Early Twentieth Century: Tolkien's secondary school education is centered on the language and literature of Greece and Rome. He is expected not only to be able to read and write both languages, but to be able to speak them with some fluency. Debating in Latin was common, and in Classical Greek not unknown.

Early Twentieth Century: The society that Tolkien depicts is an essentially self-sufficient one, in which families grow their own food and most goods are produced locally by craftsmen. Trade, when mentioned, is usually in luxuries: wine, pipeweed, and dwarf-made toys. In Tolkien's own childhood in the English countryside, this life-style would have not have seemed like the stuff of fairy-tales, but very...