Having been rightly taken to task
, I must apologise. My explanation is that, being restricted to the forword I was attempting, at first, to analyse Tolkien's claim that the work has no inner meaning. Let me quote from John Crowley's novel Aegypt:
Quote:
Dawn came; Doctor Dee wrote out in his scribble hand (he had four different hands he wrote in, besides a mirror hand) one meaning of Mr Talbot's book:
IF EVER SOM POWR WITH 3 WISHES TO GRANT
Which made little sense to him. But if he went backward - backward through the forest where the rooks called in the hawthorns along the track below the fortress, backward through the ogham & the Greek & the stars & the letters & the numbers, the same line could be read this way:
THERE WERE ANGELS IN ye GLASS 246 MANY OF THEM
And that made his heart pause for an instant, & fill again with a richer blood.
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What I'm saying is LotR is a book which can be read in two ways, on two levels. One way of reading it gives us an entertaining, moving, work of art, a story. The other way of reading it gives us an exploration of Catholicism, language, history, folkore, the nature of time & most importantly of the man himself, the artist.
Of course, we must read it in one way or the other each time - if we try to read it as a story, continually stopping to analyse its other 'meaning', the ingredients of the 'soup', we are breaking it to find out what it is made of. Conversely, if we read it as an exploration of the themes & ideas I mentioned, & stop to find how Tolkien used those themes, the story will not affect us.
My point is LotR is both things. Yet these two things overlap - & that overlap is sometimes intentional, & the intervention of those themes & sources give a significance to the story. The dates of the birth & death of Christ are used by Tolkien to enhance the significance of the events in the story. This calls into question for me at least the claim made by Tolkien that the story has no 'inner meaning'.
This exploration of the Forword seemed to me the only place where such points could be made.
As I said, I am happy for this reading to focus solely on the 'story'. The underlying themes can be put aside totally - because the story is self contained, & Tolkien no doubt wanted it to be read in this way, yet, as Shippey & Flieger among others have shown, the other LotR is also there, under the surface, for those who wish to explore it, & it is just as much LotR.
It interests me - that's all I can say - that Tolkien should 'mythologise' the Virgin Mary into Elbereth - who is not in any way a figure drawn from Norse, or any other, mythology. Yet the 'Queen of Heaven' is present in Middle Earth, as one of the most significant 'off-screen' figures in the story, & Galadriel is present, as almost a manifestation of her, in the woods of Lothlorien.
Yet, I have strayed from the point - though beginning with the statement of the author that the tale had no inner meaning. I still don't believe that - though I accept that Tolkien may have wanted that to be true, or wanted us to believe it, at least.
I will, however try to curb my tendency to 'preach'.
Sorry.