Tolkien’s Old English Exodus and the Problematics of Allegory

Abstract

This article reconsiders Tolkien’s presumed inattention to the allegorical content of the Old English Exodus. It does so, first of all, by situating allegory in the broader context of Tolkien’s letters and fictional compilations. His reception of the poem is then addressed through textual notes and an incomplete translation Tolkien used in lectures as Exodus became a regular feature of his teaching throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Reconstructed by Joan Turville-Petre and published in 1982, this material shows how Tolkien often departs from standard patristic and early medieval readings of key episodes in the biblical book and their parallels in the poem itself; this is developed in comparison to more recent editorial and textual scholarship stressing the interpretive preeminence of allegory in Exodus. Nevertheless, it is finally argued, the poem also becomes for Tolkien the occasion to imagine a rapprochement of sorts between the historical and the allegorical, something crucial not only to his own fictional sensibilities and aspirations, but also to how we understand current theoretical constructions of allegoresis.