Guest post by: Justin Orr
Was JRR Tolkien a hypocrite?
When JRR Tolkien set out to write The Lord of the Rings, he included in the foreword of The Fellowship of the Ring a line about his detestation of allegory. He stated “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”
And yet, Tolkien has also stated about the trilogy that it is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”
Is the greatest fantasy author of all time trying to pull the rug out from under us? How can these two seemingly opposite ideas about storytelling, specifically about his own storytelling, be true?
