The driving passion of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 's literary life was to make his "fairy-stories" so complete in description and detail, so varied in character and action, so expansive in philosophy and religion, as to be "real." He was in every way the perfectionist in matters of verisimilitude--revising, correcting, and amending his tales over a period of years and decades so that they would always be referentially consistent. His life's work, the creation of Middle Earth, encompasses a reality that rivals Western man's own attempt at recording the composite, knowable history of his species. Not since Milton has any Englishman worked so successfully at creating a secondary world, derived from our own, yet complete in its own terms with encyclopedic mythology; an imagined world that includes a vast gallery of strange beings: hobbits, elves, dwarfs, orcs, and, finally, the men of Westernesse. The personalities and languages of...