Notable among these critics are T.A. Shippey, who has described Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major as ‘autobiographical allegories, in which Tolkien commented more or less openly on his own intentions, feelings and career’ (J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), pp. 265–6), and Paul H. Kocher, to whom Leaf by Niggle was ‘an apparently simple but actually quite intricate vision of the struggles of an artist to create a fantasy world and of what happens to him and his work after death’, and who was tempted to describe Smith of Wootton Major as ‘Tolkien’s personal farewell to his art’ (Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (1972), pp. 161, 203). For Shippey’s views on allegory in Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major, see entries for those works later in the present volume.
In The Road to Middle-earth Shippey also considers whether *Farmer Giles of Ham could be an allegory:
It is very nearly irresistible to conclude that in his mixture of learning, bluff and sense the parson represents an idealised (Christian) philologist; in which case the proud tyrant of the middle Kingdom who disards his most trenchant blade looks very like literary criticism taking no notice of historical language study! … Farmer Giles would be the creative instinct, the rope [Giles takes with him to hunt the dragon] (like Tailbiter) philological science, the dragon the ancient world of the Northern imagination brooding on its treasure of lost lays, the Little Kingdom the fictional space which Tolkien hoped to carve out, make independent and inhabit. [2nd edn. 1992, p. 90]
But this is no more than an exercise, only semi-serious, and shows how easy it can be to interpret almost anything in allegorical terms.
In Keble College Chapel on 23 August 1992, in his sermon delivered at the Tolkien Centenary Conference, *Father Robert Murray remarked that
the power of stories to act as parables depends not on whether they are fictitious or factually true, but on whether they possess that potential universality which makes others find them applicable, through an imaginative perception of analogy, to other situations.
At this point you will have picked up one of Tolkien’s memorable words, ‘applicable’. He used it often when discussing the power of stories to suggest more to the reader than they say, without their being artificial allegories. … A good story need not have a ‘message’ yet Tolkien often acknowledged that most great stories, whether as wholes or in many particulars, abound in morally significant features which are applicable to the experience of readers far removed in time and place from the story-teller.
Tolkien had an ambivalent attitude to allegory, often expressing dislike of it; but he ‘could not, however, refuse allegory some place, provided it were kept in it. It could serve in an argument; there he was quite prepared to make up allegories and call them such, as he did twice in two pages of his great lecture on Beowulf [*Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics]’ (‘Sermon at Thanksgiving Service, Keble College Chapel, 23rd August 1992’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995), p. 18).
In the first of these Tolkien speaks of Beowulf as a work of literature critics have treated as an historical document – expressed allegorically, Poesis (poetry) superintended by Historia, Philologia, Mythologia, Archaeologia, and Laographia (history, philology, mythology, archaeology, folklore). His second allegory, with a similar aim, tells of a man who built a tower out of stone from an older hall, on which he could look out upon the sea, but his friends pushed it over to examine the stones rather than appreciate the purpose of its builder, while his descendants wondered why he had built a tower with the stone rather than use it to fix up his old house. Tom Shippey explores the latter allegory in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, suggesting that the old stone could stand for the remains of earlier poetry known to the Beowulf-poet (the builder of the tower, itself Beowulf); the house he lives in, partly built from the old stone, for Christian poetry contemporary with Beowulf (such as the *Old English Exodus); the friends who toppled the tower for critics who dissected Beowulf and pointed out ‘where the poem had gone wrong’; and the descendants for critics who ‘rejected dissectionism but said repeatedly that they wished the poet had written an epic about history rather than a mere fairy-tale about dragons and monsters’ (pp. 162–3).
See also, in our respective articles, Tolkien’s comments on the character Tom Bombadil relative to allegory in *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and his views in regard to allegory and symbolism in *Pearl.
The ‘Alphabet of Dairon’. Brief text on the runes devised by the Danian Elves of Beleriand, published in *The Treason of Isengard (1989), pp. 454–5. Their most elaborated form was the ‘Runes of Moria’, ‘long in use among the Dwarves, and most of the inscriptions employing it survived in the halls and chambers of Moria’ (p. 455).
*Christopher Tolkien dates the writing of this text to c. 1937, but notes that his father made additions substantially later. See also *Writing systems.
Alphabets see Writing systems
Aman. Originally the beginning of the introductory text to *Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (c. 1959), Aman was removed from that work to stand alone. Only one manuscript is extant, written with little hesitation or correction. *Christopher Tolkien published it, with notes and commentary, as text XI in the section ‘Myths Transformed’ in *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), pp. 424–31.
SYNOPSIS
In this the Valian Year is redefined, in accordance with cosmogonic changes Tolkien contemplated making to the *‘Silmarillion’ in later life: it is no longer based on the waxing and waning of the Two Trees, but on the Valar’s perception of the slow ageing of Arda. Elves are said to be able to live in Aman, the Blessed Realm of Tolkien’s mythology, because their speed of growth was in accord with the slow rate with which other living things aged in Aman. ‘For in Aman the world appeared to them as it does to Men on Earth, but without the shadow of death soon to come. Whereas on Earth to them all things in comparison with themselves were fleeting, swift to change and die or pass away, in Aman they endured and did not so soon cheat love with their mortality’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 426). In Middle-earth the Elves’ hröar (bodies, singular hröa) weakened or faded, even if very slowly, until only their longeval fëar (spirit, singular fëa) remained, whereas in Aman these aged at the same rate, and ‘the Eldar that remained in the Blessed Realm endured in full maturity, and in undimmed power of body and spirit conjoined for ages beyond our mortal comprehension’ (p. 427).
Tolkien also considered, under the (later) subheading ‘Aman and Mortal Men’, what would have happened to a Man if he had been allowed to live in Aman. The Valar could not alter his nature; he would remain mortal. Even in a life of a hundred years, little would seem to change or age in the land about him. His mortality would thus seem an even greater burden: ‘he would become filled with envy, deeming himself a victim of injustice. … He would not value what he had, but feeling that he was among the least and most despised of all creatures, he would grow soon to contemn his manhood, and hate those more richly endowed. He would not escape the fear and sorrow of his swift mortality that is his lot upon Earth … but would be burdened by it unbearably to the loss of all delight’ (p. 428).
Possibly