Some thoughts from a literary standpoint…
J.R.R. Tolkien served in the British Army during World War I. He was exposed to Catholicism at the young age of eight. These two events help shape the authors mind and his heart.
The horrors he witnessed in the Great War had an impact on his work that brought to light the world encompassing view of the inhumanity of man.
His being brought up in poverty was another contributing factor in his drive, however it was not the defining element.
He seems to pose a theory, that there is a struggle in each of us and there is a choice of reconciliation also.
You may be born into a realm of delight, or horrendous circumstance yet you still have a choice,
The road is yours, you chose the direction you wish.
The innate struggle of man.
This he learned first hand. This sense of a struggle between good and evil permeates his tales.
His earliest works of the Legendarium are collected in The Book of Lost Tales Part Two and were begun during the first world war.
As Tolkien stated in his own words…
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know; and that I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it.
Also at the time he was writing he was member of the Inklings.
This group of illustrious people met together and debated, collaborated, talked theology, created and even argued…they were iron sharpening iron.
They imparted to each others ideas and offered encouragement.
As he was steeped in English literature, the forms and the illuminaries around him gave his writing a sense of authority.
His ideas of the “hero’s journey” was defined by his broad reading of many great forms of literature.
He embraced the hero’s journey in all of us.
Bringing to life a hero who was nearly an impotent powerless creature.
Such is the Hobbit in comparison to the fearsome inhabitants and nearly divine and royal cast of his created world.
That such an inconspicuous character would be the one to deliver as it might be said the “final blow”.
Golem, such a powerful representation of the ugliness of man, holding on to his “precious” sins, oblivious even as he fell to a fiery death.
