The book The Lord of the Rings (which the author originally intended to be one book) resounds with symbolism and metaphor which reflects the era in which it was written. Although the author claims this story has no "inner meaning or 'message'" and that the story is merely a story to be told, it would take a far stretch of the imagination not to find the ideas of the book as metaphors for the real world around it. The very essence of the characters and plot lends the book so completely to the idea of its metaphorical representation of World War II, it is obvious why the author would deny the relation.

The story begins with Bilbo leaving the Shire after his 133rd birthday. He gives the Ring, which is the source of limitless, corrupting power to Frodo, Bilbo's adopted heir. From this point, Gandolf, the almighty and mysterious wizard, helps lead Frodo and a band of other Hobbits and heroes on a quest to destroy the one ring in order to keep it out of the grasp of Sauron, who is the representative of all evil in the world. While this at face value may not seem to have a relationshiop to WWII, the very nature of metaphor, the comparison of two u

The Ring in the story represents the center of power and action throughout the novels. The Ring was created by Sauron in an earlier age, along with eight other rings, in order to increase his power. The Rings all represented greater power but were tainted by the forging and the forger. The Ring which Sauron made for himself, is the ultimate source of power, the power of hate. The Ring is a metaphor for hate. It makes the wearer of it invisible to prying eyes. Through the use of hate, a person can mask his true character from those around him. Also with the Ring, any wearer is granted the power of invisibility, but only specially trained people can harness its true power, which is to alter the world around it. So is true with hate. Only those who are truly masterful in the art of speech can use hate to its full potential and extreme. Also, the Ring has a side effect: it corrupts that which is good to evil and distorts those who use it to hide from others. This is true, too, of the power of hate. Those who begin with the best intentions commonly cause more harms than that which they originally intended to solve. As a person uses hate to disguise him from what he fears the world sees them as, he becomes what they fear the world sees him as being. Such is the case of the character Smeagol.

The character of Saruman is not as much representative of any one specific person, but can more identified as betrayal at the offer of power. His closest parallel in World War II is the Viche Regime. The Viche government was established in France as a Nazi puppet government and was led by former patriots who, at the offer of greater power in the future, betrayed their country and sided with the Nazis. The same is true with Saruman. Saruman was the leader of the Council of Wizards as the Chief of Order, in charge of maintaining balance in the world. He went over to the side of Sauron at the offer of greater powers through the Ring, but later betrayed Sauron in order to capture the Ring and obtain the powers for himself. His original intentions, as were probably those of the signers of the surrender agreement between France and Germany, were good. He sought to capture the Ring and bring greater order to the world, but he fell victim to his own lust for power and became what he had originally sought to destroy. This is true of the Viche government. It wanted to save the French people from the Blitzkrieg of the Nazis, but in the end became little more than puppets of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Saruman was defeated in his fortress of Isengard by the overwhelming power of the Ents.

Sauron enters the novel as the representation of pure evil. Sauron never actually talks nor directly participates in any of the novels, but without him there would have been no story. Sauron is most clearly Hitler's parallel in the scheme of things. They both sought to use hate to gain power over those around them. They both fell to the flaw of hubris. Hitler thought that Germany could not lose, the Aryan race would

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2021
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)