The Shaping of Middle-Earth's Maker: Influences on the Life and Literature of J.R.R. Tolkien

Abstract

While most readers and critics of the major creative work by J.R.R. Tolkien, 'The Lord of the Rings' (1954-55), are familiar with its language, narrative quality as a "fairy story" and with its many analogues in Old English and Old Norse literature, few consider particularly its style as a philosophical history modeled on and interpretative of the passage of events in Western Europe over perhaps 2,000 years or more. Although it is not formally on this, one may quote the following passage from Tolkien: "variations [of life] arouse in me visions of kinship and descent through great ages, and also thoughts of the mystery of pattern/design as a thing... recognizable." There are many other 'obiter dicta' of his to be found, concerned with Divine Purpose and the movement of history. In this endeavor to document Tolkien's notions of grand pattern, researchers have some explicit clues in the various references in "On Fairy-Stories" to a famous work by Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), namely 'Progress and Religion' (1929), the subtitle of which was "An historical enquiry into the causes and development of the idea of progress and its relationship to religion."