While reading chapter four I found it more difficult to pull things out that greatly interested me. I am not that interested in the Beowulf section of the chapter even though Tolkien was influenced by the poem greatly.
I liked the section of the chapter on allegory especially the part about the equal signs. From the discussions we had in class, I thought that Tolkien was totally and completely against allegory and that it has no place in his tales but Shippey says that Tolkien didn’t think they made sense unless they were completely without error. This was new information for me.
I never thought about the equal sign scenario the way Shippey does. The part about how the ring could, for example, represent nuclear weapons brought up some things that I had never thought about. I never thought that if the ring were to “equal” or represent something in my mind as I am reading the story then that representation would change the outcome of the story based on whatever I connected the ring with in my mind. The example that Shippey gave about the nuclear weapons would have changed the outcome of the story because the ring would have been used against Sauron instead of just being destroyed because of the fact that nuclear weapons were used against Japan in world was two.
The part of the chapter about the counterparts of the different characters in the book caught my attention also. This goes back to what we talked about in the previous chapters and how the journeys of the different groups paralleled with eachother. With what Shippey says it can be thought that each character has a character that is opposite it in one way or another. One examaple that Shippey gives is Denethor and Theoden. They share a lot of similarities in the sense that they both lost their sons but they rule over groups of people that are culturally different. The part about how they react to dispare is where my real interest lies in this section of the chapter. I find if kind of cool the way Tolkien made these characters so much alike and then in a critical point in the story truely defined each of them as different characters.
