Tolkien's trilogy … resembles the Anglo-Saxon chronicles he studied as a scholar. The Lord of the Rings is a work of art but it is also history—even if invented history—and it bears comparison to works of Gibbon or Parkman more readily than it does to other novels. The great historians are equally artists and builders of worlds. Gibbon's Rome and Parkman's French America are worlds as strange and distant from our own as Tolkien's Middle Earth. On the level of great historical narrative it matters little whether the events described can be absolutely verified; what matters far more is the historian's attitude toward his world and his treatment of it.

As a work of history The Lord of the Rings is distinctly Spenglerian in tone. Tolkien has created a historical world with a comprehensive erudition and a philosophical audacity few historians since Spengler have been able to...