Chapter four begins with Tolkien’s usage of an allegory when he lectured on Beowulf. In the allegory, each element can be made to stand for (equal) something else. For example, “the tower, of course, = Beowulf, and the man= the Beowulf poet” (162). This made it easier for me to understand whey Tolkien would be so infuriated to have his work assumed to be allegorical, because it reduces The Lord of the Rings to something much simpler and “dumbed down” than what it really is (erasing all of its complexities). Shippey goes on to explain all of the possible allegories which The Lord of the Rings could be interpreted as. Shippey points out Tolkien’s contradictions in that he did say that he detested allegories, but also that “applicability” could be confused with “allegory,” and “the one resides in freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author” (164). He seems to accept that some may have difficulty discerning between the two.
I thought that the possibility of perceiving Saruman and Denethor as allegorical figures was interesting. Saruman I could easily see as a person who is absorbed in technology and where it can get him in life. I explored some of this in my research paper, as my paper was on “nature” in The Lord of the Rings, and Saruman is seen as evil because he sides with technology rather than good, which is associated with nature. Denethor, on the other hand, is seen as a reactionary as he bases his ultimate decision on what he sees in the palantir, which is an image that makes him think that the enemy has the Ring. The way in which the plot is layed out, what Denethor sees is Frodo being carried off by the Enemy to Minas Morgul. He does not know that the Ring has not been taken, though. Therefore, he acts in a rash way dependent on a scene which he has merely viewed and obviously does not reveal the entire context and story behind the vision. This is why the palantir is so deadly and a useful weapon of the Enemy and of Aragorn (when he distracts the Eye from Frodo and Sam). The entire section that went into the fact that Tolkien assumed the book to be a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work” (175). The ambiguity in the death scenes of Aragorn and Arwen was something I had not considered, although I had wondered while reading the text at the lack of religion. When Shippey mentioned Paradise Lost (180), I was excited as I had already made several connections to this work in previous responses.
My favorite part of the chapter was the section “Timeless Poetry and true tradition,” which used the “Old-Walking Song”/the “Road” song as a means to demonstrate the flexibility of it, in that it is both timeless (myth and applicability), and time-constrained (allegory and legend). The poem, or variations of it, come forth multiple times in the book, and in each case is altered to apply to the characters’ specific situation. It becomes apparent, though, that the road can also be seen in a more general sense, as the road being “life.” I had always thought that Bilbo was the one to originally come up with this song. This section was particularly interesting to me, as our chorus senior year of high school sang a song whose lyrics were Bilbo’s initial “Old-Walking Song.”
The various possibilities of the meaning of the “faces” in the Dead Marshes was also a point that interested me, as that was a section of the book that left me with many questions.
Kelsey Till November 05, 2008, at 08:30 PM
