Yep that's a valid point about Tolkien's anti-allegory stance. It's rather interesting too for him, given he was a strong Catholic believer and also a specialist in old English and literature of that period, where there was quite a bit of allegory going on! :-) At a surface level I get his point: you want to just tell a good story and not necessarily have this rigid literary and semantic structure that virtually everything in your story must have an 'inner meaning' and directly correlate to something else in real life.
In that same area of the forward, he strongly reacts to a popular view in his day, that some thought his work was some kind of allegory about the war and the fight against Nazi Germany. I guess his point was that he was not intentionally doing that at all in LOTR, it had no such 'hidden meaning' and in particular, no hidden political message. I kind of like that point--especially salient in our time--where the tendency is for everything and even art to get politicized.
From pp 6-7:
Quote:
"As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical."
[...]
"Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels."
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Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Second ed. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. 3 vols.