I think context is always important in understanding what Tolkien meant when he said it was not allegorical in any way. I have not read the letters, because I don't have them...yet....but the one time when I read the quote about allegory when context was provided it was in the context of either WWI or WWII.
Perhaps it's because I haven't had my coffee fix yet, but I'm starting to get confused about this allegory business. Is everyone talking about "allegory" allegory or is the discussion really about symbolism? The definition of "allegory " is:
The representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form.I've started reading references to allegories (or rather..."not an allegory") in The Letters. When he first starts LOTR he states in Letter #34 dated 13 October, 1938 :A story, picture, or play employing such representation. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Herman Melville's Moby Dick are allegories
. A symbolic representation: The blindfolded figure with scales is an allegory
When I spoke, in an earlier letter to Mr Furth, of this sequel getting 'out of hand', I did not mean it to be complimentary to the process. I really meant it was running its course, and forgetting 'children', and was becoming more terrifying than the Hobbit. It may prove quite unsuitable. It is more 'adult' - but my own children who criticize it as it appears are now older. However, you will be the judge of that, I hope, some day! The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it. Though it is not an 'allegory'. (I have already had one letter from America asking for an authoritative exposition of the allegory of The Hobbit).Still reading......
Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read 'just as a story'; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed.