Tolkien and Allegory
(avg. read time: 13–25 mins.)
The Lord of the Rings has often been subjected to allegorical interpretation. Many readers wrote to him asking him if it was an allegory of something, usually related to the Second World War, given the time of its writing and publication. His comments on allegory have also often been noted in the context of discussions about the Christian (generally)/Catholic (specifically) character of his work, and so they will be relevant to explore here. His overall response to his readers prompted a kind of summary statement in his foreword to the second edition of LOTR in 1966. In his words:
As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical…. Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels.
The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion….
Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views 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 or 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.1
Readers who have sought to rebuke all attempts at any kind of correspondence between Tolkien’s work and the Bible, Christian theology, or Christian praxis have been keen to note the sentence beginning with “But I cordially dislike allegory,” and it has also been used more broadly to rebuke any claims to allegory. Unfortunately, this has also led to overstatement in various readers’ circles that Tolkien hated allegory, which is obviously not what he said. Others have “cordially” disregarded this statement from Tolkien and have still sought to hold fast to this or that claim of allegory in Tolkien’s story. Tolkien himself could be prone to overstatement in this fashion, as he could certainly use allegory as a rhetorical device in his famous essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Scholars have also noted his short stories “Leaf by Niggle” and “Smith of Wootton Major” as allegories, but Tolkien himself did not regard these stories as allegories properly speaking.2 Even so, he would say in Letter #153 about “Leaf by Niggle” that “I tried to show allegorically how that [subcreation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my ‘purgatorial’ story Leaf by Niggle.”
It is unsurprising that there has been confusion on this subject. Tolkien is not entirely clear or consistent in his use of “allegory” and “allegorical,” and his statements can be ambiguous. What makes the matter all the more difficult is that those who respond to statements like the one in Tolkien’s foreword do not necessarily have a clear idea of what they themselves mean when referring to allegory, so that the category becomes so broad as to mean anything and (thus) nothing. This is something I observed about a book on Tolkien’s work that I was rather critical of. The following definitions appear in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary:
The use of symbols in a story, picture, etc., to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one; symbolic representation. Also: the interpretation of this.
A story, picture, etc., which uses symbols to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one; a symbolic representation; an extended or continued metaphor.
A character or figure that symbolically represents someone or something else; an emblem, a symbol.
The online Cambridge Dictionary has the following:
A story, play, poem, picture, or other work in which the characters and events represent particular qualities or ideas that relate to morals, religion, or politics.
Likewise, the online Merriam-Webster says this:
The expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence
A symbolic representation
One can easily understand how someone working with one of these definitions in mind could misunderstand someone using another. While allegory is definitely a kind of representation, so that the thing signified is something other than the sign used, and the meaning is something other than what one says, the question remains of what one means by “representation.” On the one hand, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress uses figures with rather apparent names to stand in for characteristics of whatever they are named after, and it is among the clearest examples of allegory as a means of overarching storytelling that one can find. On the other hand, any character in any story can be said to exemplify certain characteristics and so, in that sense, could be taken to “represent” whatever they exemplify by sheer fact of embodying and enacting the characteristic in question. But does that mean it is proper to describe such a feature of a narrative as allegory?
Consideration of what constitutes allegory should also involve consideration of purpose. In that a story is an allegory, it should achieve some purpose that is in line with the author’s purpose in making the story an allegory. Craig Blomberg notes, “Contemporary analysis largely agrees that there are at least three primary functions of allegory: (a) to illustrate a viewpoint in an artistic and educational way, (b) to keep its message from being immediately clear to all its hearers or readers without further reflection and (c) to win over its audience to accept a particular set of beliefs or act in a certain way.”3 These purposes could be applied to allegories like the parables of Jesus (on which, see here), but do they fit a narrative like Tolkien’s?
Much, much more could be written on the matter of allegory, its usage, the history of difficulties surrounding it, and so on, but we need to narrow our focus. We must consider what Tolkien himself had to say on the matter that could possibly illuminate the relationship of his story with allegory. I will begin with his statement that is most helpful for giving us a theoretical framework to work with for how he understands allegory, and then I will proceed through his letters.
His most extensive comment on the matter of allegory comes in an introduction he composed for his translation of the poem Pearl. Tolkien notes that there was debate that had been going on for only a couple of decades at the time he wrote concerning whether this poem was an elegy on the death of the author’s daughter, his “pearl,” or if it was an allegory. He then explains why he wants to distinguish between allegory and symbolism (in contrast to the earlier definitions):
it is proper, or at least useful, to limit allegory to narrative, to an account (however short) of events; and symbolism to the use of visible signs or things to represent other things or ideas. Pearls were a symbol of purity that especially appealed to the imagination of the Middle Ages (and notably of the fourteenth century); but this does not make a person who wears pearls, or even one who is called Pearl, or Margaret,4 into an allegorical figure. To be an ‘allegory’ a poem must as a whole, and with fair consistency, describe in other terms some event or process; its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end. There are minor allegories within Pearl; the parable of the workers in the vineyard (stanzas 42–49) is a self-contained allegory; and the opening stanzas of the poem, where the pearl slips from the poet’s hand through the grass to the ground, is an allegory in little of the child’s death and burial. But an allegorical description of an event does not make that event itself allegorical. And this initial use is only one of the many applications of the pearl symbol, intelligible if the reference of the poem is personal, incoherent if one seeks for total allegory. For there are a number of precise details in Pearl that cannot be subordinated to any general allegorical interpretation, and these details are of special importance since they relate to the central figure, the maiden of the vision, in whom, if anywhere, the allegory should be concentrated and without disturbance.5
By this description, one can clearly see why Tolkien would deny that his work constituted allegory. He does not consistently describe by means of other terms than what is stated “some event or process,” and no design of his was directed by the notion that “its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end” of referring to the other thing in question.
Moreover, as Tolkien’s foreword indicates, he thinks that allegories are allegories by authorial purpose. If certain elements in the story happen to evoke something outside the scope of the story, show a resemblance thereto, or prove to be applicable to something outside of the story, he does not consider that allegory. This point of his foreword summarizes points he made in several of his letters.
One such example similar to his foreword is a letter he wrote to Charles Calleja the same year the second edition of LOTR was published, “Being influenced by, or making use of, events or experience of one’s life (which is inevitable) has nothing to do with allegory.”6 This is because, again, his story is not meant to “stand for” or be a sign for signifying those things other than what is in the story. He had stated in a letter he sent to G. E. Selby in 1955/1956, “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’,” which uses slightly different terminology from his foreword.7 Around that same time, he wrote in a letter to Derrick Parnum that his story was simply meant to be a good tale for his own satisfaction of needing literature of its kind, “It is not an ‘allegory’, all the same. Though one soon discovers that the more you put into any story the more capable it becomes of being generally or particularly applied to other matters … It was imagined as a ‘plot’, and largely written before nuclear physics became political and mixed up with power.”8 Letter #205 features Tolkien’s roundabout denial to a question of if the story was allegory, wherein he states a more specific version of this general idea, “Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.” He writes similarly in 1963 in response to Baronne A. Baeyens’s proper perception that the story is “in no way an ‘allegory’—in any sense of that elusive and misunderstood word; but mythical-historical.” He says that he simply tried to write a good story that would indulge his “personal pleasure in history, languages, and ‘landscape’—and trees.” But he laments how his book has been analyzed and how there are so many people who cannot just enjoy anything, “And still more who cannot distinguish between allegorical intention and ‘applicability’ (by the reader).”9
We see him continue to make use in his later writings of distinction between intentional/conscious allegory, on the one hand, and “applicability,” on the other. He says in Letter #203 to Herbert Schiro, after denying that there was any conscious allegory in his story, “That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is.” After another denial that his story was allegory in Letter #215 to Walter Allen, he notes, “I do not like allegory (properly so called: most readers appear to confuse it with significance or applicability) but that is a matter too long to deal with here.” In his statement that Smith of Wootton Major is not a proper allegory, he says, “Its primary purpose is itself, and any applications it or parts of it may have for individual hearers are incidental. I dislike real allegory in which the application is the author’s own and is meant to dominate you. I prefer the freedom of the hearer or reader.”10
Several other times, he simply denied his work was allegorical:
His earliest recorded denial is in Letter #34, where he insisted that The Hobbit is not an allegory. He even mentions that he received a letter from America asking for an “authoritative exposition of the allegory of The Hobbit.” Again, this fits with his notion of allegory proper being the product of design, a design that he lacked.
He told his reader, Rayner Unwin, not to suspect allegory in LOTR, simply because there was a “moral” to it in its portrayal of the struggles of darkness and light (Letter #109).
He writes in Letter #163 to W. H. Auden of how he is amused by various interpretations of his work, excepting those “in the mode of simple allegory: that is, the particular and topical.”
He would say in another letter to Auden that his story never attempts to allegorize his experience of life (Letter #183).
He tells Houghton Mifflin that his story is not about anything other than itself, which is to say “it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political” (Letter #165; emphasis original).
Likewise, he wrote to Michael Straight in Letter #181, “There is no ‘allegory’, moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all.” This is because it is a fairy story, which has a distinct mode of reflecting truth from allegory (or satire or forms of “realism” for that matter). Connections can certainly be made between his story and things outside of it, and a story that is not built on mere escapism will make some connection with the human condition, “So something of the teller's own reflections and ‘values’ will inevitably get worked in. This is not the same as allegory. We all, in groups or as individuals, exemplify general principles; but we do not represent them” (emphases original). The latter is the mode of allegory proper, as Tolkien often articulated it, while the former is similar to what he will refer to elsewhere as people “containing” universals.
He says in Letter #203, “There is no ‘symbolism’ or conscious allegory in my story” (emphasis original).
In a way similar to his letter to Chris Calleja and Letter #181, he remarks in Letter #211 to Rhona Beare that his tale is built on or out of certain beliefs of his as a Roman Catholic, “but is not an allegory of them (or anything else) and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them.”11
Likewise, he says in Letter #215 that he has in his story “no didactic purpose, and no allegorical intent.”
Tolkien insisted in a letter to Maria Mroczkowska that he did not have an “analytical or allegorical mind.” Therefore, he had to make sure that his Secondary World had deep historical roots in itself, rather than relying on some correspondence with an external object.12 He said much the same thing to Naomi Mitchison in Letter #144 that his setting is mythical and not allegorical, since “my mind does not work allegorically.” Relatedly, the aforementioned Letter #203 features Tolkien saying, “Allegory of the sort ‘five wizards = five senses’ is wholly foreign to my way of thinking.” He insisted in Letter #229 to Allen & Unwin that one allegorical reading linking Sauron and Stalin angered him and that, “Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought.”
Also consistent with his foreword is how he would claim on multiple occasions to dislike allegory. He mentions offhandedly to Christopher in Letter #60 that he did not care much for the concluding chapter of C. S. Lewis’s moral allegory of lost souls visiting heaven (which eventually became The Great Divorce). He will mention the allegory again in Letter #69 without such a comment. Of course, this does not specifically ground his distaste in its allegorical quality. He says this more directly in Letter #131 to Milton Waldman, telling him, “I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.” The language is presumably allegorical because it goes beyond the scope of the story and appeals to what Tolkien elsewhere calls “universals” in explaining the story in those other terms. We saw another such statement of his dislike for allegory in Letter #215. In a more roundabout fashion, he says in Letter #262, “I am not naturally attracted (in fact much the reverse) by allegory, mystical or moral.” In an unpublished letter to Eileen Elgar in which he comments on Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, he says, “I do not like ‘allegory’, and least of all religious allegory of this kind.”13 However, in making this comment, Tolkien shows how he could be mistaken about what constitutes allegory. He is hardly alone in this error when it comes to The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in particular, but those stories are not allegories by Tolkien’s definition. Lewis considered the initial story—and, by extension to some degree, the others—to be “supposals,” as in exploring what the gospel story would look like supposing it took place in another world with the features given (see here for more).
This does not mean there are no elements in Tolkien’s story that he was not willing to describe as allegory. Tolkien described the story of Aragorn and Arwen in an unpublished letter to Rayner Unwin as, “an allegory of naked hope.”14 He also admitted allegory as a possible description of Frodo and Bilbo’s fate in Letter #131 when he says that they had an Arthurian ending, “in which it is, of course, not made explicit whether this is an ‘allegory’ of death, or a mode of healing and restoration leading to a return.” In these cases, “allegory” appears to be used in a way like “symbol,” as in a footnote of his Letter #131 where he writes on the “symbolical or allegorical significance” of the Light of Valinor. Thus he also writes in Letter #153 of the desire of the Eregion Elves being, “an ‘allegory’ if you like of a love of machinery, and technical devices.” Of course, the examples from Letters #131 and #153 present something of an ambiguity, since he puts “allegory” in quotes in such a way that he is suggesting that the aspects of his story could be applied this way, almost as if he is giving into the failure to distinguish between allegory and application, but only by putting “allegory” in quotes. It should also be noted that these comments come from times before he was more frequently insistent on distinguishing the two in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
Moreover, there are yet other times when Tolkien uses “allegory” in quite different ways from the examples that align more directly with his foreword. In Letter #71 he said to Christopher, “Yes, I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in ‘realistic’ fiction: your vigorous words well describe the tribe; only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For ‘romance’ has grown out of ‘allegory’, and its wars are still derived from the ‘inner war’ of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other.” This is something closer to how the ancient and medieval Christians wrote of the allegorical sense of Scripture as that which was spiritual and mystical. Tolkien is here referring to larger, spiritual realities in which particular conflicts partake/participate as examples. Similarly, he could speak of “the War” in Letter #101 (also addressed to Christopher), when he said, “the War is not over (and the one that is, or the part of it, has largely been lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint.”
Similarly, in Letter #109, which features one of Tolkien’s denials that his story is an allegory, he noted:
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.
Notice how Tolkien distinguishes between the quality of an allegorical narrative in which individuals represent universals—that higher plane to which the allegory purposefully points—and the sheer fact that all individuals in any kind of story/history “contain” universals in that they embody and exemplify in varying ways the “Pattern” in which they participate by living.
He then commented in Letter #109 on the relationship between Allegory and Story, the latter of which is what he aimed to write:
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 can it 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 out 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 a thing existed.
He made a similar statement in Letter #131 that “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.”15 In another letter where he indicated his displeasure with allegorical interpretations of his work—namely, Letter #163—he nevertheless says, “In a larger sense, it is I suppose impossible to write any ‘story’ that is not allegorical in proportion as it ‘comes to life’; since each of us is an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life.”
We see varying senses drawn together as well in Letter #153 when Tolkien commented on Tom Bombadil. He insists that he did not intend for him to be an allegory—that is, allegory in the proper narrative sense of the word for Tolkien—for he would not have given him such a name. But if one can put “allegory” in quotes, as in other instances seen previously, he says that this is the only way of “exhibiting certain functions,” and that Tom can be described as, “an ‘allegory’ or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing' anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture” (emphases original). While Tom is not an allegory in the narrative sense as set out in his exposition on Pearl, Tom is an “allegory” in the sense that exemplars “contain” universals and embody them particularly well. This sense of allegory as example/exemplar seems to be behind how Tolkien describes “Leaf by Niggle” in this letter: “I tried to show allegorically how that [subcreation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my ‘purgatorial’ story Leaf by Niggle.” If that is so, it could explain how this statement squares with his denial of its character as allegory in Letter #241, “It is 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.” In this case, he is referring to what he considers a proper allegorical narrative, as opposed to the earlier letter. That is, if he did not simply change his understanding of the story or revise his description to be more precise. Similarly, the aforementioned Letter #181 features Tolkien having one sense of allegory in mind when he denies that his story is that and he uses the language of exemplification to distinguish from allegorical representation, even though we have seen here how in other contexts he uses “allegory” in a fashion to refer to exemplification.
Letter #186 to Joanna de Bortadano has perhaps been the text most often considered to give license to allegorical interpretation because Tolkien opened the letter with, “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done” (emphasis original). The way he writes could easily be taken to mean that he did intend LOTR to be an allegory after all, since the opening says that his story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but, by implication, is an allegory of Power. That is the most straightforward way to understand the syntax. Of course, this is particularly linked with the One Ring, about which Tolkien had already said elsewhere that one could, if one liked, make the Ring into an allegory. But that is a matter of application in realizing the connections of the Ring with more enduring matters outside of the scope of the story. One can obviously see from later letters than this one in 1956 (and from the fact that his foreword was published ten years after this letter) that this was not Tolkien changing his tune on his story being an allegory the whole time. He was simply speaking more loosely here. It could also be that he was allowing the implication of allegory here because he is referring to the “universal,” the larger spiritual theme in which his work participates by virtue of engaging the idea of Power. Moreover, he even went on to say in this same letter that Power is not a central matter in his story, but those concern Death and Immortality (he says much the same in Letter #211), as well as the themes of how the wheels of the world are turned by the hands of the unknown and weak (or, as he said in Letter #131, “without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless”).
Tolkien regularly insisted that the story of LOTR, as well as others he wrote, was not an allegorical narrative. That is to say that he was not conscious of intentionally making connections between his story and matters outside of it. He did not consistently describe by means of other terms than what is stated “some event or process,” and no design of his was directed by the notion that “its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end” of referring to the other thing in question. On the one hand, he maintained that the story had much applicability for his readers to explore using their own imaginations, but he also maintained that this should not be confused with allegory. On the other hand, he acknowledged that there were connections between elements outside of his story, such as his Christian faith, so that they contributed to his sub-creative project, but that this also should not be construed as allegory so that elements of his story simply represented these things his story was connected to. However, there were other times that he used the terminology of allegory in different ways that could lead to confusion about his more direct statements. There were even times he could be as mistaken as anyone else about what does and does not constitute allegory, as in his view of Lewis’s work in Narnia. But I have tried to show how it is possible for his views to be understood more coherently and consistently, even if his terminological usage is not always so, and even though he did make some overstatements. In any case, it appears that he was more consistent in his rejection of allegory as a description of LOTR in his later writings, which his foreword is consonant with as something he wrote in his 70s. And I think it is fair to say that the aforementioned purposes of conscious allegory do not apply to Tolkien’s fiction.
In line with Tolkien’s statements, my own work has not been one of suggesting allegory, despite what he said. That would be to adopt a different notion of what allegorical narrative is than what Tolkien said in his denials of his story being allegory. Rather, I have sought to make connections with the resources of his faith out of which he drew to compose a narrative that was consonant with his faith but was not a designed allegory for its elements.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, illustrated edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), xix.
For the denial of allegory in the former, see Letter #241. On the latter, see Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, rev. and exp. ed., vol. 2: Reader’s Guide, Part 1: A–M (London: HarperCollins, 2017), 47.
Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2012), 62.
The name “Margaret” derives from the Latin Margarita, which is in turn derived from the Greek term translated as “pearl”: μαργαρίτης.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo (New York: Del Rey, 1980), 11 (emphases original).
Available online at: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Charles_Calleja.
Scull and Hammond, J. R. R. Tolkien Companion, 46.
Available online at: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Derrick_Parnum.
Scull and Hammond, J. R. R. Tolkien Companion, 47.
Similarly, he said in Letter #208 to C. Ouboter that he had no conscious purpose in writing the story so as to preach any message, “I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive. But in such a process inevitably one's own taste, ideas, and beliefs get taken up.”
Available online at: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Maria_Mroczkowska.
Available online at: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Eileen_Elgar_(24_December_1971) (emphasis original).
Available online at: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Rayner_Unwin_(12_May_1955).
This is the obverse of what he stated in his “On Fairy-Stories” when writing in opposition to the once dominant view that folk tales, fairy stories, and so on were derived from “nature-myths,” wherein the Olympians were supposed to be personifications of aspects of nature and stories about them, which he said were better called “allegories” than “myths,” were about processes and changes of nature (J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Christopher Tolkien [London: HarperCollins, 2006], 123). He thought that this theory was “the truth almost upside down. The nearer the so-called ‘nature-myth’, or allegory of the large processes of nature, is to its supposed archetype, the less interesting it is, and indeed the less is it of a myth capable of throwing any illumination whatever on the world” (ibid.).