WWII and LOTR..Compare/Contrast

[radagastly]

I think Bethberry has it right. Tolkien rejected allegory for the sake of timelessness. He didn't want his personal experiences to influence peoples "applicability" of his work. While World War Two may have had a personal impact on Tolkien's telling (and creating) of this story, he did not want (it seems to me) that experience to impact the reception of the story as a story. He wanted (like most authors) for the readers to bring their own experience into the story and find what lessons or meaning they encountered or discovered. Isn't that any artist's hope?

Bergil:
I (and Tolkien) dispise allegory. what's more, the end results of the wars were opposite. the corruption in gondor ended with the War Of The Ring, but World War 2 started the moral fall of the United States (pet theory, no offence meant to Americans).

Being an American, I suppose I should challenge this, but I really can't. I can only say that this moral decay is shared across the rest of the western world. This is probably more a discussion for PM's or chat than here, though.

I must take Tolkien at his word, and say that the war of the Ring is not World War Two, despite the similarities the reader may bring to it.

[Boromir88]

I must take Tolkien at his word, and say that the war of the Ring is not World War Two, despite the similarities the reader may bring to it.

I agree and I think it goes along with what davem said earlier. Tolkien didn't intentionally write allegories in his stories, but you can find allegories in them. Simply, because I think it seems more general.

It's sort of like how you can always connect atleast one of the Seven Deadly sins to a bad guy, or one of the Seven Heavenly virtues to a good guy. You can connect things in LOTR and say, hey that sounds an awful like this. For instance, the example I used with Saruman destroying nature and acting like the industrial/scientific brain of his day. Wanting to know how things work, and how to improve.

Authors do intentionally use allegories. I know Henry James for one based his character Daisy in Turn of the Screw off his wife. Where I don't think Tolkien purposefully put references to political, social...etc issues at the time. But, this is what he grew up around.

[Bêthberry]

I forgot to thank Gurthang for providing that link to the earlier discussion of this topic. Good work! That thread contains HI's very useful quotation of Tolkien's letter, dated 31 July 1947, about this issue. Tolkien's letters are a wonderful read, full of shrewd perception, subtle analysis, and great wit. Even when I disagree with him!

I want to go back to Tolkien's hypothesis in the Forword, because I think it is a fascinating observation on the victors in WWII.

Originally Posted by Tolkien, Forword to the Second Edition

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it [ie, the real war] 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.

Hmm. Hmmm.

[Bergil]

for example, the last chapter of the humerous book No Coins, Please by Gordon Korman proves a lot of my (not written here) arguments about the fall of the united states/the world and the danger of efifciancy, but Korman surely never thought about that well righting that. I was once told that the only books anyone had to read were Dr. Seuss's Are You My Mother and The Cat In The Hat, because the former was about the search for love and the latter about "order and chaos" vs. "freedom and enslavement". I don't agree, but it proves my point. I could (with reserch) find a way to beleivably cry "Allegory" about any of those 3 (and I almost believe some scholers do something like that). Besides, we all agree that Tolkien was smart enough to make up his own plot, this is just like the people who say Shakespeare didn't write his own plays.

[Rumil]

Two particular points which I noticed regarding LoTR and WWII were;-

Tolkien states that he was 'stuck' with the story on reaching Balin's tomb during the dark days of 1941. I imagine that the war must have understandably depressed and agitated JRRT, especially with his son serving abroad, and that he lost the appetite to continue his tale. If I remember, he started again later in 1942, where the situation had improved somewhat in that the USA and USSR were now our allies and Hitler looked to be stoppable. I wonder if it is possible (HoME readers?) to relate the events in the real war to the War of the Rings in respect of the time each occurred / was written? If the Nazis had won perhaps LoTR would have ended with the victory of Sauron and now be banned as anti-Fascist allegory!

I've always been reminded of the atomic bomb explosion when the Fall of Barad-Dur is described, and Tolkien, in the passage above, seems to me to imply a link between 'the ring' and 'the bomb'. Could anyone say when the Fall of Barad-Dur was written (or foreshadowed!), before or after Hiroshima?