Is The Lord of the Rings an Allegory?

I was recently contacted by a student who wished to know, for an essay, whether or not The Lord of the Rings should be read as an allegory on account of Tolkien’s Catholic faith. This student wondered, if LOTR isn’t an allegory, what was Tolkien’s purpose in writing it?

The following is my response. May it be useful to you the next time someone tries to use “Tolkien was a Catholic!” as an argument for why their interpretation of the text is the One True Meaning, intended by the author himself.

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Key to determining whether or not Tolkien's Legendarium is "allegorical" is understanding what Tolkien meant by the word when he said, in the Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings:

"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."

For Tolkien, allegory is a particular mode of literature in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between a person, object, setting, idea in the story (what he called the Secondary World) and a person, object, setting, idea in the Primary World. In order to understand an allegory, then, you have to figure out the correspondences - figure out, in other words, what each element of the allegory represents. The medieval morality play Everyman is one example of an allegory, where the main character represents the average human being and the various characters represent ethical and religious concepts; a more modern example would be George Orwell's Animal Farm, in which each of the characters, kinds of animal, etc. have a clear reference-point in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Tolkien objected to reading his stories allegorically because allegories are "riddles" with a single "correct" interpretation that is intentionally put there by the author and meant to be decoded by the reader. In a letter to the publisher Milton Waldman, he writes,

"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 as just a story.” (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #131)

Note, however, his use of the plural interpretations. One can, of course, do allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings if one likes, and potentially discover some interesting symbolic parallels in it.  But that is not to say that the story is, in its intention or in its effect on most readers, an allegory. For instance, one might look at the Ring as an allegory of atomic power, which many reviewers in Tolkien's day did, seeing as how LOTR arrived in the midst of the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It would be a categorical error, however, to say that the Ring is an allegory of atomic power, in the sense that it was written that way by its author and intended to be read that way by his audience.

Tolkien was a devout Catholic, but his main concern as a writer was not to communicate his Christianity to the reader (as it often was for his dear friend C.S. Lewis), but rather to imitate God by creating a Secondary World. The real world, in all its complexity, is susceptible to endless interpretations; thus, so should a story which purports to create a Secondary World with its own, internally consistent "laws of motion." (See Tolkien's classic essay On Fairy-Stories for more on this subject.) There are certainly Christian resonances within LOTR: the suffering self-sacrifices of Frodo and Gandalf resemble, in some respects, the story of Jesus, as does Aragorn's quasi-messianic return of the True King; lembas recalls the Eucharist; there are echoes of Mother Mary in both the Lady Galadriel and Elbereth, the Queen of the Stars; and the moral universe of the story is charged with Catholic values like the importance of free will, the sacredness of Creation, the importance of homeliness and humility, and the power of mercy and forgiveness, among many others. But that's not "why" Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. He wrote it, and all his Middle-earth Legendarium, because he felt compelled to create a world and to let stories (and languages) unfold within it.

This was, for him, a much more theological approach—to create in the image and likeness of a Creator (Genesis 1:27)—than simply dropping Christian symbolism or allegorical correspondences into a story and calling it good. He even wrote that the Arthurian Matter of Britain, beautiful as much of it is, is fatally flawed:

“It is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.” (Letters #131)

Thus he could write to his friend the Jesuit Robert Murray that LOTR was both "a fundamentally a religious and Catholic work" and, in the next breath, say,

"That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." (Letters #142)

You can certainly read The Lord of the Rings as a Christian and find beautiful applicability there, not least since Tolkien was so committed to his faith and it suffused everything he wrote. But to read it as Christian, and especially as a Christian allegory, would be, I think, to shoehorn into a literary category in which it neither belongs nor fits particularly well; to deny its wonder and power as a text that can enchant people of many faiths and people of no faiths equally.

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WORKS CITED

• Tolkien, J.R.R. On Fairy-Stories. Edited by Verlyn Flieger & Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2014.

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter & Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.