anything.

I take it to refer strictly to the genre of Allegory, like C.S. Lewis'[...]. I don't think it can be taken to dismiss all kinds of symbolic interpretations.

YOU=WRONG.

But I cordially dislike allegory <u>in all its manifestations</u>, and always have since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

You know, that seems to apply to more than just the Lewis sort of thing. That is from the foreword to LotR, btw. There is a bunch there about how LotR is not not allegory in the least bit. I would be well off quoting all of it, but that bit sums it all up very well.

[ June 16, 2002: Message edited by: burrahobbit ]