This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
- As far as I can see the trope description and it's examples are off from Tolkien's use of the word. The trope describes the word 'applicability' as a intentional thing a writer uses to let people think up their own meaning of a work. Tolkien uses it differently, and not as something the writer did as an intentional style of writing. Whenever he mentions it, one which is even quoted here, he means that the story is not an allegory of something else, that the story is just its own story. But it happens to be applicable - not because the author did it with this in mind, but because the situations and people described therein are just of such an archetypal and elementally human quality, that it is easy to find things comparable to it. The work is not meant to represent something specific nor is it explicitly made so people interpret whatever they fancy - it just is its own story, which happens to be comparable and applieable to many things.
