Отвечу огромной цитатой из Шиппи.
T. Shippey
J.R.R. TOLKIEN: AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY
CHAPTER IV
THE LORD OF THE RINGS (3): THE MYTHIC DIMENSION
Allegory and applicability
In the 'Foreword' to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings,
Tolkien wrote: 'I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations,
and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect
its presence'. As with the denial of any link between rabbits and
hobbits (see chapter I), the evidence is rather against Tolkien
here. He was perfectly capable of using allegory himself, and did
so several times in his academic works, usually with devastating
effect. In his 1936 lecture on Beowulf, for instance, Tolkien offered
his British Academy audience 'yet another allegory' (it was not
the first in the lecture), about a man who built a tower. He took
the stone for the tower from a ruin, 'an accumulation of old
stone' in a field, part of which had also been used to build the
house in which the man actually lived, 'not far from the old house
of his fathers' (i.e. the ruin). But his friends came along, noticed
at once that the tower was made of older stones, and laboriously
knocked the tower down to examine the stones, look for carvings
on them, prospect for coal, and so on. Then some of them com-
plained that the tower was in a terrible mess, while even the
man's descendants murmured that he should have spent his time
not building the tower but restoring the ruin. 'But from the top
of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea'
(see Essays, pp. 7-8).
There is no doubt that this is an allegory, for Tolkien says so
himself. A brief study of it, concentrating on the elements italic-
ized above, may explain exactly what Tolkien meant by the word,
how he expected allegories to work, and why he disliked both
word and thing when they were misused. Tolkien's little story is
an allegory of the progress of Beowulf criticism, one of the major
features of which, up to Tolkien's time, had been a conviction that
the poet had written the wrong poem. Its accuracy, or 'justness' to
use Tolkien's own term, is hard to appreciate without the kind
of awareness of Beowulf scholarship which Tolkien's original audi-
ence may be supposed to have had, but in brief one could say
that:
The old stone, i.e. the ruin = the remains of an earlier,
heathen, oral poetry which the Beowulf-poet might have
known about
The house the man lives in, also partly built from the
ruin = Christian poetry contemporary with Beowulf like the
poem Exodus (Tolkien's edition of which was published
posthumously in 1981), which also drew on the early oral
poetry
The tower, of course = Beowulf, and the man = the
Beowulf-poet
The man's friends who knock his tower down = the
dissectionist critics of the nineteenth century, who concen-
trated their efforts on pointing out where the poem had
gone wrong
Finally, the man's descendants, who wished he had
restored the old house = British critics like W.P. Ker and
R.W. Chambers, who rejected dissectionism but said repeat-
edly that they wished the poet had written an epic about
history rather than a mere fairy-tale about dragons and
monsters.
The main point about the above, though, is the repeated = sign.
Tolkien did not think that allegories made sense unless you
could consistently and without error fill these in. And to him
the function of allegory was usually, as in this case, as a
reductio ad absurdum. Anyone listening to Tolkien's allegory
of the tower would sympathize with the tower-builder, and not
with the short-sighted fools who destroyed it. Therefore, Tolkien
implied, they should sympathize with the poem and not with its
critics.
That was why Tolkien, in the 'Foreword', dismissed con-
temptuously those who would see The Lord of the Rings as an
allegory of World War II. In the first place, as he pointed out,
he started work on it 'long before the foreshadow of 1939 had
yet become a threat of inevitable disaster'. But in the second place
the 'equals' signs were missing. One could, of course, say
that the Ring as nuclear weapons, the coalition of Rohan, Gondor
and the Shire (etc.) = the Allied powers, Mordor - the Axis
powers, all of which has some general plausibility. But in that
case what does the destruction of the Ring and the refusal to use
it equal? As Tolkien wrote in the 'Foreword', if this equation had
been true, 'the Ring would have been seized and used against
Sauron', as nuclear weapons were used against Japan; Barad-dur
would have been 'occupied', as the Axis powers were by the Allies;
Sauron 'would not have been annihilated but enslaved'. As for
Saruman, the unreliable ally, who would presumably have to
'equal' the USSR, he would 'in the confusion and treacheries of
the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own
researches' and 'made a great Ring of his own', as the Russians
used German scientists (Mordor) and Western agents (treachery)
to make their own nuclear weapon. There could have been a
Middle-earth allegory of World War II, Tolkien showed - but it
would have been a quite different story, a significantly different
story, from The Lord of the Rings.One can accept, then, that Tolkien disliked vague allegories,
allegories which didn't work, though he accepted them readily
in their proper place, which was either advancing an argument
(as in the Beowulf example) or else constructing brief and personal
fables (like, in my opinion, some of his shorter pieces to be
discussed in chapter 6). He was however prepared to accept some-
thing which might well look like allegory to the unskilled, as he
also said in the 'Foreword'. Immediately following on from the
sentence quoted at the start of this chapter, he wrote:
I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applic-
ability 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.
