Although it may seem obvious that Middle-earth is “the world in which J.R.R. Tolkien sets his Elf and Hobbit stories”, that is not precisely the case. There are Elf stories which are not part of the world of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion. I speak of the Elves in The Father Christmas Letters and Smith of Wootton Major. Of course, there are similarities between these worlds. Like a run on bad puns, Tolkien kept resurrecting old ideas and giving them new form. Hence, the Elves help Father Christmas fight off the goblins, and Smith sees Elven warriors returning from strange and foreign wars when he is visiting Faerie. Middle-earth, which Tolkien said is our world in some imaginary time in the past, is distinct from the other worlds.
But Middle-earth itself is a hodge-podge of literary worlds, borrowing extensively from the original Hobbit (which Tolkien drew into the Middle-earth canon by proposing a second edition for the book in 1947) and a bit from the 1937 “Silmarillion” text, which itself was a rewrite of an earlier “Silmarilion” which in turn was a complete rewrite of the themes Tolkien had used for The Book of Lost Tales. Numenor came straight out of a science fiction time travel story, “The Drowning of Anadune”. And then The Lord of the Rings itself produced new terrain and peoples: Rohan and the Ents, Gondor and Arnor, and the mysterious Eregion whose Elven people only the stones could recall.
And, of course, behind these stories lay the older, non-Tolkienien myths and folklore which inspired him to create his own myths and folklore in the first place. Tolkien grew up on stories of Greek gods and heroes, and he discovered the primal beauty of Gothic and Anglo-Saxon verse and poetry. His devotion to Catholicism and Christianity ensured he would absorb Biblical traditions, and his curiosity led him to explore the traditions and sciences of Finland, Egypt, Babylon, and other sources of western civilization.
A recurring theme in Tolkien seems to be the clash between civilization and barbarism. The Elves’ civilization collides with the barbarous Mannish tribes, and the tribes eventually replace the Elves. The Numenoreans’ civilization returns to Middle-earth, where it becomes mingled with the barbarism of the Numenoreans’ Edainic cousins. And in the end, the high civilization of Arnor descends into a semi-barbarism which reaches out to the remnants of high civilization in Gondor far to the south.
What stands between civilization and barbarism is the power of choice. Those who choose to improve their lives, to study the world and its ways, and to learn from their mistakes, raise up the new civilizations. These civilizations are always born of a sense of wonder, a newness which evokes the symbology of a young world, freshly awakened from a long sleep. Those who have freedom of choice stripped from them live in darkness, and at best roam the world as wild folk (Men or Elves, or Dwarves), outcasts and outlaws, or simply untamed barbarians. The rest become slaves or willing servants and allies of personified evil, the Dark Lords who oppose civilization.
But when Tolkien set out to write his stories, he did not necessarily choose the theme of civilization versus barbarism. Rather, the theme he constantly pursued, and never fully realized, was the collision between ideals from two different worlds. Civilization and barbarism are the past and present (or future) aspect of the same world. All civilizations arise from barbarism. All civilizations eventually meet new barbarians. But Tolkien’s theme was a more wistful look at a past we never had.
His quest began with the attempt to create a mythology for England, to devise an Anglo-Saxon mythos which explained (from his point of view), many curious elements left behind in the wake of the Norman invasion of 1066. There must once have been people who knew (or thought they knew) what a wood-wose was, for example. Well, that is the official version of the story, as propounded by Tom Shippey and others. The problem is that the mythology for England, The Book of Lost Tales, lacks any such references. Instead, it tosses around terms like “gnomes” (from French), “pixies” (admittedly from Old English “Puck”), “fays” (from French by way of Old English), and “sprites” (also from French).
The Anglo-Saxon angle is not so much in the fairies as in the lost wanderer (Eriol, Aelfwine) who discovers that they really exist and that once they were a part of the world of men. The fairies once lived in what has now become England, and there they fought a long and harsh war with men, eventually losing it or fleeing as more and more men arrived. In a sense, Tolkien’s English mythology was really a Celtic mythology, because the men who drove the fairies from England were Anglo-Saxons, although Eriol’s descendants remained in rapport with them for an unspecified number of generations. But those descendants became the Kings of Kent, which was traditionally a Jutish kingdom, and quickly became overshadowed by the Anglo and Saxon kings in Mercia, Wessex, and Northummbria. The name “Kent” is believed to derive from the earlier name of a Celtic tribe anyway.
When “The Silmarillion” was rejected by a reader at Allen & Unwin for being very “Celtic”, Tolkien objected to such a description. By then he had eliminated most of the Celticisms, and Eriol himself was no longer a part of the mythology. England, too, had been dropped from the tales. The whole thing was no longer English, but there remained the “Geste of Beren and Luthien” and the “Lay of the Children of Hurin”. Like Arthurian Romance, Tolkien Romance was still borrowing heavily from French roots.
Which is not to say it all came from French traditions. Hurin Thalion owes something to the tragic figure of Heracles in Greek mythology, or perhaps to Samson in the Bible. All three men possessed great strength, and they were champions of their people who fought against powerful enemies. And all three experienced tragedy. Heracles and Hurin both lost their families. And Heracles and Hurin also both had brothers whose sons founded dynasties (Iolaus was the son of Heracles’ brother Iphicles, and Iolaus founded a kingdom on Sardinia with the sons of Heracles; Tuor was the son of Hurin’s brother Huor, and Tuor was the grandfather of Elros, first king of Numenor). And Gondolin owes something to the story of Troy (also called Ilion).
Although The Hobbit was little more than a light-hearted romp through fairy-tale cliches, Tolkien blended elements from Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature which revealed his love for the northern world’s old traditions. Hence, Bilbo and the dragon Smaug lift a cup-theft from “Beowulf”, and Gandalf and the Dwarves peek out from the name lists of the Elder Edda. And yet, Bard the Bowman’s lake-town is still influenced by a French Celtic lake village. Even while honing his ability to utilize Anglo-Saxon literature and imagery, Tolkien still found himself looking beyond England to France. But he wasn’t out of the woods yet, so to speak.
When the name “Rohiroth” first appeared on a sketch-map for the lands south of the Hobbit’s Misty Mountains (as Tolkien worked on the narrative for The Lord of the Rings), alternative names for them included Anaxippians and Hippanaletians. Years later, in a letter to publisher Milton Waldman at Collins, Tolkien wrote “the better and nobler sort of Men are in fact the kin of those that had departed to Numenor, but remain in a simple ‘Homeric’ state of patriarchal and tribal life” (Letter 131). Further on he writes, “The Lord of the Rings…concludes the whole business — an attempt is made to include in it…elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic ‘homeric’ horsemen,….”
It is almost regarded as axiomatic that Tolkien drew strictly upon northern resources in fashioning his mythologies. Why should he refer to Homer twice when describing the (then as-yet unpublished) cycle if everything, as people like Tom Shippey argue, is cleanly derived from Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Finnish sources? The best answer to that unanswerable question may lie in the 1991 paper by Jonathan Glenn, titled To translate a hero: The Hobbit as Beowulf retold. Although Glenn stresses the importance of “Beowulf” in the Tolkien tradition, he takes the unusual position of disagreeing with classical Tolkien analysis. That is, he doesn’t think Tolkien was lifting his ideas quite so cleanly from “Beowulf”.
“…studies of these issues are with few exceptions flawed in three dangerous ways,” Glenn writes in his introduction. “By the general critical sin of Sloppy Statements, by a tendency to simple-minded and profligate Parallel-Hunting, and by the Voilà Syndrome, whereby the critic impressively points to something but fails to ask that first of all critical questions, ‘So what?'”
He proceeds to rip into Bonniejean Christensen’s treatment of Tolkien and “Beowulf” and then offers an argument in favor of a completely different reading: that Bilbo and Beorn are not following the models others have proposed for Tolkien. Rather, Glenn believes that Tolkien was devising “an alternative hierarchy” to the northern world’s traditional hierarchy, one in which Tolkien substitutes the Adventurer for the Warrior and the Leader for the Hero. Such a substitution is easily recognizable in many analyses of Aragorn’s character, who is indeed more and an adventurer and leader than warrior and hero. But Aragorn is not equated with Beowulf, whereas Bilbo has been so identified in critical literature.
To support his thesis, Glenn more than once draws upon Biblical examples which would easily have been available to Tolkien, the devout Catholic. Now, Tolkien admitted freely that “Beowulf is among my most valued sources” to The Observer in 1937 after The Hobbit was published, although he pointed out that “it was not conciously present to the mind in the process of writing, in which the episode of the theft [of the cup from Smaug’s hoard] arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the circumstances.”
If Tolkien was not consciously borrowing from “Beowulf” when he wrote about the cup-theft, then it must be equally true that he did not keep a copy of his essay, “On Fairy-Stories”, in front of him as he wrote either The Hobbit (impossible, since the essay was first composed and presented as a lecture in 1938) or The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien never mentions the essay or the theory of story construction which he explains in it in any of his notes or letters from the period 1938-52, when he worked on The Lord of the Rings. Some people seem to feel he felt completely bound by the principles he set forth. But by the time Tolkien began to write The Lord of the Rings, he was bound by other material which had appeared in print, and which he had been working on or had worked on throughout the previous twenty-two years.
In fact, in the essay, Tolkien admonishes, “Let us not divide the human race into Eloi and Morlocks: pretty children — ‘elves’ as the eighteenth century often idiotically called them — with their fairy-tales (carefully pruned), and dark Morlocks tending their machines. If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.” He had already violated this cardinal rule by writing The Hobbit for his children, and it was not the only such fairy-story to leave Tolkien’s hand in that style. And there are other cardinal rules in the essay which Tolkien proceeded to violate with The Lord of the Rings, such as the requirement for a happy ending. He almost had one with the Epilogue, in which Sam, Rosie, and the kids anticipated Aragorn’s visit to the Shire. But Tolkien was persuaded to drop the Epilogue in favor of Sam’s unforgettable and bittersweet, “Well, I’m back.”
Although whole volumes of analysis have been published which correctly point to various Anglo-Saxonisms in The Lord of the Rings, particularly with respect to nomenclature in The Shire and Rohan, a world of Greek influences has been overlooked in an apparently zealous attempt to convert The Lord of the Rings into a modern Anglo-Saxon anthem. Tolkien studied other languages, other stories. He made reference to them. He buried their elements in his own stories.
For example, you won’t find mention of a staff in “Beowulf”, but Theoden and Gandalf both lean on staves, which are symbols of their authority: Gandalf the self-acclaimed steward and Theoden the king of the Homeric Rohirrim. But where would Tolkien find inspiration to use a staff as the symbol of authority, especially royal authority among the Rohirrim?
How about “The Iliad”?
King Agamemnon stood up, holding his staff,
one fashioned by Hephaestus’ careful craftsmanship.
That god had given it to lord Zeus, son of Cronos.
Later Zeus had presented it to Hermes,
the guide, killer of Argus. Hermes, in his turn,
gave it to King Pelops, the chariot racer,
who passed the staff to Atreus, the people’s leader.
This man, as he lay dying, left it for Thyestes,
who owned many flocks. Thyestes, in his turn,
passed it on to Agamemnon, who held it
as ruler of all Argos and many islands.
With this staff as his support, Agamemnon spoke:
Source: Homer, The Iliad: a new translation by Ian Johnston.
Homer doesn’t just put a staff into Agamemnon’s hand; he glorifies the staff, bestowed upon the king from the hands of the gods (through his family). When Agamemnon raised his staff, the Achaean kings listened to him in such as way as they would not listen to any other person. The speeches that Agamemnon and others make in “The Iliad” provide a template for the speeches in “The Wanderings of Hurin”. Agamemnon orders his heralds to sound their trumpets, and thousands of Achaeans come to a vast assembly to hear him speak. Hardang, Halad of Brethil, is forced to call an assembly of the Folk of Brethil (a Folkmoot), in which the chieftains of the people come by the hundreds. A trumpet is sounded there, too. In both stories, men get up and address the assemblies, and they win the support of the assemblies by appealing to the peoples’ strong sense of morality and law.
In the tradition of Rohan, two early leaders stand out from the rest: Eorl and Helm Hammerhand. When Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, only a handful of people knew about the “Silmarillion”, so he may have borrowed lightly from himself by modelling Helm on Hurin and Eorl on Hador Lorindol. Helm was a man of great strength and temper, and because of his ingracious handling of Freca, Helm launched a war which nearly destroyed Rohan. Helm’s son Haleth fell defending Meduseld against the army led by Freca’s son Wulf. Helm himself died later on, somewhere out in the miserable cold, alone. Turin killed himself after defeating the dragon Glaurung in defense of Brethil, and Hurin eventually wandered off to die somewhere in the south, perhaps alone. Eorl, like Hador, was already the leader of his people when he became their king (Hador became the first Lord of Dor-lomin). Both men were tall and golden-haired, and they were celebrated in song. Both men also fell in battle with their traditional enemies and were avenged by their sons. Both men led their people to new lands within the borders of great kingdoms.
Tolkien’s protagonists, for large stories and small, seem to fit the mold that Glenn proposes: they are either Adventurers (such as Turin, Beren, and Aragorn) or Leaders (such as Hador, Hurin, Eorl, Helm, Theoden, and Aragorn), or both (such as Aragorn and Isildur). The traditional northern hero, brave and arrogant, or tragic and foolhardy, a bit dim-witted, doesn’t really serve Tolkien’s purpose. He looks beyond the northern tradition for a more suitable hero archetype, and associated symbology. The merging of mythical worlds thus results in the most unique of mythical worlds, and one which reasonably echoes traces of all classical western literature.
If Tolkien continuously explores the motif of cultural conflicts, he nonetheless invigorates the art by mingling his narrative sources. However, he chooses the elements carefully, selecting archetypes and symbols which go well together. His Rohirrim, depicting all that is best of the Northmen, thus demand representation in a northern language, and therefore why not Tolkien’s beloved Anglo-Saxon? But the choice of Anglo-Saxon, Old English, as the language of Rohan forced Tolkien to lead the reader into making associatons which he later felt compelled to deny. Hence, the Rohirrim may be too much of a good thing for their own sake.
In The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey concedes that “Tolkien did not approve of the academic search for ‘sources’. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had ‘got it all’ from somewhere else.” The pursuit of identifying and justifying the Anglo-Saxon connections consumes the reader, especially the well-read reader like Shippey. He feels compelled to defend Tolkien against what he himself might regard as “Sloppy Statements” and “simple-minded and profligate Parallel-Hunting”. There is certainly nothing simple-minded in Shippey’s own parallel-hunting, but he barely mentions the Bible and perhaps once mentions Greek tragedy at all during the process of convincing the world that Tolkien’s literature nearly begins and ends with the Anglo-Saxon language. Finnish and the Kalevala are accorded some respect, since Tolkien himself pointed out the connections, but The Lord of the Rings owes a great deal more to the classics than most commentators have conceded.
However, though the Anglo-Saxonists seeks something specifically English in Tolkien’s work, Tolkien himself may have been working toward a pseudo-English literature. That is, just as it is undeniable that he used Anglo-Saxon nomenclature in The Lord of the Rings, and just as Shippey argues convincingly that there are strong parallels between snippets of Tolkien’s story and numerous medieval sources, it remains nonetheless that Tolkien abandoned the mythology for England. He abandoned it long before he wrote The Lord of the Rings. But it may be that he did so because he realized there was a more desirable, and much more easily achieved, goal. Or perhaps a more necessary one.
In Letter 329, Tolkien wrote “I have very little interest in serial literary history, and no interest at all in the history of present situation of the English ‘novel’. My work is not a ‘novel’, but an ‘heroic romance’ a much older and quite different variety of literature.” In Letter 142 he wrote, “certainly I have not been nourished by English literature, in which I do not suppose that I am better read than you; for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer….”
And yet, in Letter 217 Tolkien pointed out, in response to a request for help with a translation of The Lord of the Rings into Polish, that “as [the translator] perceives, this is an English book and its Englishry should not be eradicated.” Well, that’s a rather peculiar thing to say, coming from a person who on more than one occasion denied any particular fondness for English literature. Heroic romances, in Tolkien’s opinion, go all the way back to Homer, and realized their most widespread popularity in Medieval literature. So Tolkien may only have been denying himself a place in both modern English and Medieval literature. He didn’t say the book was Medieval, or Anglo-Saxon. In fact, it’s not either. A Medieval or Anglo-Saxon reader probably would not understand most of what was going on in the story.
But a modern Anglo-Saxon reader might. Not simply an Englishman, but an Anglo-Saxon Englishman. Tolkien was certainly no stranger to “what if” literature. His time traveling story-tellers, and his numerous essays pondering the philosophical aspects of Middle-earth, make it clear that Tolkien enjoyed wandering through the halls of What Might Have Been or What Could Be. The Lord of the Rings may be the culmination of a theory of literature which had been slowly brewing under his care and consideration for more than twenty years.
The Lord of the Rings may be Tolkien’s attempt to define the modern English heroic romance as it might have evolved from an uninterrupted Anglo-Saxon literary tradition. Such a tradition could not have helped avoid importing influences from abroad. Anglo-Saxon authors would eventually have been introduced and reintroduced to the classics as the centuries unfolded. As Tolkien devised alternative plural forms for words such as “dwarf” (“dwarrows” and “dwarves” instead of the traditional “dwarfs”), so he may have sought to devise an alternative model for English literature. Eschewing the ‘novel’, he brought the heroic romance forward and gave it the framework that a rich literary tradition would have to provide. He could pick and choose from the best traditions that western literature has to offer. Why not? Anglo-Saxon authors throughout the past 1,000 years would not have ignored so many important steps in the evolution. Especially not when England became the dominant power in the world, and the English provoked their thought with ideas from around the globe.
Just as The Lord of the Rings is set in an imaginary time in our past, so it purports to be a translation of an ancient work, The Red Book of Westmarch. In fact, it may be a fictitious work on another level, an example of how the English might have carried forward their heroic traditions, and adopted models from other traditions, had there been no 1066 invasion. In “On the Cold Hill’s Side”, chapter 8 of The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey writes “Tolkien liked to bring ‘philologist-figures’ into his fiction” and he provides several examples. Shippey discerns double-entendre throughout Tolkien’s works, and perhaps rightly so. Whether by intent or applicability, Tolkien’s characters often speak on two levels.
Faramir’s words to Frodo may be another example of that double intent or applicability. As Tolkien’s fictitious literary tradition became more like modern literature, modern literature (through The Lord of the Rings) became more like his fictitious literary tradition. In other words, Tolkien’s imaginary Anglo-Saxon literature evolved into an imaginary English literature. In Tolkien’s imaginary past, Shakespeare’s English literature might not have been so disappointing. The Lord of the Rings is therefore what a philologist might recognize as an “asterisk-book”. Shippey devotes many pages to explaining philology and its historical roots, but let it suffice to say that philology is the study of language and history. The philologist, at least one like Tolkien, cannot understand a word without understanding its history, and in understanding a word he understands the history with which the word is associated.
One example of this outlook is Tolkien’s reaction to a lecture his son Christopher gave. Shippey quotes Tolkien’s excited comment about the apparent derivation of the name “Attila” from the Gothic word “atta” (father). “Attila” means “Little Father”, and apparently implies that his Gothic warriors were very devoted to him. Many Goths did indeed serve in Attila’s army. Historians have never fully agreed upon why, and the Tolkien explanation seems as good as any: Attila delivered the goods to his soldiers, and they didn’t care who was a Hun and who was a Goth.
In reconstructing the languages of our past, and therefore providing some insights into our past, philologists devise what are referred to as “asterisk-words”. These are words which the philologists conclude must have existed at some time, and perhaps have evolved into new words. They are denoted in word-lists and dictionaries with an asterisk (*) placed at the front. Anyone who has read Tolkien’s “Etymologies” knows he scattered many asterisk-words throughout his invented languages. He didn’t presume to know everything possible about Elvish languages, but left it for others to see what he had discovered and to follow in his footsteps. At least, in an imaginary tradition of philology it must be so.
So, The Lord of the Rings is an asterisk-book. It is Tolkien’s example of how the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition might have evolved. Although they are usually devised in an attempt to look further back, asterisk-words may be devised from known or postulated roots in an effort to extend our knowledge about poorly documented languages. In the same way, Tolkien brought Old English literature forward, leap-frogging across a thousand years by looking at the evolution of literary motifs and drawing upon sources from across the ages.
Tolkien’s imaginary modern Anglo-Saxons would therefore be a diverse people, and they would be Catholic, and they would be great story-tellers. This is my long-winded way of saying the Anglo-Saxonists may have been on to something without realizing it. But though I take great joy in finding some common ground with them, the sad fact is that we now may know why there will never be another book like The Lord of the Rings. It would take a philologist of J.R.R. Tolkien’s calibre (sharing his personal preferences and background) to add another title to that imaginary literary tradition he created, and a man of his genius and insight may come along only once in a thousand years.
This article was originally published on July 22, 2001.
Reflecting your conclusion I hope, any criticism ought to start with a humble admission that JRRT was a man of immense learning and profound intellect, who was also extremely concerned to analyse and explain his work, and any judgement should be measured against his own claims – while not offering them unconditional credence. That is, make sure JRRT wasn’t there ahead of you, and see what he had to say if he was.
Furthermore, his accomplishment is quite obviously in a class of its own – as shown by the failure of anyone to imitate it – and needs to be understood in terms set by itself, though with all necessary regard to the countless “sources” or as I prefer to call them, influences.
Among critics, for me Shippey has done far and away the most in the way of illumination. Besides being intelligent, perceptive and modest, his shared professional background is invaluable. (Though even Shippey doesn’t spot quite everything: for instance, the fact that Pippin’s near-death thoughts after the hill-troll falls on him, quoted in ‘Author of the Century’, are derived from those of the Emperor Hadrian; relevant because the latter is the very model of a “virtuous pagan”.)
I do believe there is more to be done. In commenting on the many and fascinating points you’ve raised in your articles, I’ve come across aspects of the work which seem important to its conceptual structure, and seem to have been given little recognition. The most significant being:
(1) The influence of Plato, e.g. (i) the theory of Forms which underlies “sub-creation”; (ii) the aversion to “change” which leads to the “second sin” of the Elves (the creation of the Rings); (iii) the “eye of the mind”, i.e. metaphor of wisdom as “sight”; (iv) the “world of reality and truth” (Republic 525c), represented variously by Valinor and the “other side” which is accessible to the “elven-Wise”.
I realise Plato might seem a bugbear, but I’d plead that just because an influence is not made explicit does not mean it isn’t there. It is the same with C.S.Lewis: “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” tut-tuts Digory (Professor Kirk) in The Last Battle. Yes, it is – and so was a lot of Lewis’s Christian apologetic “in Plato”, though usually unacknowledged. Lewis’s path back to the faith was via the Plato-derived concept, which was the germ of “sub-creation”, of the Bible as “True Myth”; which was imparted to him, in an all-night argument on the banks of the Thames in 1931, by none other than JRRT*.
*The story is told in the Green-Hooper biography of Lewis, Chapter 4.
To answer your own point, “sub-creation” is implicit in Letter 109, from 1949:
[To Sir Stanley Unwin] But do not let Rayner suspect ‘Allegory’. There is a ‘moral’, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals – they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such.
(2) The influence of the English Romantics, particularly Keats and Coleridge: apart from clear references to the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Chapman’s Homer’ in the opening of ‘On Fairy Stories’, the departure from Lorien is very like the Ode’s conclusion, with Galadriel in the role of “deceiving elf”. Coleridge also appears in ‘On Fairy Stories’ in an unacknowledged quotation, via the OED, of his famous Fancy/Imagination distinction.
So yes, I agree one must look beyond the obvious sources, i.e. things Old English in general together with Norse-Germanic and maybe Finnish mythology. To some extent JRRT laid down a smokescreen in his claim of primarily linguistic inspiration and his professed scorn for post-1066 literature, and this may have deflected critical attention from the influences I’ve suggested. (Re Letter 217, “this is an English book and its Englishry should not be eradicated”, I think he meant it actually was English, not just based on Eng.Lit.)
Another vital aspect is the nature-descriptions – of plants and especially trees, but also of land-forms (which Karen Fonstad was brilliant on) and even weather (there is an awful lot of weather in LOTR). Robert Graves makes the interesting point (in The White Goddess) that the great English poets, such as Shakespeare and Spenser, were countrymen who readily found metaphors in the natural world. I think Tolkien (like Lewis) shares something of this. It is linked to his love of the English language, and his pleasure in using it to describe things the Anglo-Saxons could have known. Quite possibly the nature-theme arose accidentally in the writing of The Hobbit, in which (for example) the episode of Bilbo climbing into the butterfly-haunted oak-canopy of Mirkwood, although hardly essential to the story, is still memorable.
None of this, of course, is to claim any “key” or special interpretation. And I agree with Glenn, “parallel-hunting” should be pursued with caution – not avoided altogether, but having respect for the author’s intentions and the likelihood of his knowing the parallel. But I would add another critical “sin” – the Unwarranted Archetype. E.g. (capital letters being the give-away): Warrior, Adventurer, Hero, Leader.