World War II as Lord of the Rings

Thursday, June 9th, 2016

Tolkien said that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory, and it especially wasn’t an allegory of World War II.

What would World War II have looked like, Bruce Charlton asks, if it had played out like The Lord of the Rings?

The plot would focus on the destruction of the Atom Bomb (and implicitly all knowledge required to make it) by a small team of English patriots led by George Orwell, who infiltrate Germany and destroy the evil research establishment which is making the A-bomb.

The climactic end would be the death of Hitler (as the ready-for-use prototype explodes?) and the end of the Nazi regime in Germany with the return of the Holy Roman Emperor.

En route there would be the destruction of Soviet Communism, the restoration of the Tsar, and the exile of Stalin. Stalin then makes his way to England, is welcomed by the corrupt Socialist Prime Minister, Konni Zilliacus; then Stalin invites foreign mercenaries, takes over in a secret coup, enslaves the native English and manages to pollute or destroy much of the countryside before Orwell and his English patriots return and raise a successful counter-revolution; after which Stalin is stabbed by his deputy Lavrentiy Beria — who is immediately executed by a mob of pitchfork-wielding rustics (despite Orwell’s protests).

England repudiates industrialization, is demilitarized, sealed against immigration, and made into a clan-based dominion ruled by benign hereditary aristocrats; and made a protected nation under the personal care of the restored King Albrecht — the exiled Duke of Bavaria, and heir to the US monarchy, who had been given the throne by popular acclaim during the course of the war, and is now ruling from his palace in Richmond, Virginia.

Orwell, traumatized and made consumptive by his wartime experiences, sails West toward the sunset in a small boat and eventually arrives in… Ireland; where he ends his days peacefully as a subsistence crofter…

No wonder, then, that Tolkien cordially disliked allegory, in all its manifestations.

Comments

  1. Handle says:

    Now do WWI.

  2. Buckethead says:

    That would make the Finns the Ent-analogs. I am cool with that.

  3. Wilbur Hassenfus says:

    That all sounds like a much better outcome than we got, in retrospect.

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