[The Lord of the Rings] came just when disillusion among the American young at the Vietnam war and the state of their own country was at a peak. Tolkien's fantasy offered an image of the kind of rural conservationist ideal or escape for which they were looking (it also could be seen as describing, through the overthrow of Sauron, the destruction of the U.S.). In this way The Lord of the Rings could be enlisted in support of passive resistance and idealism on the one hand and of draft-dodging and drugs on the other. A second factor may have been the perennial American longing for roots, a long-tradition and a mythology: these things are the fibre of Tolkien's book, where every place and character is lodged at the tip of an enormous, growing stem of time. (p. 157)
Tolkien's intention in his book was to create a species of heroic epic. (By the word 'intention' here is meant evidence from within the text.) The trilogy has epic scale: we journey over what W. H. Auden tells us is 1,300 miles from the Shire to Mordor, taking in a variety of races and regions on the way…. The sense of extension in space is complemented by one in time: we are made continually aware of thousands of years of the past lying behind the story of the Ring, indeed that the history of its evil maker stretches back into the First Age of Middle-earth. In Frodo's journey, the long ages come to a point, and all Middle-earth is involved in the crisis and the outcome.
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