The Lord of the Rings has been my favourite all time book ever since I read it for the first time around 1984. And today J.R.R. Tolkien is still the author I admire the most - I've read all his books many times over. He was a literary genius in my opinion and in so many others - he was also a most fascinating individual.
This is not a new story, but I think it's worth mentioning here. After all I didn't find another thread for it. An audio recording of J.R.R. Tolkien speaking at a dinner in Rotterdam in 1958 was uncovered (back in the 90s), but only in recent years was it brought to public attention. After being cleaned up and analysed, it provides potentially new insight into The Lord of the Rings, and what Tolkien may have been alluding to in an allegorical way. In the recording he makes a toast, and with 'Middle-Earth' flavours makes mention of this messed up world of ours, and the dark hand that is controlling it...
Alex Jones picked up this story at the time and ran with this video. A must-watch for any Tolkien fan:...I look East and West, I look North and South, and I do not see a Sauron; but I see very many descendants of Saruman! And I think we Hobbits now have no magic weapons against them. And yet, dear gentle-hobbits, my I conclude by giving you this toast: To the Hobbits! And may they outlast all the wizards!
It's very true, Tolkien distanced himself from the widely held suspicion that The Lord of The Rings was an allegory for the present state of the world (in the 1940/50s). In fact he detested allegory as a story device. Instead, he claimed that LOTR was purely thematic, topical, and the application of what it meant, if anything, lay solely in the province of the reader.
But one cannot deny there are clear correlations between the real world power-structures and all their dark machinations, and Tolkien's great tale of Good versus Evil, the Ring of Power, and the stranglehold of Sauron over a world in decline.
I personally don't necessarily believe that LOTR was consciously allegorical, but I have to consider the possibility that Tolkien's disclaimer may have been an attempt to protect himself. Had he not clearly denied allegory, it may have harmed his position (as well as book sales). He was an Oxford don after all. But his Published Letters shed a slightly different light on what he might really have thought, and a good number of these letters suggest he knew very well there was something wrong with the world. Here we find in a Letter to Amy Ronald in 1969 this quote:
http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2014...-of-the-rings/...the spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations that there seems nothing more to do than personally refuse to worship any of the hydras' heads.