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Originally Posted by xbxMCj
I was told LoTR was a satire on world war II i.e. Tree people americans, the men european, the drawves ruskies, the men of the east the Japs, the orcs germany. There are others but I need to talk to my history teacher to remember any of them.
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The reason everybody is cramming allegories into every crack they can find in Lord of the Rings is that the book is meant to follow the mythological structure that's hardwired into our brains. You can make everything fit into this structure as long as you're able to choose a protagonist and an antagonist from a historical incident or from mythological texts. The Lord of the Rings is a big "what if" experiment, Tolkien's take on how a genuine British mythology could take shape.
All races and creatures in mythology are symbolic for human tendencies. Tolkien-Elves are probably supposed to be an isolation of all that is "high" in the human psyche, while the dwarves could represent more base elements. Ents might be humans as historically aware creatures, orcs humans as hunters/animals. Claiming dwarves are Russians is probably a result of how you or your teacher percieve Russians rather than what they actually represent. Try swapping the roles around: how about the Ents are Russians and not American? Contrary to modern Americans, they have a long history, their country is somewhat a fallen giant, they speak of the land itself as their mother... assigning attributes becomes a sorta random process. Though I don't doubt Tolkien's orcs are supposed to be perversions of Arabs or other peoples. Again, this is manufactured mythology, and the different and scary peoples beyond the border have a tendency to become demonized in folklore.
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