The Lord of the Rings Doesn't "Really Mean" Anything

Comments · 188

• JO

  @joshualovelace9161 · 1 year ago

  I think it was Tolkien himself that said it was about the ability of the most ordinary of people to overcome insurmountable odds.

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• KA

  @kaguya6900 · 1 year ago

  I have the feeling that you investigated what everyone else considered allegory without investigating what Tolkien means when he says allegory.<br><br>In my opinion, backed up by what Tolkien is complaining about when he writes that forward or writes in letters, that Tolkien is talking about allegories like Nathanial Hawthorne&apos;s Young Goodman Brown. A story where there is a one-to-one connection between things in real life and things in the story.<br><br>But that doesn&apos;t preclude Tolkien using the Dead Marshes to show people the horrors that follow in the outcome of war, influenced and informed by his own experiences in WW1. It isn&apos;t allegory to write about dead men mired in mud and water when the author has seen dead men mired in mud and water for himself. That&apos;s just writing about what you know.<br><br>Just because The Lord of the Rings isn&apos;t an allegory doesn&apos;t mean that there is no meaning intended by the author behind a little man doing great things. <br><br>Just because the ring isn&apos;t the bomb doesn&apos;t mean it can&apos;t represent the corrupting influence of power. There are messages in the story. There have to be to make stories engaging. But what Tolkien is saying (as far as I can tell) is that you can take those messages however you feel like. It isn&apos;t that he didn&apos;t put those messages into the story. It&apos;s just that he isn&apos;t telling you how to interpret them. You can do that for yourself.<br><br>The ring isn&apos;t an allegory since power doesn&apos;t have its own will. Power isn&apos;t trying to get into any one being&apos;s hands. The ring is doing that. But on the other hand, Saruman wants the ring because it represents power to him. Gandalf and Galadriel both refuse the ring because its power greatly tempts them. They see it as power, so the audience is also meant to see it as power. But again power isn&apos;t worn and it doesn&apos;t have a will of its own, so it isn&apos;t allegory.<br><br>I think that taking several people&apos;s definition of allegory and applying it to Tolkien makes a person get lost in the weeds. There are a lot of author-intended messages in the story. Some of them, like the idea of &quot;lesser men,&quot; you might want to ignore. There are some that you may think are author-intended, and they aren&apos;t. But if they&apos;re good messages, I don&apos;t see any harm in that. Getting your own meaning out of his story is what Tolkien explicitly wanted.

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• JI

  @jimberjamber8540 · 1 year ago (edited)

  When Tony gilroy was talking about how he was inspired to write Andor, in a nutshell he just said he was a history buff so he took a bunch of historic events and applied how they functioned to his story. A perfect example of applicability over allegory.<br><br>The way I interpret Lord of the Rings, is just be nice when you can, and strong when you have to be. A simple message.

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• _U

  @_uncredited · 1 year ago

  If you want a &apos;literate&apos; view of something you love, be careful what you wish for. I had the misfortune of studying Tolkein too young at school and while I can write a dissertation on its themes and mythology and why it&apos;s an important work of literature, I also found it tedious and it put me off fantasy forever. I can appreciate it but I can&apos;t enjoy it. I feel robbed because his stories are so magical to so many people. I totally understand why he said he hates allegorical readings of his work. It&apos;s purely academic, in the worst sense of the word.

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• TI

  @TimeturnerJ · 1 year ago

  I think Tolkien&apos;s environmental message isn&apos;t really allegory so much as it is a blatant statement.<br>So perhaps it can&apos;t really be counted in that sense.<br><br>For one, all the good places in his world are green and natural and full of growing things (and Legolas even restores natural growth to Minas Tirith after the war is won, because it wasn&apos;t whole without it), while the bad places are barren, ravaged wastelands, destroyed by evil.<br>Then there&apos;s the whole thing with Saruman and the ents, as you said - and the continuation of that plot that was omitted from the movies, the ravaging of the Shire.<br>In the books, Saruman doesn&apos;t die on his tower, and instead, he flees - and because the characters have a more important conflict to focus on, they lose track of him. Unbeknownst to them, he fled to the Shire, which he conquered while the War of the Ring was wrapping up. So when the hobbits return home, they find their beloved Shire deeply changed and industrialised. To make a somewhat long story short, with all the character development they&apos;ve had over the course of the story, they bravely lead a resistance and drive Saruman out - and tear down all the industrialisation he wreaked, and return the Shire to its prior state.<br><br>So Tolkien was <i>very</i> definitely anti-industrialisation. He loved the natural environment. That&apos;s why I say he probably wouldn&apos;t have considered this allegorical at all - to him, it would&apos;ve probably been a simple statement of fact.

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• ED

  @edwardnowakowski5990 · 1 year ago

  I think the issue with trying to find allegories is that it contains universal truths. <br><br>Take the crack of doom for example, what we see is a string of failures, our hero gives into temptation, loses his finger and the ring to gollum, and then gollum loses his footing, distracted by finally having the ring. <br><br>What we have there aren’t allegories, but commentaries on the nature of good and evil.<br><br>Without bilbo and Frodo showing gollum mercy, Sauron wins, so there’s statements there about the value in mercy and gentleness<br><br>We have even the most pure hearted characters falling for temptation, which looking at Tolkien’s catholic upbringing, is exactly how believers talk about sin. No human is sinless, we all fall to temptations sometimes, and we see an example of that.<br><br>And then in the struggle between Frodo and gollum, all driven by the lust for the ring that it itself creates, we see evil destroy itself.<br><br>None of these are exact allegories, but throughout the story we see examples of virtue and truth’s about good and evil. There’s something innately human in it that we all resonate with. <br><br>Or at least that’s my take<br><br>But I will say, I 100% believe Tolkien drew the scouring of the shire from his experiences coming back from war.

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• OM

  @Omenethious · 1 year ago

  the story is not in service to a moral, it is in service to itself.

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• LI

  @lI-Duck-II · 1 year ago

  Reality and our world is complex, it&apos;s chaotic, it&apos;s not an allegory. Why do so many want or feel our stories have to be? -Audiance and writers included. Why can&apos;t a story within a fictional reality be just the telling of events within that fictional realities chaotic environment free from our own.<br>Hearing that these fictional groups represent these real world groups in this real world conflict feels immediately disappointing to me, throwing me out of that fictional world and now thinking about ours.... The one that I want to escape through watching these movies.

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• MY

  @Mymindzeye · 1 year ago

  Its all archetypes. Its the same reason it&apos;s so hard to garner meaning from dreams even though they seem so meaningful

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• DA

  @davinaali8068 · 1 year ago

  Fuck I’m 8 minutes in and I already ate all my food

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• CA

  @CalypsoReviews · 1 year ago

  the problem with films is that, unless you hear whatever X or Y film is actually about or whatever its message/meaning is directly from the director/writers mouth it all ends up being a &quot;Curtains are Blue&quot; thing endlessly becoming interpreted &quot;wrong&quot; or &quot;right&quot; to a million different people who get whatever they get out of it on their own viewing.

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• YA

  @YadraVoat · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuk0BiTWg44&amp;t=755">12:35</a> — And did you notice the conveyor belts form a patter of concentric pentagons? (The shape of a major headquarters building of &apos;the system&apos;. I never watched the movie but I spotted that here instantly.)

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