Tolkien's ambiguity, in his Middle-earth fiction, in his literary analysis of fantasy, and in his personal statements about his fantasy, has attracted the attention of critics, who have drawn conflicting conclusions about his intentions and the quality of his work, and of scholars, who have examined the nature of that ambiguity.
In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is carefully ambiguous in diction and in descriptions. These often seem quite concrete, but scholars such as Steve Walker and Nils Ivar Agøy have noted that he leaves wide freedom for the reader to imagine different aspects of Middle-earth, balancing psychological reality against the possibilities of fantasy, and leaving quite vague his descriptions of characters and landscapes. Others, like Catherine Madsen and Verlyn Flieger, consider the way that The Lord of the Rings is at once pagan and Christian, as events arise seemingly naturally but carrying a moral message. Tom Shippey notes that Tolkien made equivocal statements about fantasy, such as in his essay "On Fairy-Stories". Tolkien was similarly equivocal about the nature of evil, as seen through the One Ring, created by the Dark Lord Sauron to dominate the whole of Middle-earth; it behaves both as an inanimate object, and as a thing with constantly evil intent, seeking to enslave whoever bears it. Shippey admired Tolkien's ability to balance between pagan and Christian worlds through literary skill and suggestion.
Tolkien uses punning names to introduce ambiguity, as when a name like Mordor hints at murder. The name Orthanc, uniquely, is explicitly stated to be a bilingual pun between Sindarin ("Mount Fang") and Rohirric ("cunning mind") – which is its real-world meaning in Old English. Other double meanings are introduced around important concepts, as when Frodo nears the Cracks of Doom, he speaks in "a cracked whisper". In addition, he interchanges the name Old Man Willow, suggesting a sentient character, with the description "old Willow-man", leaving open whether this is a tree-like man or a man-like tree, and how different or similar he may be to the rest of the trees in the Old Forest.
A film adaptation inevitably reduces the complexity and ambiguity of a narrative, not least because any object described has to be represented in just one way. The fact that Peter Jackson's film version chooses to emphasize the metaphor of a journey further simplifies the presentation. On the other hand, music is, like text, inherently ambiguous, and a work like Johan de Meij's 1989 Symphony No. 1 "The Lord of the Rings" can in its way preserve some of the ambiguity of Tolkien's narrative.
Context
J. R. R. Tolkien was an English author and philologist of ancient Germanic languages, specialising in Old English; he spent much of his career as a professor at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his novels about his invented Middle-earth, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and for the posthumously published The Silmarillion which provides a more mythical narrative about earlier ages. A devout Roman Catholic, he described The Lord of the Rings as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work", rich in Christian symbolism.
Freedom for the reader
Tolkien left wide freedom for the reader to imagine different aspects of Middle-earth, such as through his diction, his balancing of psychological reality against the possibilities of fantasy, and the vagueness of his descriptions of characters and landscapes.
Ambiguous diction
The scholar of English literature Steve Walker states that Tolkien's prose leaves ample freedom for the reader through its ceaseless ambiguity in many dimensions, such as in diction, in balancing psychological reality against "imaginative possibility", in description of characters and landscape, in tone, between past and present, and between the ordinariness and almost pantheistic animation of nature.
Tolkien deliberately introduces ambiguity in many places with words of various parts of speech – including adjectives, verbs, and nouns – that hint at uncertainty, strangeness, or chance.
+ Steve Walker's analysis of Tolkien's ambiguous diction Part of speech Examples Function Verb imagined, believed, half fancied, seemed, suspected, wondered Actively introduce ambiguity Adjective curious, odd, queer, strange, unnatural Qualify ordinary nouns, "tending to objectify the supernatural even as they imply mystery in the natural" Abstract noun chance, fortune, luck "Complicate [the] significance" of "plotted coincidences" with ambiguity between luck and fate
In his tone, Tolkien achieves an ambiguous balance by offering alternative views or opinions, such as when the Elves Galadriel and Celeborn meet the ancient Ent Treebeard near the end of the book.
+ Steve Walker's analysis of Tolkien's ambivalent tone in one conversation Character Statement in The Return of the King Tone Treebeard "It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again." "reluctantly pessimistic" Celeborn "I do not know, Eldest." "abstaining" Galadriel "Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the spring." "hesitantly hopeful"
Ambiguous description
Some of Tolkien's critics, like the Beowulf translator Burton Raffel, have been in two minds about The Lord of the Rings. Raffel liked the book, but in the words of the historian and Tolkien scholar Nils Ivar Agøy "reached the weird conclusion that it was 'not literature'." Taking the passage describing Frodo's awakening after meeting the Elf Gildor Inglorion, Raffel calls the prose "brilliantly adequate, straightforward, just starched enough to have body, resilient enough to catch the echoes of speech, not a super-charged instrument, nor one with great range, but very competent". Agøy describes Raffel as being "in two minds" on Tolkien's descriptive powers. Raffel wanted Tolkien's descriptions to be precise, with "particular objects in particular relationships with the characters", and without all the ambiguity and uncertainty that Tolkien had created. Agøy contrasts Raffel's reaction with Walker's, noting that Walker describes Tolkien's prose as "sensuous, the landscape tangible". He adds that Walker also states that Tolkien's writing is not as specific as the impression that it gives: his writing is, he argues, somewhat generalized (with archetypes in place of individual characters), causing critics like Raffel to react against the book. Tolkien's ambiguity further explains why The Lord of the Rings has been seen in so many different ways.
Agøy finds that while Tolkien does sometimes describe people, places, and objects such as utensils, swords, and staves, he just as often makes the descriptions "general ... almost generic", leaving plenty of room for the reader's imagination: "If we see cosy Bag End in vivid color and high definition, the colors and details are added by us, the readers, to a framework provided by Tolkien." Agøy adds that in his essay On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien states in a footnote (Note E) that "illustrations do little good to fairy-stories", since "every hearer of the words will have his own picture" of what a piece of bread, a hill, or a river is like. Accordingly, Agøy summarizes Tolkien's view as being that authors should "not unnecessarily constrain the reader's 'own picture'", in other words favouring "quite vague descriptions."
Tolkien took care, too, to choose ambiguous titles, so as not to give away too much of the story. When his publishers decided to bring out The Lord of the Rings in three volumes, rather than six books as Tolkien had hoped, he stated in a letter that "I prefer for Vol. III The War of the Ring, since it gets in the Ring again; and also is more noncommittal, and gives less hint about the turn of the story: the chapter titles have been chosen also to give away as little as possible in advance."
Tolkien's ambiguity may fit into a wider pattern of unknowing. Benjamin Blakeslee-Drain describes this in Mythlore as elements that "suggest ... unreliability or incompleteness ... including the unknown, the unsaid, the forgotten, the distanced, the fallible, the biased, the hinted at, the varied, and the contradicted." These serve both to allow readers space to use their imagination, and to express Tolkien's "most profound moral statements." Blakeslee-Drain proposes that such unknowing matches an Elvish tradition of unreliability, and a biblical tradition of unknowing, as in the Book of Job.
Pagan and Christian
Echoes of Christianity
Catherine Madsen, writing in Mythlore, describes the contradictory quality of The Lord of the Rings, "religion without revelation", in which "all triumphs are mixed: every victory over evil is also a depletion of the good." She sees "echoes" of Christian imagery in the book, but "precisely not witnesses to the Gospel", arguing that if Elbereth recalls the Virgin Mary, it is her "starriness that crosses over into Faerie, not her miraculous motherhood or her perpetual virginity." Tolkien had in Madsen's view a strong allegiance both to Christianity and to the "laws and form of the fairy-story". She argues that he wanted to show "a world on its own terms" where "both catastrophe and eucatastrophe developed from natural facts, because these carry a weight which the supernatural cannot."
Matthew Thompson-Handell, in his 2025 paper in Mythlore, "No Ragnarök, No Armageddon", reviews early Tolkien criticism, from 1972 to 1981 when The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien was published, reducing some of the apparent ambiguity. He analyses the writings of scholars such as Paul Kocher and Randel Helms, who took up either a Christian or a Pagan interpretation of Middle-earth. In his view, the work is ambiguous rather than actually contradictory, so he supports Flieger's 2014 view of the inherent theological "ambiguity and indeterminacy" of The Lord of the Rings, rather than her 2019 position which asserts a balancing of inbuilt contradictions.
Moral ambiguity
Madsen notes that the book's Cracks of Doom scene where Frodo and Gollum struggle for the One Ring is deeply ambiguous in its morality; far from some simple good triumphing over evil, good "depends on evil to deliver it." The classicist J. K. Newman agrees that this climactic scene has a moral ambiguity about it, likening it in Classical terms to "Aeneas' morally ambiguous killing of Turnus" at the end of Virgil's Aeneid.
Imagination and orthodoxy
The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes in her 2014 paper "But What Did He Really Mean?" that The Lord of the Rings has constantly attracted conflicting analyses, such as those of neo-pagans and evangelical Christians. Tolkien replied ambiguously to questions, or gave conflicting statements of his own view. Flieger states that he adjusted his explanations of his work to best suit his audience, noting that the book offers "richness and multivalent texture", enabling every reader to take what they personally need and want. In her view, Tolkien was trying to "harmonize his work's originality and his own imagination with Christian orthodoxy, and to situate his often unorthodox views within the narrower confines of his religion without abandoning either." Flieger quotes Judith Thurman's remark that "A coherent personality aspires, like a work of art, to contain its conflicts without resolving them dogmatically", stating that Tolkien had the advantage of being inclusive enough to achieve this. Flieger ends by stating that the book is "not a story about good and evil but a story about how good can become evil, a story whose strength lies in the tension created by deliberately unresolved situations and conflicts... [tapping] into that 'reservoir of power' below the visible world."