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 that cannot be harnessed, but must be destroyed, the source of unlimited power that corrupts and destroys even the best and highest. His picture of the Shire, which works as a society because justice and law are internalized rather than imposed, while admittedly ideal, is an ideal that has more in common with the Jeffersonian ideal of democracy than Imperial...