The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ Tale of Aldarion and Erendis’, Mythlore 18, no. 3, whole no. 69 (Summer 1992), discusses how pride and differences in interests and outlook lead step by step to the complete breakdown of the marriage, and describes ‘Tolkien’s refusal to allow the characters of the story to be portrayed in black and white’ as ‘a credit to the sophistication of emotion and mythos he conceives’ (p. 29).

      In his ‘Law and Arda’, Tolkien Studies 10 (2012), Douglas C. Kane calls Aldarion and Erendis ‘perhaps Tolkien’s most emotionally nuanced story, a tale of true love initially overcoming tremendous obstacles, only to eventually collapse under the weight of two prideful people with truly irreconcilable differences’. He notes also that the child of Aldarion and Erendis, Ancalimë, the first ruling Queen of Númenor, ‘is described as having disastrous relationships with men, showing that Tolkien was well aware of how dysfunctional relationships tend to propagate themselves’ (p. 53).

      Maddalena Tarallo, in ‘Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife’, Amon Hen 205 (May 2007), suggests that readers are attracted to the story ‘mainly for its extreme modernity and for the accurate analysis of the characters’ psychological make-up’. Tolkien reveals ‘many deeply personal aspects’ of his characters’ relationship’, such that ‘we are painfully aware that Aldarion and Erendis almost completely lack a deep spiritual union that might counterbalance their disagreements or at least somehow lessen them’. Tarallo compares their ‘widely diverging attitudes’ and notes their ‘monumental pride’, comparing their tale with that of the Ents and the Entwives (in *The Lord of the Rings) in which ‘the male soul seems to yearn for adventure and freedom, while the female spirit looks more inclined to an orderly, and ordered, kind of life’ – ‘two totally opposed views and the refusal to find a neutral ground where a compromise might be reached’ (pp. 20–1). Tarallo believes that ‘the tale’s strong point resides in the unwillingness of the author to lay the blame on any one of the opposed parties: on the contrary he clearly shows how right and wrong are equally divided’ (p. 21).

Aldershot (Hampshire). From 28 July to 6 August 1910 Tolkien attended a camp with the *King Edward’s School Officers Training Corps (*Societies and clubs) and cadets from other schools at Aldershot, south-west of London. Their camp was pitched on a expanse of open land called Farnborough Common (now subsumed by the Farnborough airfield), and their exercises and inspections took place in the general vicinity. They were also taken in groups to visit a depot of military aeroplanes and airships in neighbouring Farnborough. Then as now, Aldershot was the centre of military training in England.

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. …

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