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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salthanas" data-source="post: 1216127" data-attributes="member: 9689">Any time you attempt to mention the authors intent or try to guess at his purpose you invariably have to link that back to his perspective. If I write a book and then people say this reminds me of the situation in xxx thats fine, thats them treating the book in an applicable manner. However trying to say that a book is sending a particular message is entirely different. A message invariable has to have some relevance to the authors situation, it suggests that you can understand what he was trying to do. Whilst you can try and infer this from the text alone and in some cases that might be all you need the idea that this will be the case all the time simply seems to me a rather primative way of trying to understand literature particually when the author is making a conscious attempt not to actually make the book have a singular message. Unless your saying that Tolkien willfully lied on this point I don't see how you can argue otherwise. With regards to your point about some interpretation being better you have to consider primariliy what actually makes an interpretation better. Ultimately the interpretation has to have a consitency with the work itself. Why is one interpretation better than another? They have to be supported by evidence. The problem is that your method of simply using the text can always be circumvented if the author wants that to be the case. If I deliberately use elements which are tangential to the central thrust of a book and people draw all sorts of conclusions from them does that mean that I deliberately set out to  make those conclusions possible or is it the case that someone has drawn inferences which simply were not there to begin with and then attributed them to the book as a whole. However if someone then reads that I've said actually those elements were purely arribtary don't they then have a greater understanding of the text as a whole and can argue from a point of greater strength. In fact can't they then quite catagorically say that yes those elements have an applicability but in essence they have no inner message.With regards to the last point confusion is inevitable  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> In fact its what makes LoTR quite pardoxical. Tolkiens definative beliefs about language  essentially say that the meaning is what you make it, hence his statement about allegory and applicability, the domination of the author and his intent against the freedom of the reader. The difference is that the authors tryanny of purpose is to give the reader as much freedom as possible which is totally paradoxical, he is in fact trying to be as tryannical as possible in allowing you as much freedom as possible. You've tactically agreed with his initial statement which was that the meaning of the book is purely to what the reader gives it. However this is also the same as saying that the book actually has no message as such and that even if it did the message would be totally irrelevant anyway.</blockquote>

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