“You can go to a Shakespeare play and you can apply it to things in your mind, if you like, but they are not allegories… I mean many people apply the Ring to the nuclear bomb and think that was in my mind, and the whole thing is an allegory of it. Well, it isn’t.”
But part of the enduring appeal of The Lord of the Rings is that it is more than merely a direct allegory. The themes it explores – war and trauma, industrialisation and the despoiling of the natural world, the corrupting influence of power and how the bond of friendship can help people endure adversity and loss – resonate far beyond a single event or time.
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The fantasy novel has, at times, been dismissed by some critics as just an adventure story of valiant friends battling an unspeakable evil. But The Lord of the Rings is not a glorification of war – it is a reflection on how death and the trauma of conflict irrevocably changes those who witness and live through it.
The dislocation felt by many soldiers who served in WW1 on their return home, greeted by those who were unable to comprehend what they had seen and done, is mirrored in the last Book when the hobbits return to the Shire. They find their world changed in the aftermath of the battle, with their fellow hobbits unable to fathom why Frodo and Sam, who are haunted by what they have been through on their journey, can never be that innocent again.
“One reviewer once said it was a very jolly book, isn’t it?” Tolkien said to the . “All the right boys come home and everybody is happy and glad. It isn’t true, of course. He couldn’t have read the story.”
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