"When Tolkien's Lord of the Rings appeared in 1954, it was eagerly sought by a rapidly widening community of readers while snootily dismissed by eminent critics as juvenile escapism. For many years most literary scholars refused to take Tolkien…
As a scholar of medieval literature and a lover of Germanic and Finnish mythologies in particular, J.R.R. Tolkien was "grieved by the poverty" of legend and myth in his own beloved culture. Inspired by works like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green…