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How to Read Tolkien and Why

(Recorded 16/6/2009) – Professor Corey Olsen
iTunes & iTunesU (The Tolkien Professor/Mythgard Academy)

Hi, my name is Professor Corey Olsen from Washington College. I study medieval literature. I specialise in

the works of Chaucer and Sir Thomas Mallory but I have also been an avid reader of J.R.R. Tolkien since I

was a kid and the more I read and re-read Tolkien’s works, the more amazed I have become by his stories.

When I came to Washington College I fulfilled what is basically a lifelong dream of mine, to teach a full

semester course on the works of Tolkien.

I realise though that a lot of people have not had the chance to study Tolkien in an academic setting. In

academia as a whole, Tolkien in particular and the fantasy genre in general are so looked down upon,

unfairly, that there aren’t that many Tolkien courses taught. I’ve begun the Tolkien Professor website in order

to give people more chance to study Tolkien’s works with the kind of respect and attention I think his works

so richly deserve. I am myself convinced that Tolkien’s works match up to any works of English literature of

the last three centuries at least and I’m really excited to share some of my thoughts about Tolkien’s books

with you.

Now before I get started with the introductory lecture, let me just explain briefly how these lectures will

work.

I plan to do an extended series of lectures on each of Tolkien’s major works. I’m going to start with The

Hobbit since it was the first one published. The Lord of the Rings, of course, was initially conceived as a

sequel to The Hobbit, though it turned out to be something rather different and rather huge, as Tolkien

discovered while writing it. Beginning with The Hobbit then, will help us see the roots of many of the ideas

that are more fully developed in The Lord of the Rings. The deep roots of both stories can be found in The

Silmarillion, Tolkien’s mythological account of the early Ages of Middle Earth, millennia before the accounts

of The Lord of the Rings, and I hope to come back to that after I finish The Lord of the Rings.

Now I realise that most of you have probably read Tolkien’s works before, though I recognise that some

won’t have. I encourage all of you to read the relevant portions of Tolkien’s works along with me as I go

through them. In my talks I’m going to be looking carefully at fairly short passages, something like one to

three chapters at a time. I’m going to be doing a lot of close reading and I'll be making many specific

references to and quotations from the text. In each lecture I’ll let you know what the relevant reading is, so

that if you want to follow along more closely, you can. On my website you’ll find a little bookstore that

supplies links for purchasing excellent authorised editions of Tolkien’s texts. The page numbers I quote in

my lectures always refer to the editions I link to on the site. I’ll also sometimes refer to Tolkien’s letters by
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number which correspond to the numbers in the editions of Tolkien’s Selected Letters, edited by Humphrey

Carpenter. This is also in my little bookstore.

But enough preamble, this introductory lecture is called How to Read Tolkien and Why. In this lecture, I’ll be

looking at some popular critical approaches, ways of reading Tolkien, and examining them in the light of

what Tolkien himself says about his books and about writing in general. My goal here is to give a good

background in how Tolkien himself understood the writing and the reading of stories. In short, what did he

think he was doing when he wrote The Lord of the Rings? What was at stake for him in this process? I want

to build a framework, a foundation for talking about his works. In this lecture, I’ll be focusing primarily on

two pieces of Tolkien’s writing, the foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, found at the

beginning of the Fellowship, and his essay On Fairy-stories, which can be found in the volume titled The

Monsters and the Critics.

Now it would be normal to start with a discussion of Tolkien’s life, a sketch of his biography. This kind of

background information is generally thought to be essential for an in depth study of an author’s work. There

will be times when I will mention facts from Tolkien’s life in the course of my lectures. There are moments

and ideas in Tolkien’s books that are interestingly illuminated by his life, but I’m not going to start there.

Tolkien believed that the knowledge of an author’s life is a vastly overrated way of gaining insight into his

writing. He says in Letter 213, for instance, “I object to the contemporary trend in criticism with its excessive

interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author’s works

and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest” (Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,

2000). Tolkien always wanted his readers to focus on his stories, not on him.

While I’m on the subject, let me explain two other approaches that Tolkien was uncomfortable with and

which I would caution against. The first is doing a strictly allegorical reading of one of his stories. In the

foreword to the Second Edition, Tolkien says of The Lord of the Rings, “…as for any inner meaning or

message, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical” (Tolkien, 2013, p.

xxi). Tolkien is responding here to widespread speculation that the book was an allegory of World War II.

Remember that The Lord of the Rings was published about ten years after the end of the war. Now he goes

on to explain on page xxii, “I cordially dislike allegory and have done so since I grew old and wary enough

to detect its presence.”

By saying it has no inner meaning, no message, he’s not saying that his stories are meaningless, that they

are entirely unconnected with life, instead he’s making a crucial distinction. He says, “I much prefer history,

true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many

confuse applicability with allegory, but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the

purposed domination of the author” (Tolkien, 2013, p. xxii). This is a very important distinction to Tolkien.
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An allegory is a symbolic drama through which an author is trying to communicate a particular meaning.

Characters and events in an allegory are all supposed to stand for something else. This mode was really

popular in the Middle Ages and can often be both fun and intellectually engaging for the reader. Through a

carefully crafted symbolic narrative an author is trying to steer readers to a very specific point or set of

points. It is this sense that the author of an allegory is practicing purposed domination upon the reader.

Now Tolkien recognises that all stories contain things applicable to the thoughts and experiences of

readers. There are many different things that are going to strike different readers in very different ways. This

applicability to the reader is unique and it’s fundamentally outside of the control of the author. These affects

may at times be manipulated by the author, but the author isn’t trying to shepherd readers towards a

particular interpreted goal. Now this doesn’t mean that Tolkien never tried to convey the ideas, he even

does use symbolism and even allegorical elements at times in his stories. But it is important to remember

Tolkien’s discomfort with a heavy-handed proactive stance on the part of an author. He doesn’t shove his

readers towards one particular goal. He’s more interested in the dynamic, even if unpredictable, ways in

which a reader interacts with a story.

Another approach to be wary of is the analysis of source material. Tolkien was very well read. By profession

he was a philologist. He had an amazing understanding of language and was fluent in dozens of languages.

He was also a medievalist. He immersed himself in ancient and medieval literatures of various periods and

countries and traditions. Tolkien’s works contained many elements and ideas that are inspired or influenced

by many of these works. It’s really tempting, therefore, to get caught up in identifying and cataloguing the

source materials that underlie his ideas. A lot of people tend to want to dissect his stories, to trace his

references, his illusions, the analogues to his stories and the adaptations he’s doing. Tolkien was not happy

at all with people doing this kind of thing. In one of his letters, in which he’s talking about the analysis of his

stories by critics, he even quotes the words in which Gandalf rebukes Saruman in The Fellowship of the

Ring: “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom” (Tolkien, 2013, p. 259).

Tolkien doesn’t necessarily object the analysis of his works, so long as it is the work itself being analysed. In

his essay On Fairy Stories (Tolkien, 2001); he makes an interesting analogy to illustrate this. He compares

the telling of a tale to the dipping of a ladle into a huge pot of stew, what he calls the ‘cauldron of story’. A

story is like soup in the complex intermingling of the elements it’s made of. In any story, those elements

blend together into a new whole. It’s more than just the sum of its individual ingredients. It’s not like a salad

with different things just lying there together on a plate. All of the ingredients contribute their flavours to

the unique taste of the stew. Tolkien says that if we criticise soup, we must criticise it as soup, as a whole

(Tolkien, 2001, p. 20). When we taste soup, we should be focussing on its complete and unique flavour, not

trying to anatomise it, concentrating on what it is made of, like some sort of snooty food critic. We shouldn’t

be sitting and speculating about what exactly went into the stock. When we do that, we stop really
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experiencing the soup itself. This doesn’t mean you have to like it, but he wants readers to experience his

stories on their own ground, not to dissect them, no matter what the reader’s final reactions to the stories

may be. We might say, ‘Wow, that’s good soup!’ or we might say, in the words of my four year old son,

‘Gross!’ But either reaction would at least be an honest response to the stories themselves.

I should pause here for a sort of corollary to this soup argument. If you’ve ever cooked stew, you know that

it’s best when it’s cooked for a long time at low temperature. The longer you cook it, the more savoury the

stew is. Tolkien unabashedly applies the same principle to stories. He prefers old things, old words, old

ideas, old themes from old stories. There isn’t a whole lot that Tolkien liked about the modern world. He

was not thrilled by new things. I’m a medievalist too and I have to admit that I can totally relate to this. One

of the things that Tolkien disliked most about the modern world is the rage for novelty that we tend to have.

How we tend to value things just because they’re new, because they’re the latest thing. Tolkien sees this

enjoyment of ours as a sign of the corruption of our age, actually. We’ll be able to see Tolkien’s respect for

old things at many points in his works.

Okay then, we’ve looked at three approaches to reading stories that Tolkien didn’t like; the biographical

approach, allegorical readings, and the identification of source materials. It’s good to be aware of these, but

what I’m really interested in is the overall pattern here. What do these approaches all have in common?

What, fundamentally, is Tolkien objecting to? What was he really concerned about? The main thing that

Tolkien had a problem with was oversimplification. Each of these approaches involves bringing in some kind

of outside information that seems to provide a kind of key to the stories. They give us a sense that we

understand what’s really going on without actually paying attention to the story itself. It gives us a kind of

shortcut. It makes reading the story with care, at least to some extent, superfluous.

Let me give some examples to show what I mean. I’ll start with the biographical approach. Here’s a

quotation from the website of the Tourist Board of the city of Birmingham in England: “Tolkien himself said

that there was a danger in too much interest in the life of an author as it distracted attention from the

author’s work. He then went on to say that he was a hobbit in all but size, liked gardens, trees and

unmechanised farmland, smoked a pipe and liked good plain food!” (Birmingham City Council, 2016) Now

the author of this quotation is obviously implying that Tolkien’s objections to the biographical approach are

some kind of smoke-screen. My favourite part of the quotation is the way it ends with an exclamation point:

“…smoked a pipe and liked good plain food!” I take their exclamation point as implying that the

connection between Tolkien’s life and his story is completely self-evident and that therefore his denial of this

connection is obviously absurd. Now we must keep in mind, by the way, that the city of Birmingham’s

Tourist Board has a strong vested interest in this question. This particular theory of Tolkien’s is highly

inconvenient for them. Tolkien spent most of his childhood in the Birmingham area and they’re trying to get
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Tolkien fans to come out and see his family house and stuff. They recognize that if you actually accept

Tolkien’s argument about the biographical approach, you’ll be a lot less inclined, actually, to schlep out to

Birmingham. In any case, what I want you to notice is that the author of this quotation has not actually said

anything at all about Tolkien’s works, has made no substantive argument about the stories in general, or

about hobbits in particular. Yes, hobbits reflect many, though by no means all, of Tolkien’s own likes and

dislikes. So what? How does it help us to know this? It’s an interesting fun fact, but does it give us any real

insight into the stories? Does it inform our reading of them? How? Are we to say that hobbits are Tolkien?

That he’s portraying himself when he describes hobbits? So what they do, he approves of, he’s behind? So

hobbits everywhere are speaking with Tolkien’s own voice? Obviously, no. Oh, so shall we say that Bilbo

specifically is really Tolkien? Okay, that sounds better. But is it? Again, where does it get us? Does it mean

that we can apply all the things that Tolkien says to Bilbo? Does it mean that we can draw conclusions about

Tolkien, about his opinions and his feelings, from how Bilbo’s described? No and no. This is just

oversimplification, its reductionism. This doesn’t help us understand the story. This gets in the way of

understanding the story. Once we establish this biographical connection it’s hard to resist the feeling we

have some kind of special insight, that we have hobbits figured out in some sense. The end result is that we

tend to read less carefully, we tend to think less thoroughly through the story.

For an example of the allegorical approach, I want to return to the idea that The War of the Rings is

supposed to be World War II. Tolkien spends a fair amount of time poking holes in this idea in the foreword

to The Lord of the Rings. He says, “The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its

conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend then certainly the Ring would have

been seized and used against Sauron. He would not have been annihilated, but enslaved, and Barad-dûr

would not have been destroyed, but occupied” (Tolkien, 2013, p. xxii). Then he goes on to give a bunch of

other examples. Tolkien is not just nit-picking here. His point is that when you theorise an allegorical

interpretation of a story, the temptation is even stronger than with the biographical approach for you to

stop paying attention to the story. Usually, you end up working to fit the story into the theory; you downplay

or overlook things that don’t fit into your idea, things that might in fact be really important. Again, this

approach is very reductionist. You are looking for the answer, the key, and by doing so you’re likely to miss

the point big time.

Finally, I want to consider an example of Tolkien’s use of source material, specifically a connection between

The Hobbit and Beowulf. Now I love Beowulf. If you’ve read it, and I hope you have, and you know The

Hobbit, then a moment near the end of the poem might have jumped out at you. A small thief sneaks into

the lair of a fire dragon and steals a large two-handed golden cup and the theft so enrages the dragon that

it wreaks fiery destruction on the local towns. Now, what do you do when you notice this? The tendency is

to say ‘A-ha! A reference to Beowulf!’ and then get all excited about the connection. Okay, maybe it is only
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English professors that get all excited about this kind of thing. But anyway, the connection is very interesting

as far as it goes. The question is, how far does it go? How does it really help? How much does it really tell

us about Bilbo, about Smaug, and about their story? The two moments, though similar, are certainly not the

same story. I want to go back here to Tolkien’s soup metaphor. Beowulf in particular and Anglo-Saxon

poetry in general are very influential in Tolkien’s thinking. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who wrote

poems in Anglo-Saxon for fun. We can think of the Anglo-Saxon tradition as forming a big part of the stock

of which the soup of Tolkien’s stories is based, but we can’t let the recognition of this fact distract us from

savouring Tolkien’s stories as soup in its own right.

So then, how should we read Tolkien’s stories? In the foreword, Tolkien says that the prime motive for The

Lord of the Rings was the desire of a tale-teller to “…try his hand at a really long story that would hold the

attention of readers, amuse them, delight them and at times maybe excite them or deeply move

them” (Tolkien, 2013, p. xxi). Do we buy this? He just wanted to write a really long story? I mean, that

sounds so simplistic. It still leaves us with a big question of why? Why, according to Tolkien, write stories at

all? We know that he wants us to focus on experiencing the stories themselves, but what’s the good of

amusing, delighting or even deeply moving readers? We need to look at how he understands the nature

and purpose of storytelling.

The place where Tolkien explains these things most clearly is his essay On Fairy Stories (Tolkien, 2001). In

this essay, he uses an interesting metaphor to describe stories. He calls a story a leaf on the great tree of

tales. There are several important things that this metaphor suggests. First, it suggests that the story is

something outside the teller, it isn’t merely an artificial product of the teller’s mind, a story is discovered

rather than invented. Second, stories discovered like this are part of some much larger organic whole. A

story is only a glimpse by the teller of one part of a much larger thing that exists not only outside of the

mind of the teller, but beyond the complete comprehension of any individual author. Third, the great

separate organic whole of which any story is a part is itself a living thing, a tree. Any life or beauty in an

individual tale is ultimately derived, not from the teller, but from the tree of tales itself. So we might ask,

what does Tolkien suggest the author’s role actually is? I mean, do authors do nothing, then? Are they

totally passive in this process? Well, no. Tolkien says that an author’s job is to unfold the leaf. Authors don’t

just discover the leaves; they reveal them to the world, or at least to their audience. The art of the telling is

the writer’s, their art is the means in which authors transmit glimpses of the tree to their readers and thus

they are largely responsible for how successfully the story is received by their audience. But the author is

not an inventor, not a creator.

The word that Tolkien used to describe the process of story-making is sub-creation. We tend to talk about

artists being creative, but humans can’t actually create stuff, they can’t make something out of nothing. Only
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God can be creative in the literal sense. By using the term sub-creation, Tolkien emphasises that this literary

creation is much lesser than God’s creations and derivative of it. But he also points to the parallels between

the two creative processes. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), or

what Tolkien calls the primary world. A storyteller creates an imaginary world, what Tolkien calls a secondary

world. This is sub-creation. A reader, or listener, then is invited by the author of a story to enter into the

secondary world of that story in our own imaginations. English teachers sometimes describe this experience

as ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. We know when we read a story that what we read is not actually true but

we must make the choice to go along with it nevertheless. Tolkien did not think that this was a good

description of what happens in a successful story. What really happens, Tolkien says, is that the storyteller

proves a successful sub-creator. He makes a secondary world which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he

relates is true. It accords with the laws of that world. He adds, the moment disbelief arises, the spell is

broken, the magic, or rather art, has failed. Willing suspension of disbelief, therefore, is only a substitute

when the storyteller’s art fails. It’s the means by which we tolerate a poor performance. The successful sub-

creator does not just ask that we play along, he ushers our minds into the world of his story. Tolkien calls this

secondary belief.

Now it is important to note that this secondary belief that Tolkien describes is not in any way dependent on

whether the secondary world in question is what we would call realistic. It does not have to be real,

according to the laws of the primary world, in order for us to invest in it. This is a really important point for

Tolkien. What I’ve already said about sub-creation is true for all literature. Tolkien believed that fantasy

literature, stories about magic and magical worlds, has an additional special function. In these stories the

separation from the real world is one of the things that draws us to invest in it. They are not about

possibility, what can really happen, they’re about desirability; if they awaken our desires, they succeed.

Stories of this kind excite our faculties of awe and wonder. I’ll come back to this point in a little while.

Now, in On Fairy Stories, Tolkien takes a lot of time responding to a very natural question that arises as

we’re considering these things. And that is, is all this really healthy, either for the writer or the audience?

Isn’t this all just a bit escapist at best, or at worst, leading to actually losing touch with reality? Well, as for

the author, Tolkien insists that the desire to be the sub-creator of an imagined world is itself perfectly

healthy. He bases this claim on his Christian faith and worldview. He calls the sub-creative impulse not only

natural, but a human right. He says, “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are

made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker” (Tolkien, 2001, p. 56). This

doesn’t mean, of course, that our sub-creations are themselves always wholesome. Humans are fallen and

corrupted by sin and so the literary worlds we create frequently reflect this corruption. But the desire to sub-

create is part of who we are as human beings.

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I’d like to pause for a moment here to say a few things about Tolkien’s Christianity. Tolkien was a firm

believer in Christianity and a faithful member of the Catholic Church from his youth up. His writing and his

thinking are based throughout on Christian premises. This might not always be obvious in his stories

themselves. If we’re looking for a Christian message, we won’t find it very easily. When compared, for

instance, with The Chronicles of Narnia by Tolkien’s very good friend, C.S. Lewis, The Hobbit and The Lord

of the Rings will seem to lack in any clear Christian message. This isn’t because Tolkien was a less serious

Christian than C.S. Lewis, or less willing to express his beliefs, it mainly reflects a difference in literary taste.

Remember what I said earlier about Tolkien’s views on allegory. There is no parallel in Tolkien’s stories to

C.S. Lewis’ great lion, Aslan, who is so clearly a manifestation of Jesus Christ. This is because that sort of

thing is too much like the purposed domination of the reader by the writer that Tolkien dislikes. Generally,

Tolkien will not try to steer his readers towards any plain Christian message in his stories, but the Christian

worldview is the absolute bedrock upon which all of Tolkien’s sub-creations are founded. I’d also note that

Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories and the short story Leaf by Niggle that was published with it are probably

the two places in all of his published writings, other than his letters, where he discusses his Christianity most

openly.

Anyway, so Tolkien claims that being a sub-creator is totally cool. But what about that question of escapism?

What use is it to spend ones time in an imaginary fantasy world, either as an author or a reader? Shouldn’t

we be dealing with the real world? In addressing this question, Tolkien openly challenges the modernist and

post-modernist assumptions about the world. I would add that the conflict between Tolkien’s ideas about

this and the dominant twentieth century philosophies is a big reason why his works are still not taken

seriously by literary scholars today. English professors, as a group, tend to rule Tolkien out of the literary

canon without blinking, largely because fantasy stories about elves and dragons obviously cannot be

serious literature. Near the heart of this assumption lies this idea of escapism. It is not serious literature

because it does not deal with the real world and therefore it is viewed with disdain. It’s childish. Tolkien

observes the accusation of escapism is almost always made in a tone of scorn but he points out that no such

tone is attached to the word ‘escape’ in normal life (Tolkien, 2001, pp. 56-70). Normally, escaping is a good

thing. Sometimes it is even a heroic thing. What’s the reason for the scorn then? It boils down, Tolkien

claims, to how we view the so called ‘real world’. Is the ‘real world’ really all there is? If so, then fantastic

worlds that suggest higher, greater things above the mundane are completely empty. They’re lies and

indulging in them is at least an act of shameful irresponsibility. You’re not facing facts. But what if there is

something else? What if there is something greater, something higher than the world that surrounds us?

What if something like the opposite of our assumptions is true? What if the mundane world is only a

shadow, a distraction from this higher reality? You will, of course, again notice Tolkien’s Christian worldview

asserting itself here. Tolkien claims that this is indeed the case. Imaginative sub-creation through the use of
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artistic skill opens windows on this higher world. This is especially true of fantasy. In this sense, we actually

can escape the primary world. Fantasy frees our minds from bondage to drudgery and corruption. This is

not an act of shameful escapism; rather this is like an escape from a prison. Remember the implications of

the tree of tales metaphor. An author catches glimpses of something larger than himself; something

outside, beyond his own experience, through his stories he can share those glimpses and help his readers

to escape as well. Tolkien argues further that fantasy doesn’t undermine our relationship with reality, with

the primary world. To the contrary, the glimpses it provides cleanse and heal that relationship. He suggests

that this is actually necessary; that our understanding of reality may well become diseased without it.

Fantasy doesn’t distort the world; it helps us to regain a clear view of the world.

This picks up on what I mentioned earlier about fantasy serving to excite our faculties of awe and wonder.

Let me explain Tolkien’s argument about how this works. We naturally tend to have our attention fixed on

the world around us. This leads us over time to stop really looking at what surrounds us in the world. As

things become familiar we don’t pay attention to them. And even worse, we end up adopting an attitude of

possessiveness toward them. Here is how Tolkien describes the process. He says of the things that surround

us: “We say we know them. They have become like the things that once attracted us by their glitter, or their

colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and

acquiring ceased to look at them” (Tolkien, 2001, p. 58). Works of fantasy, by their distance from the

everyday world, prompt us to see the things in our own world afresh by making them strange by freeing

them, as Tolkien says, from the drab blur of triteness, or familiarity. Tolkien’s own works can definitely have

this effect. Shadowfax the Great may prompt us to see horses differently. Ents are quite likely to make us

change how we think about trees. Hobbits may change our understanding of our own neighbours or even

of ourselves. As we become less obsessed with, less fixated on our own mundane world, we become less

desensitised to it, we rediscover its wonders and its delights. We become, as Tolkien says, the lover of

nature rather than her slaves.

On the whole, therefore, we find that when Tolkien says in the foreword that his motive for writing The Lord

of the Rings was to try his hand at a really long story that will delight and move his readers, he’s not showing

any kind of false modesty at all. If anything, he is admitting to a serious artistic ambition. His goal in writing

The Lord of the Rings, and his other works, was to sub-create a world that would support secondary belief;

that would allow his readers to invest themselves in it. If he succeeded, and his readers could find

themselves amused, excited and deeply moved, the perhaps his story would even accomplish some of the

higher goals of storytelling. Perhaps even his story, which he himself doubted the worth of for so long,

would provide glimpses for his readers of the joy beyond the world. This is why Tolkien was so adamantly

resistant to those approaches to his stories that were reductive and oversimplifying; that distracted attention
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from the story itself. For Tolkien, his writing was about the story, the unfolding of a leaf on the tree of tales

and sharing it with his readers.

In these lectures, I hope to examine Tolkien’s works as he would have wanted to see them examined. I won’t

be psychoanalysing Tolkien or dissecting his stories, but rather examining them closely and exploring their

delights, their beauties and their patterns. In each individual lecture, I’ll be looking very closely at the details

of Tolkien’s sub-creation by discussing short passages of Tolkien’s works, and through the series as a whole, I

will be showing how these details come together to form larger, compelling patterns of thought. I hope that

you’ve enjoyed this introduction and that you will join me in my further explorations of Tolkien’s remarkable

sub-creation.
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Works Cited

Birmingham City Council. (2016, March 5). J.R.R. Tolkien. Retrieved from Birmingham City Council: http://
www.birmingham.gov.uk/tolkien

Tolkien, J. (2000). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. (H. Carpenter, Ed.) New York: HarperCollins.

Tolkien, J. (2001). On Fairy Stories. In J. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (pp. 1-82). London: HarperCollinsPublishers.

Tolkien, J. (2013). The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Collectors ed.). London:
HarperCollinsPublishers.