They believed the universe was ordered and maintained by a celestial hierarchy with the Creator at the top. Places like Middle Earth and Narnia are metaphors of the model. Lewis's "The Discarded Image" is not an easy read, but would help anyone who wants to know more. A more current and more easily understood starting place would be Michael Heiser's "The Unseen Realm", which is squarely theological / Christian in nature, but still thoroughly academic. Heiser's book carries continuity with Lewis's book, but Heiser has done the work to make the material more readable for the masses by footnoting a lot of the references and for the person who really wants to dig in, he's provided supplemental material.
Tolkein may have believed this, and one could interpret his works in this way, but he is on record as loathing allegory. [1] Any allegory present in his works is therefore likely unintentional.
Tolkien shared some valuable insights into allegory:
... 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
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 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.
He may have said that, but his work is very clearly infused with a particular worldview and inspired by historical and mythological themes. I think Tolkien disliked the kind of allegory where things in the story directly correspond to something, e.g the ring war is actually WWII, the hobbits are the English, the Orcs the Nazis and so on.
But you will see very strong parallels between Tolkien and Christian mythology and pre-Christian myths. Like in Silmarillion you have blatant parallels to God and Satan. Tolkien likely did not consider this allegory. Like the sacrifice of Aslan in Lewis is not intended as an allegory for the death of Jesus but rather as a retelling of the same (universally true) myth - but come on, it is obviously an allegory for Jesus.
I agree that Aslan is obviously an allegory for Jesus, but I don't think that's true in the same way for the parallels in Tolkien's stories. The key feature that distinguishes allegory from other sorts of parallels is that allegory is meant to reveal or teach something about the thing it parallels. Lewis's allegories are bald-faced Christian teaching, but Tolkien's parallels seem to just be remixes of narrative elements, without any sort of commentary intended. Gandalf obviously has a death and resurrection and goes on to save everyone, but is Tolkien saying something about Jesus with it, or is he just riffing on the Christ-figure archetype that appears in many mythologies? It seems more like the latter to me.
Exactly. That's exactly what disappointed me about Narnia: I felt like Lewis is ramming his Christianity down my throat, whereas I never felt that way with Tolkien's work. Whenever I compare Narnia and Middle Earth and people tell me "but Tolkien's work is also allegorical", my reply is "If the word allegory can be applied to both, then we need to split it up into two different words, to distinguish two things that are obviously different."
Maybe the word you are looking for is "subtle". Lewis is downright preachy a times and sometimes even goes beyond allegory and just lets Aslan be a mouthpiece for his own theology and morals. Tolkien is never preachy, so he could even become a cult hit among counterculture hippies which probably didn't share many of his values. (Probably to his own dismay I suspect)
I recently went to a Tolkien expert's lecture (author of the latest biography https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tolkien-Raymond-Edwards/dp/07198098... ). He was very adamant that Tolkien didn't like allegories and instead filled his books with his moral values in a more subtle way. It is easy for us to project our own allegories on someone else's books, but anything you may see in LOTR was only made for good storytelling and not with an intention of allegory.
""The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," he wrote, "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. 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" - JRR Tolkien
I think you should not always take an authors word at face value. Just because he said he didn't like allegory doesn't mean it is not present all over the work - come on, is Eru, the Ainur and Melkor not an allegory for God, the angel and the fall of Satan? Did it just happen to closely parallel the Christian mythology purely by coincidence?
Tolkien and Lewis had some bizarro theories about universals myths which meant that to them, blatant Christian allegory was not actually allegory but just a retelling of eternal truths in the form of myths. But as a reader, we don't have to accept those theories. We can enjoy their stories as stories.
I think a lot of fantasy readers dislike allegory because it kind of turns reading into work and takes the escapism out of it, so it is nice when Tolkien in person validates this aversion. But be careful - you can enjoy Tolkien without caring about the underlying worldview, but that emphatically does not mean it is not there.
(Of course to me Christian mythology is just as much fantasy as Middle Earth, but it certainly was not like that for Tolkien)
The story of Eru and the fall of Melkior is interesting in that it blends the Christian creation myth with that of pagan religions - take for example the fact that each ainur has his own "domain". This is in fact typical of the genre of fairy stories or myth, which is what Tolkien was trying to mirror. If anything, the creation story is the one that has the most allegory and even Tolkien would find it hard to deny that. But applying the same to LOTR is harder - the people who could be allegories of Jesus couod be multitude (Gandalf, Frodo, Aragorn). People like to see allegories in things and that is great, no one can tell you you are reading something wrong, and if that is how you get more meaning out of a book, then good for you.
> What was the theological and philosophical significance they were supposed to communicate?
I don't know, but I can think of an analogy: If angels were commonly depicted as cheerful and a bit silly characters in cartoons, perhaps religious people would have the same complaint.
I’ve been (slowly) reading the Silmarillion, so I can try to answer (although I never read Lord of the Rings).
From what I can surmise the elves represent preindustrial humans. The Maiar are elemental forces (fire, water, etc). Not sure what the Valar are exactly, lesser gods of mythology I guess.
Within that landscape play out all manner of basic lessons, the importance of different crafts, the danger of vengeance, etc.
I guess “bippity boppity boo” and the patron saint of class mobility didn’t do it for Tolkien.
One of the central themes of Tolkien's world is 'decay': The world was perfect at the very start, then Melkor ruined it. The Third Age is merely a faint shadow of the Elder Days, the future is even fainter still, etc. Elves are understood as old beings, part of nature as it were. Abandoning middle-earth, fitting in that pattern of decay, of 'now is a shadow of the past'. Analogy with modern history is, according to Tolkien himself, "completely foreign to my thought".
Also, Valar and Maiar are greater and lesser Ainur, primordial spirits. Angels might be the closest thing, not elemental forces.
WWII was basically an extension of WWI. WWI was remarkable in that it was the first really mechanized war, and for the time, a really huge war unlike wars before it, which is why it was called "the Great War" before WWII happened. It was a real turning point for western society.
I think you can see a big parallel in LOTR here, with the Elves/Hobbits/etc. basically being pre-industrial peoples, while the "evil" forces were industrial societies: they felled trees, burned forests, causing widespread destruction to build their society.
What about the idea the Noldor had, that they had seen great beauty in Valinor but they’d see even greater beauty through their suffering? They could’ve stayed and let the Ainur protect them from Melkor, but they chose to stoke a sense of honor, and fight for themselves.
I don’t think Tolkien sees this as a fundamentally deleterious development. But I haven’t seen how it ends for the Noldor so I don’t know. :)
As for Melkor, I don’t see him as fundamentally a force of decay. Destruction, yes. But Ilúvatar seems to have constructed Eä such that Melkor will always fail, that destruction will lead to differentiation and new lifeforms: not decay.
I wonder if this is an allegory for the way that life seems to defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics... not literally, the end always comes, but by creating a kind of a standing wave which seems to defy entropy, even if it is doomed to eventually decay.
I don't see the "decay" theme. You are concentrating on one thing only, overall there is just change, so yes, what was has to go and is replaced. The age of humans replaces what came before in Middle Earth.
That "decay" interpretation would just as well to our earth: The old has gone, "decayed". You misinterpret change just as in "Today's youth is the worst generation", a theme that can be traced through history.
I'm going to quickly produce an animated feature film to show you. Hold my drink.
Well, tbh, if you've seen Dwarf Fortress or read Terry Prattchett, then one of the first things that comes to mind is work ethic and moral. The ethic is highly puritan and greedy, the moral is upright but loose. I'd say that's somewhat faithfully represented, except that the sense of a wider community is missing, they don't live in a mountain and of course Disney didn't do war machines jugging liters of bear and hoarding gold for the sake of it. One might argue those features were exaggerated in folk lore to begin with.
Wikipedia should have some more [1], but I can't get past the Etymology section. An ancient mythology about short spirits not withstanding, it's rather obvious that German Zwerg was related to work, Werk, PIE wérǵ- [2]. Now if I look at the indo-arian cognates, I can't deny that those look similar to warrior, related to PIE wers-[3]. That leaves the initial d unexplained. My best guess is that's pejorative, because we- as in very, venerable etc. is too positive, but which short root the d came from I wouldn't know. I guess so far that's nothing new and where previous attempts called it quits.
By the way, guess the Zerg from Starcraft are an analogy to Zwerg, and then some. kekeke
> it's rather obvious that German Zwerg was related to work
No, it is not obvious. In fact, that is not a mainstream etymology at all. Nor is positing the initial dental as a “pejorative” prefix, something any recognized scholar of comparative Indo-European linguistics would do. Furthermore, your connection of ‘dwarf’ and the PIE ‘work’ root to ‘warrior’ is, frankly, crackpot.
I am very sorry that you feel so emotionally disturbed as to resort to insults.
> No, it is not obvious. In fact, that is not a mainstream etymology at all.
It rhymes. That is not obvious? The proposed root *werg has hardly changed at all in over 2000 years!
> Nor is positing the initial dental as a “pejorative” prefix, something any recognized scholar of comparative Indo-European linguistics would do.
Was that a compliment? I'm aware that humanities research is full of opinion. That doesn't mean I was pretending to be a recognized scholar, just because I admitted an opinion.
> Furthermore, your connection of ‘dwarf’ and the PIE ‘work’ root to ‘warrior’ is, frankly, crackpot.
I did not read this off from a cracked pot to fill in the missing bits. I attempted internal reconstruction which is admittedly highly speculative.
--
Frankly, I suppose you are, like pretty much every linguist, biased towards your mother tongue, and can't readily accept the rhyme work~dwarf ... because that doesn't rhyme, indeed. Conversely, I have to admit a bias, too.
I couldn't even explain in detail how dwarf and Zwerg could be cognate or how to derive a Germanic root from those and other cognates. So, of course I expected the need to take this with a pinch of salt. But your spoon full was a bit much.
> […] it's rather obvious that German Zwerg was related to work […]
Is it? A quick glance at the Wiktionary reference and the etymology section in the Dwerg-article on the German Wikipedia doesn't yield any concrete evidence to support that statement.
'Rather obvious' seems overly optimistic — I would go with 'dubious' at best. For all we know some travelling story teller made the word up on the spot because it had the right dwarfish feel.
While I talk hugely about language gone by, I have actually no idea what "rather" means. Take "rather obvious" as "I can't be the only one who'd consider this for a bit".
> For all we know
No, absolutely not. Rhymes are very important to old folk lore. And to language acquisition in general. And, in a metaphoric sense, to pattern matching over all.
Of course it is possible that the word was obscured from the get go lest it would appear derived. But I don't think it's onomatopoetic, if that's what you mean (I guess you didn't, though). Thinking about that, it's likely though that the word had to be pronounced by children, requiring easier phonemes, so perhaps no th. That gives a lot of leeway to speculate about an original root. Anther thought is that "swarz" (black) should be considered, because mines are inherently dirty, and as a kind of derogative. I agree though, expecting a single root would be too easy. A rhyme compressed into one word would easily obscure the term.
A very sad thought related to small people working in mines is child labor.