The Only Perfect Allegory is a Real Life: Tolkien On His Writing

When discussing books and stories, many people like to say, "The author meant to say this," or "The author was referring to this historical event."

If you said this kind of thing to J.R.R Tolkien about his Middle-Earth tales, he might have bopped you on the head with his long-stemmed pipe, or simply slapped you across the face and cursed you in ancient Finnish.

I know that Tolkien did not appreciate those who tried to extrapolate lessons from his stories. He wrote so many times in his Letters:

The following is a quote from a letter to Tolkien's publisher Stanley Unwin regarding a sequel to The Hobbit, which I assume is the Fellowship of the Ring. This letter was written in 1937, as Germany was disenfranchising Jews and gearing up for war. Tolkien was explaining to the less whimsical nature of the sequel: 

The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it (The Hobbit). Though it is not an 'allegory'. (I have already had one letter from America asking for an authoritative exposition of the allegory of The Hobbit).

What does it mean to contain universals, yet not represent them as such? Regarding an early version of FOTR in which his publisher Rayner Unwin expressed that the darker nature of this Hobbit sequel was an allegory of the eternal battle between light and dark:

But in spite of this, do 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...the only perfect allegory is a real life.

After the Unwin brothers refused to publish The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings as a single volume, which would have run over 2000 pages by my guess, Tolkien approached some dude named Milt Waldman about doing so.

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more 'life' a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.) 

re: Tom Bombadil (my favorite Tolkien character)

I do not mean him to be an allegory – or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name – 

re: LOTR

The Lord of the Rings as a story was finished so long  ago now that I can take a largelyimpersonal view of it, and find 'interpretations' quite amusing; even those that I might make myself,which are mostly post scriptum: I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point. 

To the editor of the New Republic re: LOTR:

Thank you for your letter. I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed is thekey-word. For it was written to amuse (in the highest sense): to be readable. There is no 'allegory',moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all. 

And this:

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. There were five wizards and that is just a
unique part of history. 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....But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!

On Sauron as an allegory for Stalin:

There is no 'perhaps' about it.  I utterly repudiate any such 'reading', which angers me. The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought. 

 To Tolkien, The Hobbit was a whimsical tale about an individual placed in certain situations. That is all.