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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 1966, Tolkien wrote that the story ‘is not an allegory – properly so called. 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’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford). Probably at the beginning of 1967 he wrote to Clyde S. Kilby that Smith of Wootton Major is ‘not an allegory (however applicable to this or that) in intention: certainly not in the “Fay” parts, and only fleetingly in the Human, where evidently The Cook and the Great Hall etc. represent The Parson and Church and their decay’ (Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois). And on 12 December 1967 Tolkien described it as ‘an old man’s book already weighted with the presage of “bereavement”’ (letter to *Roger Lancelyn Green, Letters, p. 389), a statement which has been seized upon by critics who have sought to interpret the work as a personal allegory.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ