"the ring does in no way represent the bomb"

[pynchonoid]

"[...] When I was 13 I read about the trilogy in The
New York Times, and I was mesmerized, experiencing the
same astonishment one would on finding a family
member's name in a newspaper headline. How did they
know about those books? I read with growing
incredulity the analysis of the books as an allegory
in which Sauron's ring represented the bomb, and
wondered how a reputable paper like The Times could
sanction such evident absurdity. 

Outraged, as if someone I loved had been accused of
committing a crime of which I knew he was incapable, I
sought assurance. It couldn't be true, could it? What
a cheap, ungentlemanly thing to do. To write about one
thing but intend another? Tolkien wouldn't do such a
thing — not this chronicler of hobbits with the
Elvishlike spelling to his surname and the mysterious
extra R preceding it — not my Tolkien. So I wrote to
him again. This time a publishing assistant replied
that Professor Tolkien had asked him to tell me "most
positively that the ring does in no way represent the
bomb."
I was gratified and perhaps repudiated symbolism
longer in my literary career than I might otherwise
have done (though I still haven't disabused myself of
the conviction that there's something fundamentally
unsavory about it). As is well known by now, Tolkien
rejected the notion that anything in his Middle Earth
represented anything else, and although it's evident
that the book couldn't have come into existence
without the two World Wars Tolkien experienced, in the
first as a participant and in the second as the father
of one, or without his love of a rural England that
was being swallowed by suburbs, it may not tell us
that much about the books or his creation of them to
know that. We might just as well think of the World
Wars and industrial pollution as symbolic of the
battle between the forces of good and evil in Middle
Earth and the overrunning of the Shire. [...] "

from:
New York Times
December 30, 2002 
Middle Earth Enchants a Returning Pilgrim
By KATHRYN KRAMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/30/books/30KRAM.html

...enjoy!

-Doug


 




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