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Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man
Taking that definition of 'allegory', I agree. But is it a correct definition? Must the author intend a work to be allegorical for it to be labelled as such? There seems to me to be some question over this proposition.
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Ok, in place of 'Allegory' & 'Applicability' substitute the terms 'X' & 'Y'. Tolkien has defined clearly what 'X' is - 'The purposed domination of the author.' ie the author sets a primary world event, or series of events, in a different form (a 'secondary world'), with a one-to-one correlation between the primary world events & the secondary world forms in which they appear - hence Hitler
is Sauron, etc. Effectively, the author would be telling you 'Sauron is Hitler, & you must think of Hitler as you think of Sauron'.
He's also defined 'Y' (Applicability) as the freedom of the reader to make connections between the events of the story & events in the real world - if they so choose. Now, because he hasn't committed the 'sin' of doing 'X' those 'similarities' to the real world contained in the story will be sufficiently vague & generalised that the reader may find many opportunities of such 'applicability' without being able to find any absolute one-to-one correspondence for the whole story (ie if LotR
is an allegory of WW2, & Sauron is an 'allegory' of Hitler, who is Frodo an allegory of?)
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In any event, the effect is the same whether we allow the reader to perceive an unintended allegorical meaning, or whether we categorise it as applicability. The reader remains free to interpret and to form his or her own understanding of the work.
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No - its only an allegory if Tolkien deliberately wrote it as one - which he didn't. Allegory is a literary form - an author either writes an allegory intentionally or he doesn't - at least in the sense that Tolkien is using the term. He didn't do 'X'.