I get it. I won't say you're wrong. I'm just basing what I'm saying off his letters where for some of the more obvious allegories and parallels he was really dismissive and was like "don't know where you're getting that from, I was just using my imagination"

The real discussion is which is true:

his imagination needed him to explore his traumas
he was actively dismissive in communiqué of the idea that he was exploring horrifying things because he didn't have it in him to have that conversation with the public once the books were published
it was both. He didn't actively mean to do it, but he got where people were drawing the parallels, but he wasn't equipped to explore those parallels.

Personally, as much as people of that generation did erase their own experience, I think he was being genuine in his letters when he said "I wasn't trying to do that, don't know why you'd think that" when what he experienced shook him so deeply to his core that it needed an outlet, and that outlet became his imagination. But I see validity in all the ways of seeing it, except to take him at his word and dismiss that LotR was influenced by an industrial war that felt like it completely destroyed the world

[–] MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago

Tolkien uses the words in a funny way, but what he actually means to say in those letters is that he rejects other people feeling the need to absorb the authorial intent. He wants people drawing their own conclusions in relation to the work, he doesn't want to prescribe the one correct reading of the text. That's what Tolkien views Allegory as

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Tolkien was for sure writing from his experience with war, he just doesn't want you to have to read the text that way. He wants you to interpret the story however you like.

[–] CitizenKong@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

He based Mordor on the heavily industrialized north of England and the shire on the idyllic south (Kent, where he grew up). So the ecological themes of the books are very much based on the times Tolkien lived in, consciously or subconsciously.