LotR - Foreword

[The Saucepan Man]

Davem

Which is not to say we can't read it as simple entertainment. We just have to recognise that it wasn't written as that.

I tend to agree that Tolkien did not write the story purely to entertain his readers. It assumed greater importance than this to him, which is, I suspect, why we get the sense that it almost wrote itself. But I disagree that we, the readers, necessarily have to recognise that or that he is requiring us to do so.

If we are looking at the Foreword for what it is, a foreword, rather than as part of the material on which to base an assessment of Tolkien the author (and, indeed, Tolkien, the man), then we must take what he says in it at face value. Readers approaching his work for the first time will have nothing else to go on. And here he is telling such readers that he wrote it as a piece to entertain, to move and to amuse them. While his reference to the Ring as providing the central theme points to the importance of the conflict between good and evil as a theme, readers do not necessarily have to accept this conflict as something which is real to them (or as real to them as the material which you have provided suggest that it was to Tolkien). They may simply find certain aspects of it, certain “sub-themes”, for example the importance of friendship or the the importance of respect for the environment, as applicable to them and leave it at that. Or they might simply allow themselves to be entertained, amused and moved by it without really analysing why. And Tolkien gives them carte blanche to do so here in the Foreword when he champions the freedom of the reader above the purposive domination of the author. He may have hoped that his readers found in it what he did, but he does not here require this of them.