MrU
Clearly there is an allegorical dimension to SoWM - Tolkien even makes a stab at interpreting the allegory of the Human world - though not of Faery (at least not in any passage quoted by Fleiger. He writes:
'The Great Hall is evidently in a way an 'allegory' of the village Church; the Master Cook with his house adjacent, & his office that is not hereditary, provides for its own instruction & succession but is not one of the 'secular' or profitable crafts, & yet is supported by the village, is plainly the Parson & the Priesthood. 'Cooking' is a domestic affair practised by men & women: personal religion & prayer. the Master Cook presides over & provides for all the religious festivals of the year, & also for all the religious occaisions that are not universal: births, marriages, & deaths'
But is this interpretation 'canonical', or an attempt to impose a primary world relevance on the secondary world - my point (probably badly expressed) was not that secondary worlds like Middle Earth have
no meaning - of course they do - but that whatever meaning they have is, or should be, limited to that world, & that we shouldn't take that meaning 'out' of that world & attempt to impose it on this world, which is what Stormfront & others are trying to do. There is a 'meaning' to Frodo's Quest, the story of the Numenoreans obsession with racial purity has a relevance, & can teach us something - but [I]only/I] about Middle Earth, not about this world. (Though having said that, what Tolkien shows in this instance is that an obsession with such ideas of racial purity & bloodlines brings disaster, & if anyone was looking for it, they could find a very insightful analysis of Fascism & its disastrous effects in the Akallabeth - but that is to miss the whole point, & make the story into something it wasn't meant to be - so,
MrU, though even with this point I may be seeming to contradict my own argument, I will 'save' myself again
. The point I'm making is that Stormfront don't even seem to understand what Tolkien has written, & they are not making a 'one to one' connection between the Numenoreans & their own 'philosophy', because they are interpreting the Numenorean thing as 'pro' racial purity, when it is actually 'anti' that position).
If we take another piece from the essay, Tolkien describes the geography of SoWM -
'The Forest lies on the western edge of Wooton Major, whose one Inn bears over its door a stone with a worn & faded carving of three trees & the inscription
'Welco to the Wode.'....The western villages of the country, among them the Wooton's & Walton, were originally main points of contact between Faery & this country of Men; they had been at an earlier period actually within the forest borders, as their names signify.' (Wooton comes from Old English
wudu-tun- 'town in or by a wood', & Walton, a village even samller than Wooton Minor, from
weald-tun,' town in a wood or on a wold' ).....Walton, even deeper in the forest than Wooton Minor, is evidently still the point of entry into Faery for those humans who venture there.'
I would say that this description of the geography of SoWM should be treated as 'canonical', even though it is not included in the story, because it limits itself to the secondary world, & is not aimed at making the story 'relevant' to this world. It is not 'meaningless', but any meaning it has is limited to the world of story(='Faerie' - hope everyone has realised I'm not using the spellings Faery & Faerie interchangeably - Faery is the world Smith travels in in SoWM, Faerie is the 'world' Tolkien is exploring, the world of 'fairy story' as such).
There may, as you say be an allegorical dimension to the story. Tolkien gave two possible ones - an old man's story about 'letting go', & one about the relationship of the Church to the community. But it works without those interpretations, & works better in my opinion without them, because they blur the lines between the worlds. SoWM is very definite in its seperation of the Faery & the world of Men. Allegory attempts to make the two worlds one, to make the secondary world into nothing more than a 'clever' description of this world (awkward phrase, but its early, & I hope you get what I mean), & denies its autonomy. Sadly, this is a trap the older Tolkien fell into more & more often. It is based on a mistaken belief that stories must be 'relevant', must have a meaning in & for the primary world, to have any worth. But secondary worlds should be self contained. There should be 'crossing points', places where access is possible, but there should also be limits, boundaries, which some things don't,
cannot, cross. The Monsters should stay there, & not come here - I've never come across a believeable story of Dragons or Elves existing in this world, for instance, it always feels 'wrong' when a writer says they have. Its a bit like historians 'discovering' the
real King Arthur, then go on to present us with a fifth century warlord - no Guinevere, no Lancelot, no Grail - so, we can have a 'real' Arthur, but the price is the loss of all the magic, of everything that made us want him in the first place.
In the same way, the 'meaning' of the stories set in the secondary world should stay there, because it can only come through stripped of its secondary world magic.
That's not to say the magic of itself can't remain with us when we return to this world - it can & should. As I said before, the beauty & the magic of the secondary world can make this world seem more beautiful & magical, even if that is simply the effect of memory of the secondary world overlaying the primary world, but the two worlds are just that - two seperate, bounded worlds.
And that's more than enough for now