‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[davem]

He tells us that it is not his intended meaning. But can it not still be the readers perceived meaning?

But in order for the book to be taken as an allegory of WW2 (or WW1) there would have to be a one-to one correspondence between the events of the story & the events in the real world - which, as Tolkien points out in the foreword, there is not. Some events within the story may correspond closely to events in the real world - if the reader chooses to make those connections. It depends on how we read the story. Shippey, for instance, compares the Rammas of the Pelennor with the Maginot line - but Lewis & Currie, in The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien, draw a comparison between it & the Star Wars satellite defence system. Therefore, I think that both are approaching the Rammas from the perspective of applicability rather than allegory. If the Rammas was an allegory of the Maginot Line then it could not be applied fully to anything else - Star Wars or whatever. The allegorical meaning would be fixed, because it would be precise. What we have instead is a symbol which is more universal. The reader is free to apply it to any number of similar primary world situations. The story & its events are 'timeless' in that sense, & have no one-to-one connection with specific things/events.

From this point of view, Lembas both is the host & is absolutely not the host - it depends on how, or whether, the reader chooses to apply it. Both statements are true, but therefore Lembas is not an allegory of the Host To some readers it is the Host & nothing but the Host, to others it isn't anything of the sort. Applicability may be as absolute in the mind of the reader as allegory is in the mind of the writer.

One is left with the option of calling it a 'spiritual' allegory of the 'human condition', the events with which it deals being universal 'archetypes'. I suspect this is perhaps how Tolkien saw it. In Letter 71 Tolkien states:

'For 'romance' has grown out of allegory, & its wars are still derived from the 'inner war' of allegory in which good is on one side & various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, & angels.

So, Tolkien admits 'allegory' of a sort into his Legendarium, but I don't think this clashes with his statement in the Foreword to LotR that the book is not an 'allegory' in the generally accepted sense - as, say, the Faerie Queene is, let alone The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.