Dec 21, 2009

Lord of the Rings | Historical Context

Introduction
Tolkien is often approached with the expectation that he was a typical child of late Victorian and Edwardian England, and deeply embedded in the British intellectual establishment. He was in some ways, however, atypical. His Catholicism, passion for Philology, profound love and respect for the earth, and distrust of the benefits of technology, particularly that of the internal combustion engine, made him a potentially uneasy member of his society. Even as the atomic bomb was being developed, the Ring was emerging in his narrative as the technology...