One of the things you hear most when reading Tolkien (or reading about Tolkien) is whether or not The Lord of the Rings is an allegory.  Tolkien, of course, flatly denied the charge, but that hasn’t kept decades of readers from speculating about the atomic bomb and world wars and the effects of the industrial age.  Lewis picks up on the possibility, too, but quickly dismisses it in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring.  Consider:

What shows we are reading myth, not allegory, is that there are no pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological application. A myth points, for each reader, to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key; use it on what door you like. And there are other these in The Fellowship equally serious.

That is why no catchwords about ‘escapism’ or ‘nostalgia’ and no distrust of ‘private worlds’ are in court. This is no Angria, no dreaming; it is sane and vigilant invention, revealing at point after point the integration of the author’s mind. What is the use of calling ‘private’ a world we can walk into and test and in which we find such balance? As for escapism, what we chiefly escape is the illusion of our ordinary life. We certainly do not escape anguish. Despite many a snug fireside and many an hour of good cheer to gratify the Hobbit in each of us, anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls: rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone.

I love the image of myth-as-key, that a myth “points the reader to the realm he lives in most.”  It’s a “master key,” almost like the elvish word of entry to Moria or the way into the Lonely Mountain.  And that is why, in Lewis’s estimation, the story of Frodo and Sam, Aragorn and Arwen, Gandalf and Galadriel, is more than just escapist literature.  More on that tomorrow.

(image of the Door of Durin by Tolkien from lotr.wikia.com)