Allegory. In July 1947 *Rayner Unwin wrote of *The Lord of the Rings (then still in manuscript) that ‘the struggle between darkness and light’ sometimes seemed to leave ‘the story proper to become pure allegory’ (quoted in Letters, pp. 119–20). Tolkien was quick to advise Rayner’s father, publisher *Stanley Unwin, that he should
not let Rayner suspect ‘Allegory’. There is a ‘moral’, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals – they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them 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 it can be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own 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 things existed. [31 July 1947, Letters, p. 121]
In a ?late 1951 letter to *Milton Waldman Tolkien made it clear that for him, allegory was something deliberately introduced into a work by the author: ‘I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language’ (Letters, p. 145). The *Oxford English Dictionary agrees with this definition: there allegory is the ‘description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance’, or ‘an instance of such description: a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or continued metaphor’. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (8th edn., 1990) defined the term more succinctly: ‘a story, play, poem, picture, etc. in which the meaning or message is represented symbolically’, or ‘the use of such symbols’. But later in Oxford dictionaries the definition underwent a subtle change, to ‘a story, poem or picture which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one’. This seems to suggest that a work can be an allegory without the intent of its creator, if it is so interpreted by the reader, and may reflect a tendency in contemporary literary criticism to prefer a reader’s or critic’s opinions to the author’s intentions (or what he claims were his intentions).
When The Lord of the Rings was first published many readers wrote to ask Tolkien what the story meant, or to describe their own interpretations. These queries led to an autobiographical statement written in 1955, in which Tolkien felt it necessary to state that The Lord of the Rings ‘is not “about” anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political’ (Letters, p. 220). He thought that many readers misunderstood the meaning of the word allegory, and c. 1955 wrote to G.E. Selby: ‘There is, of course, no “allegory” at all in [The Lord of the Rings]. But people are very confused about this word, and seem to mix it up with “significance” or relevance’ (quoted in Sotheby Parke Bernet, Catalogue of Nineteenth Century and Modern First Editions, Presentation Copies, Autograph Letters and Literary Manuscripts, London, 28–9 July 1977, p. 110). The word he came to prefer, to describe what readers saw, was applicability. In a letter to Herbert Schiro on 17 November 1957 he wrote: ‘There is no “symbolism” or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort “five wizards = five senses” is wholly foreign to my way of thinking. … To ask if the Orcs “are” Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs. That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is’ (Letters, p. 262).
Tolkien felt so strongly about the matter that in 1965 he devoted space to it in his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. There he explained at length that much of the work, which some critics had supposed to be inspired by the Second World War and in some respects an allegory of it, in fact had been written before the war began.
As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical or topical … its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as a link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if the disaster had been averted. …
The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it 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. …
Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or view of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. 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.
The fact that readers today can find relevance in The Lord of the Rings to current situations unknown to Tolkien emphasizes that applicability has a wider range than allegory, and can indeed originate in the mind of the reader. *C.S. Lewis approached the heart of the matter when, after reading part of Tolkien’s *Lay of Leithian, he wrote to him on 7 December 1929: ‘The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of a myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader’ (quoted in *The Lays of Beleriand, p. 151). And in a letter to Lucy Matthews about The Lord of the Rings Lewis wrote: ‘A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place. I think the something is “the whole quality of life as we actually experience it”’ (11 September 1958, C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3 (2006), p. 971).
Despite Tolkien’s statement that he ‘cordially dislike[d] allegory in all its manifestations’, his stories *Leaf by Niggle and *Smith of Wootton Major seem to include allegorical elements. It is not clear in either case, however, that Tolkien set out consciously to create an allegory. His accounts of the writing of Leaf by Niggle suggest that it was entirely unplanned: ‘I woke up one morning … with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get it down, and then copy out. I am not aware of ever “thinking” of the story or composing it in the ordinary sense’ (letter to Stanley Unwin, ?18 March 1945, Letters, p. 113).
Much later, he called the story ‘not really or properly an “allegory” so much as “mythical”. For Niggle is meant to be a real mixed-quality person and not an “allegory” of any single vice or virtue’ (letter to *Jane Neave, 8–9 September 1962, Letters, pp. 320–1). And yet in a draft letter to Peter Hastings in September 1954 he wrote: ‘I tried to show allegorically how that [*sub-creation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my “purgatorial” story Leaf by Niggle’ (Letters, p. 195).
In regard to Smith of Wootton Major, as part of prefatory comments to a reading of the story at Blackfriars, Oxford, in October