From Today I Found Out.

The writings of J.R.R. Tolkien are widely read and revered by both his home country of England and around the globe. A BBC poll found Lord of the Rings to be the “Nation’s best-loved book” and Amazon customers worldwide in a 1999 survey rated it as their favorite book of the entire second millennium. Given this enthusiasm, it’s no surprise that even many casual fans of the film adaptations and the books they’re based on are at least vaguely aware that Tolkien had set out to write a mythology for England. But they’re probably a bit vague on the details of how exactly stories about fury-footed little folk from a fantasy land called “The Shire” were supposed to be the English equivalent of Odysseus in Greek mythology sailing around the Greek world or Romulus in Roman mythology founding the city of Rome.

Fortunately for us, there’s a long trail of evidence regarding Tolkien’s thinking throughout the entire course of his composition. Per Tom Shippey in his book The Road to Middle-earth, the two things that separated Tolkien from other authors were “the very long gestation period of all his works, and his deep reluctance ever to discard a draft.” From the sound of it, Smaug the dragon was more than a bit autobiographical, albeit instead of hoarding dwarven gold and jewels, Tolkien hoarded moldy manuscripts from before the first World War even.

This thankfully allowed Tolkien’s son, Christopher, to posthumously publish such a veritable treasure trove in his twelve-book series The History of Middle-earth, which lays out in exacting detail the documentary history of his father’s poetry and prose about what would one day be called Middle-earth, going back decades before the Oxford don ever scribbled on a scrap of paper the iconic opening line “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” But given that Christopher’s History is several times the length of the Lord of the Rings and is padded by many manuscripts of minute variation from one another, far fewer fans have trudged through this journey from English pseudo-myths to high fantasy epic than have walked with the Fellowship from Bag End to Barad-dûr, so we thought we’d hop on the backs of eagles to give you a bird’s eye view of just what Tolkien was getting at.

Author: Matthew Theriault
Host: Simon Whistler
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila