There are multiple chapters that are set in hospitals where the characters are attempting to recover from injuries that never fully heal. I must once again stress that my experience in WWI was perfectly normal.
There is a giant horrible mudplain full of unrecoverable and perfectly preserved dead bodies that the characters have to walk through in a land where the air is poisoned gas, and on a compLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: WWI WAS TOTALLY FINE AND NORMAL!!
Uh??? Tolkien did not claim that???
"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."
He talked about how WWI affected his writing all the time, he was not in denial for how it affected??? Am I missing something????
https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2017/09/tolkien-as-war-novelist-another-way-of-dealing-with-trauma-through-writing/
what Tolkien was adamant about, which has been confusing people for several decades now, is that he wasn't writing about World War Two
He was also very clear that he was not writing allegory. Now, some people are not very clear on what allegory means. "Allegory" and "symbols" are not the same thing. Allegory is a type of symbolism, but there are a lot of ways of doing symbolism that aren't allegory ... and a lot of people are kind of fuzzy on that. The way allegory is most commonly used in literary and religious analysis is that there is a direct, almost 1:1 correspondence between the literary figure and what it is standing in for.
So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.
Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.
Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.
So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.
So people read Tolkien's insistence that he didn't write allegory, and take that to mean that he's saying there isn't symbolic and thematic references. And that isn't what he meant! And also, we focus so much on the thematic references to WWI and Christianity, and we miss most of the other references, which makes it seem like Tolkien's only drawing on WWI, when he's actually doing something more complex.
I was with you up until
Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.
As insistent as Tolkien was that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory, C. S. Lewis was equally insistent that Narnia was not an allegory. And I mean, he wrote an entire scholarly book on mediaeval allegory (The Allegory of Love), and his first work of prose fiction very clearly was an allegory: it was called The Pilgrim's Regress and it's even more of a fever-dream than most of his other fiction. So he would probably know.
The way he used to explain it was: Narnia was written to answer the question "Suppose there were a world of talking animals and mythical creatures, and suppose that like our world it was Fallen and needed the salvation of Christ, how would that happen?"
Aslan is a fictional portrait of Christ, doing what Lewis imagined Christ would do if he were incarnated as a talking lion, but he is not an allegorical portrait.
To give you an idea of what Lewis considered an actual allegory to be, The Pilgrim's Regress has the allegorical meaning written out as a superscript line above each page, like "Greed to recover Desire hides the real offer of its return. | He tries to force himself to feel it, but finds (and accepts) Lust instead. | The deception does not last; but it leaves a habit of sin behind it."
Those superscripts were added in the second edition and Lewis felt that the fact that they were needed at all, indicated that his allegory was a failure. Because allegory is supposed to be clear; it's supposed to explain, not mystify, the thing it allegorizes.
Incidentally, despite his professed dislike of allegory, Tolkien wrote an allegorical story about his own creation of Middle-Earth, titled Leaf by Niggle. Niggle is an artist who paints a perfect leaf, and continues from there to create a magnificent picture of a tree, but it takes over his life and social duties and yet he can't finish it because the scope of the project keeps expanding...
(great, now I'm crying over Leaf by Niggle)
