created by imhereforthevotes on 04/03/2025 at 04:31 UTC
268 upvotes, 9 top-level comments (showing 9)
Comment by TScottFitzgerald at 04/03/2025 at 10:32 UTC
171 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is a good writeup, but it should be noted Tolkien disagreed with this common fan interpretation and in general disliked allegorical literal analysis.
Obviously despite his own protestations, you can't deny he was still at the very least subconsciously influenced by his own personal experiences and culture that he grew up in, but when you go deeper into his worldbuilding and additional LOTR material like The Unfinished Tales and the Silmarillion, the allegory does kinda fall apart and you can really see the work is far more influenced by the mythologies and older literary works he studied.
I don't think he meant it directly to reflect his own experiences as much as he observed a common pattern both in his own experiences and the mythologies he studied.
Comment by bionicjoey at 04/03/2025 at 12:45 UTC
37 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Matt Colville has a great YouTube channel in case you don't know. He mostly talks about D&D and other TTRPGs (including the one his company is developing, Draw Steel). He has a ton of videos going into movies and TV that he thinks are important.
Comment by Dottsterisk at 04/03/2025 at 21:28 UTC
38 upvotes, 2 direct replies
But so much of this is just *wrong*. And what’s not is either empty or old hat.
There’s nothing like it. There may be books you enjoy more, sure, but there’s never been any series as...weird...as The Lord of the Rings. It’s the same weirdness that turns a lot of people off (compare The Lord of the Rings to any random book you might pick up at the airport or the grocery store) that causes people to fall in love with it.
I agree that LotR’s singular character is both what draws people to it and pushes them away, but to claim it’s the weirdest novel (not a series) ever is just an empty statement that sounds good.
How are we measuring this? Is A Clockwork Orange not weird as fuck and out of nowhere?
Most fantasy authors are...authors. They are professional writers.
That’s not true. And the ones who are professionals weren’t professionals until they published their work… just like Tolkien.
They grew up on fantasy, they want to write fantasy, they work to get an agent who gives them advice, they get a book deal with an editor that gives them advice. They work to sell their book. They work to write something saleable. They care about what their agent thinks. What their publisher says. What fans like.
This is *wildly* wrong. I mean, really? Not only does this ignore the vast sea of self-published fantasy authors, but are we really going to say that Tolkien is/was the only fantasy author with vision and the rest wrote for sales, according to their agent and publishers? That’s just ludicrous fanboying.
Tolkien was never that. He was never a professional author.
Yes, he was.
He never really cared what anyone else, including his publisher, thought. He had a job as a teacher, writing was his side-hustle.
The second sentence does not preclude the first.
Except...not really! What Tolkien did was something very embarrassing for himself and any other proper Oxbridge don. He wrote a smash hit. He wrote a generational work. Everyone knew these guys didn’t make any money and so they’d sometimes write in their spare time to make some money, and that was fine. As long as they wrote mystery novels, or detective fiction. Something cheap and quick with no pretension. You were not supposed to write a smash hit that invents a whole genre and attracts decades of literary analysis. That was very much not the done thing.
How are we getting even fucking dumber? Tolkien was supposed to be *ashamed* of writing a seminal work? There is zero evidence for this absurd narrative. It just makes Tolkien sound like a maverick. In reality, while there were certainly critics, the work also won awards and praise from literary figures almost immediately.
A lot is made of Tolkien’s statements that he only wrote these books so there would be a place where people spoke his languages. I don’t think most modern readers understand that this was Tolkien’s way of apologizing for his embarrassing success.
Any evidence of that? *At all?*
In reality, I think he wanted two things. He wanted to give his culture, English culture, something like the mythic bedrock he felt they were denied. He was in many ways trying to reconstruct, like a good linguist does, resynthesize a Myth for England. Imagining “what if 1066 never happened? What stories might the English be telling their children?”
That’s not an “I think,” it’s something that Tolkien was very open about.
That’s why there’s so much Beowulf in there! Basically all the Rohan stuff is just lifted wholesale from Beowulf, but he didn’t stop there! There are tons of placenames in Middle-earth that are taken right out of the places Tolkien walked past on his way to work. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, he was an expert on where English placenames come from. It must have annoyed the hell out of him to be accused of writing escapism with no basis in reality when our actual reality is all over Middle-earth!
A rare bit of truth, but also common knowledge.
And, whether he intended to or not, I think the books are very much the process of Tolkien trying to come to grips with the apocalypse he survived called World War I.
Another *very* common theory, although one that Tolkien rejected.
It sucks because no one these days really knows what genre The Lord of the Rings belongs to, because it took so long to write.
That is an absurd statement.
People put it in the Fantasy Genre but...I dunno, does it seem ANYTHING LIKE the other fantasy you read?
Yes. Lord of the Rings is clearly fantasy.
To me, the books have a lot more in common with stuff like Parade’s End and Her Privates We. Goodbye To All That. The books the WWI generation wrote trying to understand what just happened. Trying to fathom evil, industrial evil.
Fantasy books can be allegories and can have profound messages. That doesn’t mean they aren’t fantasy.
There’s a great bit in the books where Sam and Frodo are crawling through Mordor and there’s a Nazgul on a whatever-it-is evil bird and it mirrors very closely the language used by a WWI vet talking about No Man’s Land and the seeking airplanes and warning sirens. That stuff is all through the books.
Tolkien and his three best friends signed up for WWI because they thought it would be a great adventure. They were all of the same class of citizen as the four hobbits. English gentlemen. Are we meant to see the four Hobbits going through all the same shit Tolkien and his friends went through, and think this is just a coincidence?
He gives the hobbits the ending he couldn’t give his friends. They all come home. But do they? Does Frodo ever get to go home? Isn’t what happens to Frodo exactly what happened to thousands of survivors of WWI?
Again, *a very common theory.*
Folks don’t see it this way, I think, because the books took so goddamned long to write.
Yes, they do. And as for harping on how long the book took to write—all three parts were published in 1954-55, so it’s not like audiences were waiting years for sequels.
It’s exactly because The Lord of the Rings came from a completely different generation that folks in the 60s glommed onto it. It felt real to them in a way the other junk they were reading did not because it was written by someone who had lived through a real-world apocalypse and that reality infuses everything that happens in the book.
Again, zero evidence or argument. Are people today becoming fans because it’s from a different generation or because it’s some fantastic storytelling and marvelously creative.
And the rest is just as meaningless. Yes, the book evolved as Tolkien was writing. That’ll happen with art. And reading in motivations related to his experience in WWI is nothing novel.
Comment by AStarkly at 04/03/2025 at 06:41 UTC
16 upvotes, 2 direct replies
So was The Chronicles of Narnia- as well as the effects WW1 and the deaths of so many he knew/loved, had on Lewis's faith. I'm not even religious, but some reason take it really personally when people talk shit on the Narnia books for their Christian aspect when all of it was just a guy trying to work through a hell of a lot of demons.
Comment by jedify at 04/03/2025 at 15:58 UTC
9 upvotes, 2 direct replies
He wanted to give his culture, English culture, something like the mythic bedrock he felt they were denied. He was in many ways trying to reconstruct, like a good linguist does, resynthesize a Myth for England. Imagining "what if 1066 never happened? What stories might the English be telling their children?"
Does England not have myth? As an outsider it seems they have plenty of it
Comment by rnhf at 04/03/2025 at 05:55 UTC*
12 upvotes, 1 direct replies
probably this guy[1], makes good content
1: https://www.youtube.com/@mcolville
-e- yeah that's him, his channel is worth checking out, and if you're planning to be a DM in a pen and paper rpg, he has a series that's great for beginners
Comment by marwynn at 04/03/2025 at 04:46 UTC
21 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Succinct?
Comment by cdank at 05/03/2025 at 00:31 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Your experiences influence your art
Comment by alcaron at 04/03/2025 at 10:58 UTC
-8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You don't say...never heard that before...how interesting... /s