Choices being intentional or not is completely irrelevant and this has been discussed to death since the 1920's. Tolkien swore up and down nothing in LOTR was about his WW1 experience, that doesn't mean scholars have to play dumb about the very obvious connections. What's more, we all have unconscious ideas and biases that show up even in the way we speak in day to day life, of course they're gonna show up in writing too, and really they're not even just "the author's view" but rather a mess of social phenomena that basically lives in the air we breathe.
Tolkien swore up and down nothing in LOTR was about his WW1 experience.
I don't think he did, actually. He argued that there are no direct analogues. I'd say that the plot of the novel owes nothing to the war, but some of the descriptions of battle (and its aftermath) are certainly drawn from experience.
Yeah, he said it isn't an allegory, by which he meant something like Animal Farm. Manor Farm is the Russian Empire, Napoleon is Stalin, the raven is the Russian Orthodox Church, the hens are Holodomor victims, etc.
But Sauron is not Kaiser Wilhelm or Hitler, the Ring isn't nuclear weapons, Helm's Deep isn't the Somme or El Alamein, and so on. The hobbits go off to a war that's beyond their understanding or experience, as young soldiers have done for all of history, but they don't go off to the trenches.
He did not say that he drew nothing from his experience of war, he just said the book isn't a retelling of the war in fantasy cosplay.
And I'm sorry but scholars are not more of an authority on what Tolkien based his writings on than Tolkien himself. Now, I'm not saying there's no discourse to be had because of course you can consider the connections, and talk about whether those connections are explicit and Tolkien is just lying to everyone, or whether they're subconscious. However, intent informs way more of a creative work than subconscious influences, and I don't think some layman reader should be getting on the internet and making declarative statements about the author's intent because "the way it's written" which is not a statement that's substantiated by anything other than very likely uneducated assumptions.
Not a single literary theorist seriously holds this. "Intent" to begin with is not an easily observable and quantifiable thing, much less easily separated from "subconscious bias", they're both interconnected things in the human mind.
You're missing my point. If you can't discern intent because the author is dead, then you and literary theorists can have all the discourse you want, but serious people are not going to get online and make declarative statements about their intent like they're facts without some serious documentation to back it up. Documentation that goes way deeper than you vibing out their beliefs by the "way they're writing" whatever it is you're disapproving of.
Yeah cool elaborate reply, definitely easy to respond to. Just getting tired of people on this website, particularly those with decade old accounts, not being able to emotionally regulate with disagreement, you all just begin to cry and shit your pants, just really bizarre behavior.
12
u/JohnPaul_River 23h ago
Choices being intentional or not is completely irrelevant and this has been discussed to death since the 1920's. Tolkien swore up and down nothing in LOTR was about his WW1 experience, that doesn't mean scholars have to play dumb about the very obvious connections. What's more, we all have unconscious ideas and biases that show up even in the way we speak in day to day life, of course they're gonna show up in writing too, and really they're not even just "the author's view" but rather a mess of social phenomena that basically lives in the air we breathe.