The Problem of Allegory and Tolkien.

Ah, the old problem of allegory.  Is The Lord of the Rings allegorical or not?  As defined, allegory is:  "A form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself.  Thus, it representations thing in the guise of another -- an abstraction in that of a concrete image.  [T]he order of words represents actions and characters, an they, in turn, represent ideas" (Handbook, 12).  In other words, all characters at all times represent something outside of the text.  For example, imagine a story in which a rat and a weasel fight over a crumb of cheese on a sinking ship.  If the rat represented a lawyer and the weasel a politician then the cheese could represent power or money and the sinking ship the government.  Or, if a more antiquated version is preferred, the rat as opportunist, the weasel as aristocrat or monarch, the cheese as (again) money or power and the sinking ship is the populace or the country.  These are allegories, the rat, weasel, cheese and ship represent ideas beyond the story of the sinking ship.  They represent ideas that exist in the "real" world beyond the fictitious world.

The trouble with allegory is that it can weigh down a work if not used properly and sometimes even when it is.Furthermore, a very long allegory can become tiring.  The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser is an example of a very long (and possibly tedious) allegory.  However, I shall not discuss the Faerie Queene at length as I have never read the work in its entirety and therefore do not wish to make mistakes by conjecture.  If The Lord of the Rings were an allegory the same characters would have to represent the same ideas throughout the work.  This would pose a problem as an allegorical figure would tend to be flat as it's life depends on an idea beyond itself not its own development.  Most importantly is Tolkien's own flat comment that "There is no 'allegory', moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all" (Letters, 232).   He further comments that "I dislike Allegory -- the conscious and intentional allegory . . . [But], of course, the more 'life' a story has the more readily it will be susceptible of allegorical interpretations" (Letters, 145).  Most importantly, because something is an allegory does not mean that it is no applicable to an idea.  The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of evil and good because both forces possess a plurality not usually found in allegories.  Evil possesses many face and levels of evil and every character has some evil and all evil began as good.   Many evil characters turned evil in mistaken attempts to do good for their people, friends or land.

W.H. Auden wrote that Tolkien's novel was about the Quest and implied that it possessed a pattern or purpose.  However, Tolkien retorts that "[m]en do go, and have in history gone on journeys and quests, without any intention of acting out allegories of life" and that the Quest, its length being irrelevant, does not necessarily demand a higher purpose but "a deliverance from the plantlike state of helpless passive sufferer, an exercise however small of will, and mobility -- and of curiosity, without which a rational mind becomes stultified . . . To a story-teller a journey is a marvelous device.  It provides a strong thread on which a multitude of things that he has in mind may be strung to make a new thing, various, unpredictable, and yet coherent.  My chief reason for using this form [the Quest] was simply technical" (239).

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