SOURCE: “‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Ballad of the White Horse,”’ in South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. XXXIX, No. 2, May, 1974, pp. 10-16.

In the following essay, Clausen argues that for his own Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien borrowed the narrative structure and fundamental themes of Chesterton's poem about Christianity versus the forces of evil—The Ballad of the White Horse.

No reasonably learned reader of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings can fail to have been struck by the extraordinary diversity of literary material that Tolkien manages to incorporate into his complicated but tightly unified narrative. Quarrying bits from Anglo-Saxon, Norse sagas, ancient Celtic poetry, Milton, Dickens, Browning, it is as if he had approached all previous literature as a mountain of uncut stones available for his own purposes—sometimes perhaps to amuse the wise and confound the unwary, but fundamentally no doubt...