J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and his great work, \"The Lord of the Rings\", is world famous.<\/p>\n
Published in 1954, this work has been the subject of numerous political and religious interpretations<\/strong>. Some of these linked the events recounted in the book to the First World War (a bloody conflict in which Tolkien fought and was wounded), to the Second World War, and to the Cold War. In reality, the British writer detested allegories<\/strong>. This was, in fact, the main reason why he never liked \"The Chronicles of Narnia,\" the popular saga written by his great friend C.S. Lewis.<\/p>\n In line with that opinion, Tolkien always rejected any allegorical interpretation of his work.<\/strong> In June 1955, he wrote a letter to the American newspaper The New York Times in which he addressed this point. This letter appears in the book \"The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien,\" edited by his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, and published by George Allen & Unwin in 1981, eight years after the writer's death. In the letter, Tolkien explained the following regarding the possible political or religious message of \"The Lord of the Rings\":<\/strong><\/p>\n \"It is not 'about' anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political.<\/strong> The only criticism that annoyed me was one that it 'contained no religion' (and 'no Women', but that does not matter, and is not true anyway). It is a monotheistic world of 'natural theology'. The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies<\/strong>, is simply part of the historical climate depicted. It will be sufficiently explained, if (as now seems likely) the Silmarillion and other legends of the First and Second Ages are published. I am in any case myself a Christian; but the 'Third Age' was not a Christian world.<\/strong>\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the preceding paragraph of that letter, Tolkien confessed: \"It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic'<\/strong>, as I sometimes say to people who ask me 'what is it all about?'\"<\/em> Indeed, Tolkien was the most renowned philologist of his time<\/strong>. He had a passion for languages, and this was reflected in the various languages \u200b\u200bhe created for his work, especially Quenya and Sindarin, the two great languages \u200b\u200bof the Elves. Tolkien developed these languages \u200b\u200bwith great care, starting from real languages<\/strong> (Finnish and Latin in the case of Quenya, and Welsh in the case of Sindarin).<\/p>\n Obviously, \"The Lord of the Rings\" is not a work devoid of values.<\/strong> It speaks of a world in which honor, friendship, loyalty, the spirit of sacrifice, and commitment were of great importance. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and his Christian values \u200b\u200bwere reflected in his work<\/a>, but without any intention of proselytizing. He also held conservative views and was highly critical of nazism and communism<\/a>, but he did not intend to create a political or religious work, but rather a great mythological work<\/strong>, as he was a great enthusiast of Germanic mythology. With his work, he sought to create a mythology for England.<\/strong> In that same letter, he stated:<\/p>\n \"'Middle-earth', by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in<\/strong> (like the Mercury of Eddison).4 It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men 'between the seas'<\/strong>. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this 'history' is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.<\/strong>\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The fact that it was not an allegorical work does not mean that there weren't themes to which Tolkien showed a certain inclination<\/strong>, something that can be seen in many moments of his work, such as those relating to the Ents and Fangorn Forest, and the mistreatment they suffered at the hands of the wizard Saruman.<\/strong> In that same letter, Tolkien pointed out:<\/strong><\/p>\n \"There are of course certain things and themes that move me specially. The inter-relations between the 'noble' and the 'simple' (or common, vulgar) for instance.<\/strong> The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving. I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been<\/strong>; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Despite Tolkien's words, there are still people today who try to see political or religious allegories in his work<\/strong>, both to use it for those purposes and to dismiss it simply because they don't share those interpretations. I hope this article sheds some light on the matter.<\/p>\n ---<\/p>\n Photo: Haywood Magee\/Picture Post\/Hulton Archive. J.R.R. Tolkien smoking his pipe in his study at Merton College, Oxford, England, on December 2, 1955.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and his great work, \u00abThe Lord of the Rings\u00bb, is world famous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11259],"tags":[461,17308],"class_list":["post-66340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-jrr-tolkien","tag-the-lord-of-the-rings"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-02 14:54:12","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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