J. R. R. Tolkien’s literary reputation rests almost entirely on a single work, his massive novel The Lord of the Rings. His novel The Hobbit (1937; also in Literature and Its Times), a short, equally popular novel intended mainly for children, is a prelude to the longer work. Born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but reared (from the age of 4) in Birmingham, England, Tolkien was a scholar of the Anglo-Saxon language by trade. His work on The Lord of the Rings took more than a decade, not least because of his time-consuming duties at Oxford University, where he was Professor of English Language and Literature. Although his fiction was influenced by the northern traditions of epic and saga, it was also profoundly shaped by twentieth-century events: World War I, in which he fought, and the rise, during the 1920s and 1930s, of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Through the creation of Middle Earth, an imaginary world, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings meditates on a series of modern dilemmas: the evils of authoritarian power, the horrors of total war, and how necessary it is for good people to resist such evils and horrors.
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