[Fordim Hedgethistle]

His diatribe against allegory is neatly balanced against his preference for history, real or feigned, and his endorsement of applicability.

The thing that always strikes me about the Foreward is Tolkien’s very clear insistence that the LotR is a ‘historical’ work in which he attempts to recover the events that the hobbits got caught up in. His insistence as well that the work is “philological” in nature is an incredibly important point. The very genesis of Middle-Earth was the invention of Quenya and Sindarin: he made up the languages first, then had to find the speakers of that language, whom he called Elves, then he had to figure out their history, and thus it all began. I think this is so important to acknowledge from the outset because it will call our attention to the primacy of language and words in the book. As a professor of philology – indeed, as one of the founders of modern approaches to linguistics-based analysis of literary texts – Tolkien was a master of the English language like very few before or since. I think it is no bad comparison to put him alongside Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton in his careful and full response to the richness of English and the wide possibilities it contains. All that time he spent rewriting and then typing the book was far from wasted, I think, insofar as it would have given him the opportunity to revise and revise and rework the prose word-by-word, with the result that his text will, I think, bear great fruit when brought under the kind of extremely close scrutiny that I hope this forum will provide.

The sense of passivity that he expresses before the story is more than charming, it seems genuine. Kransha makes an excellent point when he indicates that the great ‘gaps’ in the writing took place just before the major turning points in the narrative. I think that is because Tolkien kept writing himself to a point where he did not know what was going to happen next, and was able to resolve this only be ratcheting up the stakes. While he doesn’t mention the particular emergence of Aragorn in Bree here, that was another point at the narrative where he got stuck very early on (in Bree, the hobbits originally met another hobbit ranger called Trotter). The impasse in Moria was resolved by Gandalf’s death, and the impasse of the Pelennor by Aragorn taking the Paths of the Dead. This is why the tale “grew in the telling” as that ‘older’ material of the Second Age just kept impressing itself onto what began as a relatively simple story giving more hobbit-stuff.

Then when the ‘end’ had at last been reached the whole story had to be revised, and indeed largely re-written backwards.

The quotation marks around ‘end’ here are just wonderful as they invite – demand – us to move past the simple idea of his book as being one composed of beginning middle and end in some linear form. The tale did indeed “grow in the telling” and continued to do so after its ‘completion’ – the Appendices were added, and a Prologue written; then the Foreward. And even after his death it continued with the publication of the Sil, and then the HoME – and then with places like this Forum! The most important connection between this book and history is that neither one is a ‘closed shop,’ constructed by the author for the benefit of the reader. The book challenges us to reinterpret it and make it our own; only a very great fool accepts unquestioningly somebody else’s version of history, and the same is to be said of this book. That’s why, I think, Tolkien writes with such vigour and energy in the Foreward about allegory and applicability. Having created a book that lends itself to such openness (that is, it’s such a readerly book that the author has little or no ‘control’ over its reception – and he doesn’t want any) that there were a lot of people who were perhaps abusing that freedom, and Tolkien wanted to add a minor corrective to that by nudging people away from simplistic interpretations of the tale (the War of the Ring is World War II) and toward more subtle and fluid interpretations. Just as historical events are never allegorical (the War of 1812 is not an allegory of the Expulsion from Eden!) but are examples of certain ideas and themes (imperialist aggression, revisionist history, birth of a national identity), so too is LotR.

So, to finish my long first post (I’m just so excited to be underway) – what are the themes that Tolkien seems to be indicating his book is ‘about’? The one thing he identifies as being central is, quite brilliantly I think, the Ring itself. He says that having chosen to use the Ring as the “link” between [/I]The Hobbit[/I] and LotR, the story was pretty much determined to proceed as it did. So the book is ‘about’ the (history of) the Ring – that, for me, will be the point I try very much to keep in mind as I go through it this time.

EDIT -- I forgot to say thanks very much davem for that interesting (and lengthy!) quote. I get chills when I think how close we all came to never having LotR!!!