this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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I get it. I won't say you're wrong. I'm just basing what I'm saying off his letters where for some of the more obvious allegories and parallels he was really dismissive and was like "don't know where you're getting that from, I was just using my imagination"
The real discussion is which is true:
Personally, as much as people of that generation did erase their own experience, I think he was being genuine in his letters when he said "I wasn't trying to do that, don't know why you'd think that" when what he experienced shook him so deeply to his core that it needed an outlet, and that outlet became his imagination. But I see validity in all the ways of seeing it, except to take him at his word and dismiss that LotR was influenced by an industrial war that felt like it completely destroyed the world
Tolkien uses the words in a funny way, but what he actually means to say in those letters is that he rejects other people feeling the need to absorb the authorial intent. He wants people drawing their own conclusions in relation to the work, he doesn't want to prescribe the one correct reading of the text. That's what Tolkien views Allegory as
Tolkien was for sure writing from his experience with war, he just doesn't want you to have to read the text that way. He wants you to interpret the story however you like.