In 2023, to mark the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death, the Journal of Inklings Studies published its third Special Supplement volume: Tolkien and the Relation between Sub-creation and Reality, edited by Giuseppe Pezzini and Eden O’Brien. I was very pleased to have my essay “The Mystical Face of Fairy-stories: Tolkien and the Use of Allegory in Fantasy” included in this volume; it is an extended analysis of Tolkien’s complex, nuanced, and apparently contradictory views on allegory. In this essay, I consider several different elements of Tolkien’s approach to allegory (some of which have not previously been fully explored), including his general rhetorical strategy, the contemporary context in which the allegorical content of Smith of Wootton Major was received by his coreligionists; Tolkien’s interaction with C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love (on which he offered feedback) and George MacDonald’s fairy-tales as discussed in “On Fairy-stories”; and Tolkien’s commentary on the allegorical Old English Exodus. I argue that his views on allegory appear to involve both his theological understanding and his practice of sub-creation, and that “what we might cautiously refer to as a sacramental approach to allegory, at least open up additional interpretive avenues for aspects of his work that have usually hitherto been considered as contradictory or undeveloped.”
By gracious permission of Judith Wolfe, the Journal of Inklings Studies General Editor, I can share the full text of my essay. For the beautifully typeset version, which also includes a number of other excellent essays, please purchase a copy of the volume using the link in the first paragraph.
“The Mystical Face of Fairy-stories: Tolkien and the Use of Allegory in Fantasy”
Holly Ordway
Tolkien is well known for having declared, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”[1] In contrast to his friend C.S. Lewis, who, he says, “was evidently born loving (moral) allegory,” Tolkien says that he “was born with an instinctive distaste for it.”[2] Regarding The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote very firmly to a reviewer: “There is no ‘allegory’, moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all.”[3] In a letter to Herbert Schiro, he makes the remark that “There is no ‘symbolism’ or conscious allegory in my story. . . To ask if the Orcs ‘are’ Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs.”[4]
However, as has been widely recognized by critics,[5] Tolkien did make use of allegory himself when it suited him, most obviously in the opening of “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in which he allegorizes critics’ responses to the poem Beowulf. Shorter works such as Smith of Wootton Major and “Leaf by Niggle” have, at the least, allegorical elements. Even with regard to The Lord of the Rings, his flat denial of allegory does not hold up. Writing to a correspondent about Tom Bombadil, Tolkien reverses himself in the space of a single sentence: “I do not mean him to be an allegory . . . but ‘allegory’ is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind.”[6]
Tolkien’s views about allegory may appear to be a self-contradiction; indeed, Verlyn Flieger observes that Tolkien’s writings include many “turnabouts, reversals of direction that not only make him appear contradictory but invite contradictory interpretations of his work. . . One result of this ambiguity is that the same cherries can be picked by both sides to support contending positions.”[7] Flieger rightly emphasizes, over against too-simplistic readings of Tolkien’s work, that he kept certain elements of his thought in tension, as she shows with regard to his treatment of the concept of Faërie and Faërian drama.
However, as Fabian Geier points out, “ambivalences are often diagnosed prematurely.”[8] What appears to be a tension or self-contradiction to readers and critics does not necessarily indicate an unsettled issue for Tolkien. For instance, although the question of Tolkien’s varied and apparently contradictory statements about Christianity in The Lord of the Rings is far too complex to even begin to address here,[9] it is worth noting one example that I would suggest is an instance of subtlety and complexity, rather than ambiguity or contradiction, in Tolkien’s thought. Flieger gives Elvish reincarnation as an example of Tolkien’s imaginative creation being in tension with his devout Catholic faith, writing that he “actually defended a heterodox aspect of his Secondary World rather than curtsey to his orthodox opponent’s position.”[10] But in fact, though Catholic teaching denies the possibility of human reincarnation, it has nothing to say with regard to the fate of non-humans. Tolkien is therefore entirely correct in suggesting that no theologian “could deny the possibility of re-incarnation as a mode of existence, prescribed for certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures.”[11] It is perhaps an unexpected approach – hence the letter to Tolkien from a Catholic reader who was disturbed by it – but it is not in tension with orthodoxy.
The question before us is, therefore, whether Tolkien’s views on allegory are (at least to a certain extent) self-contradictory, unsettled, or ambiguous, or whether there is an internal consistency and coherence, at least to some degree or at some level. It is this question which I intend to pursue in the rest of this essay.
1. Rhetorical Strategy
We certainly cannot take his “dislike of allegory” (however cordial) at face value. As Flieger observes, “Tolkien proclaimed his dislike of allegory so firmly and on so many occasions that one is tempted to see it as too much protest.”[12] With regard to The Lord of the Rings, his denunciation of allegory seems to have a strategic element: by definitively ruling out allegorical interpretations, in the Foreword to the Second Edition, we can see an attempt to head off endless queries from enthusiastic readers who were convinced that they had found the interpretive key to The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien himself offers the alternative concept of ‘applicability’ for his work. In the letter to Schiro quoted above, he adds, “That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is,”[13] and in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, he explains that “many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”[14] Yes to applicability, no to allegory. Or so it seems; to a certain extent this, too, may be part of a strategy to distract the reader from clinging to the idea of an allegorical reading. No allegory here: keep moving along!
One point to keep in mind from the outset is his complex and very English communication style. Tolkien enjoyed hyperbole, and not infrequently reacted strongly against something, then backed off from the extreme position he had made. A characteristic example is of his reaction when, in an interview, his work was compared to that of Dante: he replied heatedly that the poet “doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.” However, he subsequently backtracked, declaring that his remark was “outrageous” and adding, “I do not seriously dream of being measured against Dante, a supreme poet.”[15] It was evidently the element of over-earnest, over-lavish praise that irritated him into a hyperbolic denunciation of a poet whom, in fact, he admired (he was a member of the Oxford University Dante Society for a decade.)[16]
He also often used dramatic exaggeration about relatively trivial points, but employed characteristically English self-deprecation and understatement for the things that mattered most to him.[17] This communication style is one that American readers, in particular, tend to find baffling; in this regard, it is worth noting the reaction of the American scholar Clyde Kilby, who spent a summer trying to help Tolkien prepare the Silmarillion. He was puzzled by Tolkien’s personality, summing it up by saying that he “was a very complex character. I can describe C.S. Lewis, but I can’t describe Tolkien.”[18]
Recognizing Tolkien’s style of communication is crucial to understanding his statements on allegory. For instance, he flared up when he read Åke Ohlmarks’ introduction to the Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings, decrying his “silly methods and nonsensical conclusions.” Ohlmarks included a number of factual errors as well as sheer invention about Tolkien’s life, so by the time he arrived at the claim that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the Russian Revolution, with Sauron as Stalin, he was at his most heated and definitive: “I utterly repudiate any such ‘reading’, which angers me. . . Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought.”[19] Almost always, when Tolkien makes a blanket statement, especially a negative one, he subsequently walks it back to a certain extent and nuances it. Even here, we should note his phrasing: it not that allegory per se that he rejects, but rather “Such allegory” – in this case, allegory that is not only clumsy but based on errors of fact. We find another instance of this backtracking in a letter in which he says that “I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.”[20]
With his initial denial and rejection, he clears out any preconceived ideas about allegory, and sets up boundaries against misunderstanding; he is then able to proceed with a more subtle argument. This rhetorical strategy means that we should pay particular attention to what he says after he has cleared his throat, as it were, with his opening denial. Here, I suggest, we can begin to get a sense of his more settled and developed views on the subject.
2. Conscious and Deliberate Allegory
Tolkien repeatedly distinguishes a certain type of allegory that he dislikes: “conscious allegory,” or “conscious and deliberate allegory,” or “moral allegory.” He also emphasizes the role of authorial intention, as when he says “I do not mean” Bombadil to be an allegory (but then goes on to explain that he is one). He seems to be trying to articulate a difference between allegory that emerges naturally in and from a story, and one that is deliberately constructed by an author who is intent upon creating a fixed scheme for the readers’ interpretation. This second type of allegory is what he appears to reject, as when he says that “Allegory of the sort ‘five wizards = five senses’ is wholly foreign to my way of thinking.”[21]
To understand what type of allegory (if any) was native rather than foreign to Tolkien’s way of thinking, we should consider we mean by ‘allegory’ in the first place. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first definition “The use of symbols in a story, picture, etc., to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one; symbolic representation”; the third entry is even broader: “A character or figure that symbolically represents someone or something else; an emblem, a symbol.”[22]
What Tolkien meant by ‘allegory’ is considerably more specific than these usages, as we can see from his academic writings. In his introduction to the Middle English poem Pearl, Tolkien helpfully offers a precise definition: “To be an ‘allegory,’” he writes, “a poem must as a whole, and with fair consistency, describe in other terms some event or process; its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end.”[23] Tolkien holds that Pearl is not an allegory, because it cannot be read allegorically in a consistent, coherent way, with all its details serving the same end. However, he notes that it “certainly includes” some “allegorical and symbolical elements,” and names some instances of them; cautioning the reader that “the many applications of the pearl symbol [are] intelligible if the reference of the poem is personal, incoherent if one seeks for total allegory.”[24] Applicability, it seems, can coexist with allegory, as long as the allegory is not made to be “total.”
Regarding Pearl, Tolkien observed that when scholars decided that “the whole poem was an allegory,” the result was that “each interpreter has given it a different meaning”[25] – not unlike Smith of Wootton Major. His analysis of Pearl may shed a glimmer of light on the highly disputed question as to the extent to which Smith is allegorical, and what the allegory (if any) is about.[26]
Tolkien’s strict definition of allegory (as a complete and consistent system) meant that he could deny that Pearl, as a whole, is an allegory, while recognizing that it contains “minor allegories.” For instance, he noted that the opening imagery of the poem “is an allegory in little of the child’s death and burial” while going on to say that “an allegorical description of an event does not make that event itself allegorical.”[27] Thus, when Tolkien says of Smith that it is not an allegory, but that “it is capable of course of allegorical interpretations at certain points,”[28] this reflects a careful distinction between what we might call total allegory as a defining feature of a work, and allegorical elements within a work of literature. [29]
Here we can usefully consider “Leaf by Niggle.” Tolkien, for once, refers to his use of allegory in this tale in a relatively straightforward way; reflecting on the literary art of subcreation, he explains that “I tried to show allegorically how that might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my ‘purgatorial’ story Leaf by Niggle . . . to make visible and physical the effects of Sin or misused Free Will by men.”[30] This brief remark touches shows how richly textured the story is. As a ‘purgatorial’ story, it presents the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory; then, Tolkien states his intention within this purgatorial frame is to explore specific theological ideas: sin, free will, artistic creation. Furthermore, there is an autobiographical element: as he wrote to his aunt Jane Neave, “I was anxious about my own internal Tree, The Lord of the Rings.”[31]
“Leaf by Niggle” is arguably more of an allegory than Smith, in that the purgatorial level of its allegorical content provides the overall structure for all or most of the story (since Niggle’s life before his sudden journey shows us in what ways he needs to be corrected and healed after death). But it is also not an allegory in the sense that it is certainly not univocal and consistent; the purgatorial element is only one of the themes that Tolkien explores. Furthermore, what Tolkien said of Pearl applies equally well here: “there are a number of precise details . . . that cannot be subordinated to any general allegorical interpretation, and these details are of special importance since they relate to the central figure, the maiden of the vision, in whom, if anywhere, the allegory should be concentrated and without disturbance.”[32]
Geier gives to “Leaf by Niggle” the useful appellation of a “non-systematic allegory,”[33] which would seem to track with Tolkien’s distinction between comprehensive and limited or partial allegory. He seems to find a univocal, systematic approach to allegory to be foreign to his way of thinking, but this does not preclude there being other approaches that he found more congenial.
3. Smith of Wootton Major
We return now to Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major. Whatever we may make of the story as a whole, by Tolkien’s own account Smith contains a religious allegory, though, oddly enough, this has received very little attention: he declared that that “plainly enough the Master Cook and the Great Hall etc are a (somewhat satirical) allegory of the village-church and the village parson.”[34]
The “plainly enough” remark may seem perplexing, as this aspect is far from plain to most readers; indeed, Flieger observed that “This level of meaning. . . is so recessive as to be almost invisible.”[35] Josh Long likewise argues that this allegorical element “is ineffective because it is too subtle—besides the author, no one else was able to detect its presence.”[36] It may be well-nigh so subtle as to be invisible to readers today, but that does not mean Tolkien was indulging in an entirely private interpretation at the time he wrote it. Context is especially valuable here.
Tolkien made his comment about the religious allegory being “plainly” apparent when writing to his friend Clyde Kilby, a devout Evangelical Christian with whom he had had many discussions about religion. Furthermore, the first audience for Smith of Wootton Major was at Blackfriars Hall, the home of the Dominican Friars in Oxford.[37] His reading of Smith was part of an ecumenical lecture-series on “Literature and the Understanding of Life,” hosted jointly by Blackfriars and Pusey House, a study center for Anglicans in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.[38] This audience would have been primed to pick up on even very subtle references to Anglican and Catholic church history and theology.
And indeed the element of religious allegory seems to have been relatively plain to Catholics at the time, as we see in Christopher Derrick’s 1968 review of Smith for the Catholic weekly magazine The Tablet. Derrick found the allegory of the Church so evident that he could refer to it as “a significacio that will – plainly enough – be relevant to matters discussed in The Tablet: and here and there clear hints will indeed be found, as when we hear that the ancient hall has been re-glazed and re-painted, ‘and there had been much debate on the Council about it. Some disliked it and called it “new-fangled,” but some with more knowledge knew that it was a return to old custom.’”[39] Derrick assumes that Tolkien is alluding to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which were extensively and heatedly discussed in the Catholic press in those years; hence his slightly coy ‘let the reader understand’ phrasing. Whether Derrick’s interpretation is accurate is another question, of course (Tolkien might have been, or have also been, referencing the Reformation), but he evidently had no trouble picking up on the presence of religious allegory.[40] However, what was visible to Tolkien’s contemporary coreligionists is naturally considerably less apparent to others, especially those outside the cultural, historical, and ecclesiological context of English Catholicism.
Tolkien explains that in Smith, as in his other works,“there is no religion,” by which he means that there is “no church or temple . . . no parson or priest. . . No power or powers are by any ceremony propitiated, supplicated, or thanked.” [41] That is, religion is not overtly present as a feature of the secondary story-world that he has created. He then makes a significant clarification: “In a story written by a religious man this is a plain indication that religion is not absent but subsumed: the tale is not about religion or in particular about its relation to other things.”[42] Not absent but subsumed: that is, it is not apparent on a surface view precisely because it has become deeply embedded in the material of the tale. Tolkien goes on to explain some elements of that deeper, subsumed religious element, even pointing out that for the characters, cooking represents “personal religion and prayer.”[43]
Smith of Wootton Major certainly resists a strict allegorical reading of the kind that Lewis describes in The Allegory of Love, which Tolkien argues has been wrongly imposed upon the Middle English poem Pearl, and which he rejects for The Lord of the Rings in the ‘five wizards = five senses’ form. Indeed, he is careful to note that the religious allegory he has outlined is only a small part of the whole: “The tale does not deal with religion itself. The Elves are not busy with a plan to reawake religious devotion in Wootton. The Cooking allegory would not be suitable to any such import.”[44] However, it is entirely consistent with how he defined Pearl: that it is not an allegory, but that it contains “allegorical and symbolical elements.”
Thus far, I have argued that it is not contradictory for Tolkien to say, sometimes almost in the same breath, that something is not a (total) allegory, and yet is an allegory (in some way). But is this the limit of what we can conclude? Here I may well have embarked upon a “rash adventure,” with “pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold,”[45] but I would like to go further and consider whether Tolkien had something approaching a coherent underlying view of allegory, especially in regard to the way that fantasy might be used to express religious ideas.
4. C.S. Lewis and The Allegory of Love
We will approach this question in a slightly circuitous manner, first considering The Allegory of Love (1936), a literary-critical work by Tolkien’s friend and Oxford colleague C.S. Lewis. Tolkien knew The Allegory of Love, and even provided Lewis with comments on its first chapter.[46] In this study, Lewis observes that “It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms.” He then goes on to explain that
[t]his fundamental equivalence between the immaterial and the material may be used by the mind in two ways [ . . .] On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia.”[47]
This form of allegory as used in classical and medieval literature is what Lewis goes on to analyze in his study; it appears to correspond closely to the sort of allegory that Tolkien objects to, as being conscious, intentional, or moral in nature. Certainly, the medieval works discussed in The Allegory of Love do tend, on the whole, to fit into the “five wizards = five senses” category.
Then Lewis goes on to say something very interesting indeed:
But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. As the god Amor and his figurative garden are to the actual passions of men, so perhaps we ourselves and our ‘real’ world are to something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism. . . The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given—his own passions—to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real.[48]
What Lewis here distinguishes from allegory and names ‘sacramentalism’ or ‘symbolism’ seems to fit what Tolkien does in his own imaginative writings.
We might ask, why does Tolkien not simply adopt Lewis’s terms? One reason, I would suggest, is that Tolkien might have been uncomfortable with the way that Lewis appears to conflate sacramentalism and symbolism. A sacrament, in the Catholic understanding, is not a symbol, although it may have symbolic resonances. There is no reason to expect that Lewis would make this distinction, since he was first of all, not a Catholic, and second, was writing literary criticism and not theology, although it is interesting to consider whether Lewis might have done so later on; Allegory of Love was published in 1936, and Lewis would later write about the Sacrament in ways that were closer to Tolkien’s Catholic view.
However, I would suggest a second reason why Tolkien did not adopt this terminology. Lewis emphasizes that medieval poets intended their allegories to be utterly clear: “The great allegorist’s firm thinking leaves no room for misunderstanding. There is nothing ‘mystical’ or mysterious about medieval allegory; the poets know quite well what they are about and are well aware that the figures which they present to us are fictions.”[49] This exclusion from allegory of mystery and the mystical – which, as we will see, Tolkien considered as important to fantasy – perhaps helps to account for his reluctance to use the word ‘allegory’ without abundant qualifications and corrections. Yet he was unwilling to abandon ‘allegory’ as a concept entirely; rather, he seems to have had a view of allegory that included, or could include, the more mystical, sacramental aspect that Lewis cordons off as something else.
5. The Influence of George MacDonald
This more capacious view of allegory, and its usefulness for exploring religious themes, may well have been influenced by the writings of George MacDonald, an important figure in Tolkien’s imaginative development.
MacDonald’s fictional output included the fantasy novels Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895); a number of children’s fantasies including The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and shorter fairy tales, including “The Golden Key” (1867). Tolkien knew his work well from an early age; he remarked that George MacDonald (along with Andrew Lang) composed “the books which most affected the background of my imagination since childhood,”[50] and he even acknowledged MacDonald’s influence on The Hobbit.[51] To be sure, near the end of his life, his views changed, and he declared “I now find that I can’t stand George MacDonald’s books at any price at all.”[52] But even though Tolkien’s enjoyment of MacDonald dwindled in later years, MacDonald was a significant influence.
The clearest connection between Tolkien’s views and MacDonald’s is the latter’s emphasis on what Tolkien would later call “applicability.” MacDonald, in his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” is explicit in his embrace of multiple meanings, saying that “Everyone . . . who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will read one meaning in it, another will read another. . . . It may be better that you should read your meaning into it. That may be a higher operation of your intellect than the mere reading of mine out of it: your meaning may be superior to mine.”[53] MacDonald even asserts that he would refuse to explain his meaning if asked: “if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of imagination would be nearly, if not quite, as absurd.”[54] These views are certainly very much in line with what Tolkien would later say about ‘applicability,’ which, he says, “resides in the freedom of the reader,” and not “the purposed domination of the author.”[55]
MacDonald also gives us an entry-point for understanding Tolkien’s views on specifically religious allegory. Here we turn to Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories.” In the section titled “Origins,” he criticizes both the idea that fairy-tales are just dwindled versions of myths featuring gods who are personifications, or allegories, of natural phenomena, and the view that mythology is entirely distinct from religion. He goes on to say that “Something really ‘higher’ is occasionally glimpsed in mythology.”[56]
It is in this context, of considering the possibility of a myth, folktale, or fairy-tale conveying something about religion, that Tolkien offers a threefold analysis of fantasy. He writes that fairy-stories have three possible “faces” or orientations: “the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.”[57] In one of the drafts of “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien phrases these more strikingly, calling them “The Mystical (towards God divine)”, the Magical “towards the world”, and “the Critical (towards man in laughter and tears).”[58] Taking them in reverse order, the third of these faces, the “Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man,” is exemplified in satirical fairy-tales. He describes the second face, the Magical toward nature, or “toward the world,” as the “essential” one of the three for a fairy-tale, and here we may see the means by which a fairy-tale has the capacity to effect for reader what Tolkien would call ‘Recovery.’
Most significant for our consideration of allegory is the face of “the Mystical towards the Supernatural.” Tolkien places it first in the list, though interestingly he notes that it is easier for the ‘Magical’ element of fairy-tale to be used for satire than for it to “be made a vehicle of Mystery.”[59] Difficult though it may be to achieve Mystery in a fairy-tale, Tolkien acknowledges that “This at least is what George MacDonald attempted, achieving stories of power and beauty when he succeeded, as in The Golden Key. . . and even when he partly failed, as in Lilith.”[60] In this regard, it is useful to know that Lilith is a strongly allegorical story, dealing overtly with themes of death, sin, spiritual maturity, and salvation.
That Tolkien intended the theological meaning for ‘mystical’ and ‘mystery’ is emphasized by the phrasing that he uses in the draft, where instead of “towards the Supernatural” he writes “towards God divine.”[61] The Oxford English Dictionary gives one definition of “Mystical” that it is “Spiritually allegorical or symbolic,”[62] and gives the meaning of “mystery” in the theological sense as “A religious truth known or understood only by divine revelation; esp. a doctrine of faith involving difficulties which human reason is incapable of solving.”[63] A theological mystery is precisely one whose meaning cannot be totally comprehended or exhaustively explained. For Tolkien, as a Catholic, the Eucharist was the sacramental mystery above all others; it is not a symbol of Christ, it is Christ, really present, although our physical senses encounter only the accidents of bread and wine.
Insofar as the Mystical face of the fairy-tale points toward God, it is allegorical in the sense that it conveys ideas about the divine. These ideas are expressed by the nature and content of the story itself, and point toward a definite reality, a truth outside the story. Because it functions as a mystery in the theological sense, there can be no key that will unlock every meaning of the story. This mode of allegory is not, therefore not the “five wizards = five senses” type that Tolkien objects to; rather, it is a richer, deeper, more sacramental approach.
6. Sacramental Allegory?
Let us turn once again to Tolkien’s academic work, this time to his commentary on the Old English Exodus, a rendition in alliterative poetry of the Old Testament account of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt through the Red Sea (Exodus chapters 13 and 14). Tolkien knew the poem well, and regularly lectured on it at Oxford beginning in 1926.[64] David Lavinsky explains that Exodus features “a density of allegorical reference within individual passages” as well as lending itself to the overarching interpretation of the passage through the Red Sea as an image of baptism.[65] Tolkien was well aware of the allegorical features of the poem, writing in his commentary that the word bealusiðe in the opening lines is the “key to the poem,” as it suggests “not only the troublous passage through life, but the journey of the Israelites to the Promised Land, a symbol of that weary passage.”[66]
Interestingly, however, Lavinsky traces a pattern in which Tolkien’s commentary downplays potential allegorical interpretations in favor of more historical, concrete details, “so that what would otherwise be a fixture of the poem’s overarching allegorical meaning contributes instead to the sensory effects of language: texture, color, and motion.”[67] He goes on to argue that “But while he does not always pursue them where we would expect, Tolkien certainly grasped these associations, and elsewhere in his commentary shows himself quite alert to specific allegorical motifs.” The most notable of these is with regard to an episode in the poem which, according to Tolkien, relates to “the instruction of catechumens about to receive baptism” at the Easter Vigil,[68] an interpretation that Lavinsky suggests “actually reinforces the thematic and allegorical coherence of the poem.”[69] He concludes that “It is not so much that Tolkien’s response to this poem disregards its allegorical possibilities, however, but that his interpretation understands allegoresis as something already embedded in the traditional subject matter of ‘ancient native poetry,’ and its accompanying modes of narrative emplotment.”[70] The idea of meaning being inherent, “embedded in,” a narrative is suggestive of a sacramental view of allegory.
Riley McGuire, building on Lavinsky’s analysis, argues that Tolkien’s approach to this Old English poem is indicative of a wide-ranging, theologically grounded view: “Allegory operates in Exodus, Tolkien believes, in the same way he understands it to operate in all true stories, especially stories with happy endings.”[71] As McGuire explains, Tolkien “calls the poem an allegory, and for him a poem can only be called an allegory properly speaking if its allegorical conceit extends to its entirety.”[72] Tolkien, he argues, sees the Exodus story as “both history and allegory—and not just any allegory, but a broad-ranging allegory that can be applied to the entire ‘Church of militant souls’ as well as the ‘weary passage through life’ of every individual soul.”[73] Furthermore, McGuire calls our attention to the happy ending of Exodus, exhibited in the miraculous parting of the Red Sea. The unexpected happy ending – eucatastrophe – is deeply rooted in Tolkien’s understanding of Christianity; in “On Fairy-stories” he refers to the Resurrection of Christ as “the Great Eucatastrophe,” and declares that the story of the Gospels “is supreme; and it is true. . . Legend and History have met and fused.”[74] McGuire suggests that this eucatastrophic element in Exodus ensures that the poem “is not any “simple allegory,” but rather a deep and almost implicit one: the kind of allegory that, for Tolkien, assumes into itself the history of Israel, the trials of each soul and the Church, real-life miracles, and ultimately, the great story of the human race; it is the intelligibility of all stories derived from what is, in Tolkien’s mind, the great Story.[75]
Conclusion
The deeper we go into Tolkien’s approach to allegory, the more we find that it seems to intersect with his theological understanding and his practice of subcreation, the more complex it appears, and the less easy it is to define. This should perhaps come as no surprise. In a 1947 letter to Stanley Unwin, Tolkien, after making his standard protest that The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory, goes on to say:
Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it.[76]
This topic remains exceedingly complex, and indeed Tolkien’s threefold analysis of the ‘faces’ of fantasy is only a brief and relatively un-developed passage in “On Fairy-stories.” Tolkien seems never to have fully articulated a definition of allegory as he practiced it in his fiction. But then, he had no occasion to; his academic writings were not of the same kind of literary criticism that Lewis’s were, being much more linguistic and philological in nature. What he did do, however, was to explore the potential of allegory in his fiction. I would suggest that our consideration of the “mystical face” of fantasy, and our exploration of what we might cautiously refer to as a sacramental approach to allegory, at least open up additional interpretive avenues for aspects of his work that have usually hitherto been considered as contradictory or undeveloped. It seems oddly appropriate that Tolkien can simultaneously (and accurately) deny that he is doing allegory, while also affirming a more qualified approval of a sort of allegory. One is reminded of Frodo’s retort to Gildor: “it is also said . . . Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”[77]
[1] Tolkien, Foreword to the Second Edition, The Lord of the Rings, 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition (London: HarperCollins, 2004), xxiv.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, Note to Clyde Kilby, in Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 86.
[3] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. ed. Humphrey Carpenter (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 232.
[4] Letter to Herbert Schiro, in Glen GoodKnight, “Death and the Desire for Deathlessness” (Mythlore 10, vol. 3, no. 2: 1975), 19.
[5] For a concise overview of the topic, see Anne C. Petty, “Allegory,” in J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, ed. Michael D. C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007), 6-7. For a more detailed overview, see Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, “Allegory,” in The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, Revised and Expanded Edition (London: HarperCollins, 2017), 44-49.
[6] Tolkien, Letters, 192.
[7] Verlyn Flieger, “But What Did He Really Mean?”, Tolkien Studies 11. 149.
[8] Fabian Geier, “Leaf by Tolkien? Allegory and Biography in Tolkien’s Literary Theory and Practice,” in Tolkien’s Shorter Works, ed. Margaret Hiley and Frank Weinreich (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2008), 209-232. 216.
[9] For explorations of this topic in detail, see, for instance, Claudio A. Testi, Pagan Saints in Middle-earth (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2018) and my Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Elk Grove Village, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2023).
[10] Flieger, “But What Did He Really Mean?”, 154.
[11] Tolkien, Letters, 189. Tolkien’s extended (and complex) reflections on Elvish reincarnation can be found in Tolkien, The Nature of Middle-earth, ed. Carl F. Hostetter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).
[12] Verlyn Flieger, Notes to Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 194.
[13] Tolkien, Letters, 262.
[14] Tolkien, Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, xxiv.
[15] Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, “The Man Who Understands Hobbits,” London Daily Telegraph Magazine, March 22, 1968, 31–32, 35. 35; Tolkien, Letters, 377.
[16] Oxford University Dante Society, Centenary Essays on Dante. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. 147.
[17] For examples and further discussion of this, see my Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021), 282-286.
[18] Clyde Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion (Berkhamstead, Herts.: Lion Publishing, 1976), 6.
[19] Tolkien, Letters, 307.
[20] Tolkien, Letters, 145.
[21] Quoted in GoodKnight, “Death and the Desire for Deathlessness,” 19.
[22] The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, “Allegory, n.”
[23] Tolkien, introduction to Pearl, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2020. 162. Emphasis in original.
[24] Tolkien, introduction to Pearl, 161-162.
[25] Tolkien, introduction to Pearl, 161.
[26] Most notably, Tom Shippey argues that Smith is an allegory, primarily autobiographical in nature while Verlyn Flieger rejects Shippey’s reading of the story and disputes that it is an allegory at all. See Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 296-304; The Road to Middle-earth (Revised edition. London: HarperCollins, 2005), 308-319; Verlyn Flieger and Tom Shippey, “Allegory versus Bounce,” in Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien by Verlyn Flieger (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2012), 165-178. I would suggest that they are both correct – in part. Flieger is correct to deny that Smith is an allegory in the total, consistent sense; but Shippey is correct to see the potential for allegorical readings of at least portions of the story.
[27] Tolkien, introduction to Pearl, 162.
[28] Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major Essay, in Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger, 111.
[29] See Fabian Geier, “Leaf by Tolkien? Allegory and Biography in Tolkien’s Literary Theory and Practice,” in Tolkien’s Shorter Works, ed. Margaret Hiley and Frank Weinreich (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2008), for a useful analysis of the distinctions within the term ‘allegory,’ with particular attention to allegory and biography.
[30] Tolkien, Letters, 195.
[31] Tolkien, Letters, 321.
[32] Tolkien, introduction to Pearl, 162.
[33] Geier, “Leaf by Tolkien?”, 230.
[34] Tolkien, “Genesis of the Story”: Note to Clyde Kilby, in Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger, 86-87.
[35] Verlyn Flieger, notes to Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition, 196.
[36] Josh Long, “Clinamen, Tessera, and the Anxiety of Influence: Swerving from and Completing George MacDonald.” Tolkien Studies, Volume 6, 2009, 127-150. 137.
[37] Verlyn Flieger, afterword to Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition, 75-76; Tolkien, Letters, 370.
[38] Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Elk Grove Village, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2023), 337-338.
[39] Christopher Derrick, “And See Ye Not Yon Bonny Road?” Review of Smith of Wootton Major. The Tablet, February 10, 1968. 12.
[40] For an extended discussion and contextualization of Tolkien’s views on the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, see my Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, especially chapters 35 and 36.
[41] Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major Essay, Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition, 141-142.
[42] Ibid, 142.
[43] Ibid., 142.
[44] Ibid., 144.
[45] Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” in Tolkien On Fairy-stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2014), 27.
[46] C.S. Lewis, Preface to Allegory of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; first published 1936), ix. See also The Notion Club Papers, in which Tolkien has his narrator note that in the future imagined here, “The Allegory of Love was all of Lewis that the academicians ever mentioned (as a rule unread and slightingly)” (The History of Middle-earth vol. IX, 219).
[47] C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 55-56.
[48] Ibid., 56-57.
[49] Ibid., 60.
[50] Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” MS B, in Tolkien On Fairy-stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, 207.
[51] Tolkien, Letters, 31.
[52] Quoted in Henry Resnik, “An Interview with Tolkien” (Niekas 18, Spring 1967), 40.
[53] George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” in A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald (Prime Classics Library, 2004), 208.
[54] Ibid., 210.
[55] Tolkien, Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, xxiv.
[56] Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 42, 44.
[57] Ibid., 44.
[58] Ibid., MS A 183
[59] Ibid., 44.
[60] Ibid., 44.
[61] Ibid. MS A, 183
[62] The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, “Mystical,” adj., 1a, 1b, 1c.
[63] The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, “Mystery,” n.1, I.2a, 2c.
[64] Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide. Revised and expanded ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2017), 890.
[65] David Lavinsky, “Tolkien’s Old English Exodus and the Problematics of Allegory.” Neophilologus 101 (2017), 305-319. 308.
[66] Tolkien, The Old English Exodus, ed. Joan Turville-Petre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 36.
[67] Lavinsky, 312-313.
[68] Tolkien, The Old English Exodus, 64.
[69] Lavinsky, 315.
[70] Ibid., 316.
[71] Riley McGuire, “The Place of Allegory in Tolkien’s Understanding of the Old English Exodus.” Tolkien Studies, Vol. 19 (2022), 39-46. 39.
[72] Ibid., 44.
[73] Ibid., 44.
[74] Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 78.
[75] McGuire, 46.
[76] Tolkien, Letters 121. See also Tolkien’s letter to W.H. Auden, Letter 163, and to Joanna de Bortadano, Letter 186.
[77] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 84.