Cornwall, as the thirteenth-century German poet Gottfried von Strassburg tells the story in Tristan, there is a cavern that was carved into a mountainside in heathen times by giants, who used it when they required privacy for lovemaking. Its immense bronze door is inscribed with a dedication to Love, naming the place The Cave of Lovers. This extraordinary cave features all the amenities one would expect from a first-class love grotto. Expert artisans fashioned a room “perpendicular, snow-white, smooth, and even, throughout its whole circumference.” On the keystone of its exquisite, vaulted ceiling, goldsmiths and master jewelers set a magnificent crown, while the floor was made of flawless marble, “as green as grass.” The bed in the very center of the chamber was “most perfectly cut from a slab of crystal,” engraved with an encomium to the Goddess of Love.

The poet devotes several pages to the “hidden significance” or allegorical meaning of the refined workmanship: three windows hewn through the rock, for instance, represent Kindness, Humility, and Breeding, and the sweet sunlight that shines through them is Honor itself. Gottfried also describes how Tristan and Isolde, fugitive illicit lovers, in the absence of conventional sustenance, feasted there on “love and desire” alone.

The poet knows the sacred cavern right down to the finest detail: “The sun-giving windows have often sent their rays into my heart. I have known that cave since I was eleven, yet I never set foot in Cornwall.”

So too J. R. R. Tolkien knows intimately every precinct of Middle-earth, though of course neither he nor anyone else has ever set foot there. A masterly writer who conjures fantastic unrealities can be perfectly at home in them, just like a writer appropriately renowned for depicting his own particular corner of the known world. Charles Dickens’s London, Mark Twain’s Mississippi River towns, Leo Tolstoy’s Russian cities and countryside, John Cheever’s Westchester commuter suburbia, and Nelson Algren’s or Saul Bellow’s Chicago are actual places these writers have set foot in, as well as imaginative haunts that they have made distinctively their own. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County may in fact exist nowhere – scholars say it is a highly modified and not always recognizable simulacrum of Oxford, Mississippi and environs – but he elevated it by the power of mind alone into Somewhere Remarkable, and he righteously called himself its Sole Proprietor.

Remarkable as well then is the mental feat that put the Shire, Lorien, Gondor, Rohan, Mordor, Mount Doom, and the Lost Realm of Arnor on the map – quite literally, for each of the three handsome hardcover volumes of The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) published by William Morrow includes a large map, drawn by the author’s son Christopher, that folds out from the endpapers, the third one a topographic contour map of mountainous terrain. Tolkien had evidently roved this country in his mind until he knew it as well as Bellow did Stony Island Avenue. Tolkien’s appendices to the novel – he considered The Lord of the Rings a single work – run to over 100 pages and give readers as much information as they could ever ask for on the Annals of the Kings, from the Númenoreans to the heirs of Anárion to the charted “Line of the Dwarves of Erebor as it was set out by Gimli Glóin’s son for King Elessar.” Genealogical trees trace as well the more common generations of the Baggins clan of Hobbiton and Brandybucks of Buckland, among others. Lessons are provided, in staggering detail, including subtleties of pronunciation and splendid calligraphic renderings of arcane scripts, on the languages spoken and written by the several different creatures inhabiting Middle-earth – drawing, say, the necessary distinctions between the runic Alphabet of Daeron used by the Elves in the country of Eregion (and favored by the Dwarves) and the rune-free language of the Elves of the West. The language spoken by each of the various beings reflects their intellectual and moral condition: “The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in the Elder Days. It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse.”

It is an entire world that Tolkien has created, and one of the most striking things about it is the familiarity of its moral order: the hatred of tyrannical power and love of freedom; the resistance to the hypnotic allure of demagogic eloquence; the appreciation of simple, comfortable, contented, unexceptional lives; the pluck and terrific courage that certain of these ordinary beings can summon when confronted by the threat of consuming malevolence; the admiration for persons wiser, more gifted, more accomplished, more impressive than oneself; the awe felt in the presence of superb physical beauty (Elvish good looks being the best thing going); the preciousness of local attachments, to one’s home ground and to the people one knows best; the live-and-let-live attitude that accepts fundamental differences in thought and taste as natural and worthy of respect, so long as they don’t interfere with one’s own preferences; in sum, what were justly considered the typical English virtues at the time Tolkien was writing, in the aftermath of the two world wars – precisely the virtues that inspired the English fight and helped secure victory.

Those are fundamentally secular virtues, the spine of a healthy liberal body politic, allowing for robust individuality in time of peace and for vital solidarity when evildoers menace the land. They abound in prominent writers otherwise un-alike such as E. M. Forster and George Orwell, H. G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford. However, at least of equal importance to Tolkien are the spiritual virtues, and specifically the Christian ones. In The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (2015), Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski number these qualities, some of them the creature’s, some the Creator’s, which Tolkien shows to be essential to the Christian soul’s right understanding and conduct: “pity and mercy, faith and trust, humility, self-sacrifice, the powers of the weak, providence (disguised as chance), freedom (deformed by sin), and grace when all seems lost.” That Tolkien sets his story in pre-Christian times and that there is no mention of religious belief of any kind serve to identify the Christian fundamentals as innately human characteristics, representing the best in mankind, even when embodied in hobbits, elves, or dwarves.

The Christian virtues and the secular ones alike face the most frightful threat the world has ever seen, for elemental evil menaces wholesome normality with the end to ordinary life as it has always been lived in Middle-earth. If the Dark Lord Sauron, a wizard incalculably proficient in wickedness, gets his hands on the One Ring, his invincible limitless power will bring on everlasting darkness and reduce the world’s population to abject spiritual slavery. Sauron’s riddling prophecy caps the epigraph to the novel:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Should this demonic sorcerer find success, he will be the ultimate totalitarian master.

As Sauron hurls Middle-earth into cataclysmic war, the world’s last hope rests with the hobbit Frodo Baggins, whose distant relation Bilbo Baggins came by the Ring in a guessing game, a matter of life or death for Bilbo, with the loathsome Gollum, a wretch cunningly obsequious and thoroughly malignant – Tolkien’s version of Uriah Heep, who bedeviled David Copperfield. Bilbo has gotten too old for serious adventures, so it falls to Frodo, as directed by the beneficent wizard Gandalf, to be the agent of salvation: he must destroy the Ring in the volcanic lava flow of Mount Doom, in the very heart of Mordor. It is an impossible task, but nothing less will do: the Ring corrupts even the best with the intoxication of inordinate power, and the worst will never cease in their efforts to acquire it so long as it exists.

Frodo is joined by a small but stalwart crew of commandos, including Samwise Gamgee, who had been his gardener, and who proves a working-class hero of invaluable grit and shrewdness, after the manner of Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers. Gandalf of course is the brains behind the operation, as well as much of the muscle, wizard-fashion, but he meets his violent death in enemy action quite early in the expedition; and though he later comes back from the dead, in the end it will be up to Frodo and Sam to try to incinerate the Ring.

I will leave it at that, for the benefit of those who have never read Tolkien but still intend to do so and hope to be surprised, or maybe even amazed. I am in my eighth decade, this was my own first (and likely my only) reading of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I took pains to ensure that I knew as little of the story as possible before plunging in. Tolkien rewarded my naive ignorance. Although at first I wasted mental energy in trying to piece together the political allegory (Could Gandalf be Churchill? Was Saruman, the beguiling orator, Hitler or was he Mussolini?), it eventually became apparent that none was intended. Each character was purely himself, and there was no diabolical Berlin or maleficent Rome or bomb-shattered great-souled London in this world of magic. A Tolkien villain’s words and deeds may resonate with significant similarity to those of actual men of action, but that is because Tolkien couches home truths about human character in his fabulous invention. The real world informs the life of Middle-earth – so doughty hobbits do remind one of stout-hearted Englishmen in their finest hour – but the reader would go wrong in reducing one to the other.

That is the way the storytelling works in my favorite chapter in the book, “The Scouring of the Shire,” in which the four hobbit warriors returning home find the place changed much for the worse and must restore proper order. A new tyranny has been established, a satrap of the wicked charmer Saruman, headed by a hobbit collaborator but with most of the dirty work done by Men, who are roughly twice the size of hobbits and enjoy throwing their weight around. The revolutionary collectivization of agriculture has caused dearth where there ought to be abundance. As a not-exactly-willing hobbit collabo sums up the general plight, “‘We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these ‘gatherers’ and ‘sharers,’ I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’” The villains in charge and their henchmen eat well, while the rest do without. Where has one heard of such a thing before?

A lengthy spell of peace has made the native hobbits all too comfortable and left them weak-kneed in the face of the overlords’ oppression. The returning members of the Fellowship, well versed in hardship and war, provide the fillip needed to rouse the masses to effective action. The difference in military intelligence between the experienced foursome and the ruffian enemy largely determines the outcome. The ruffians “knew that the countryside had risen against them, and plainly meant to deal with the rebellion ruthlessly, at its center in Bywater. But however grim they might be, they seemed to have no leader among them who understood warfare. They came on without any precautions. Merry laid his plans quickly.” The ignorant toughs don’t stand a chance. Seventy ruffians are killed at the decisive Battle of Bywater, while the hobbits lose nineteen. Saruman himself has his throat cut by his lickspittle toady Wormtongue, whom he had insulted once too often. The champions of freedom dismantle what remains of the police state: the superabundant Shirriffs, main body of official cruelty, are reduced to a reasonable number with more appropriate duties, and political prisoners are released from the Lockholes. It is a momentous victory for the side of virtue – an exhilarating occasion like the coming down of the Berlin Wall.

But is the evident pleasure I take in such rousing action and moral clarity too simple a response to an ambitious work, or is the world of the novel itself an admirable exemplar of the simple and clear? To abet my understanding of this celebrated fantasist gloriously new to me, I consulted The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creation (2025), the most recent work of Michael D. C. Drout, professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts; specialist in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, fantasy, and science fiction; author of several books and audio courses; editor of the J. R. R.Tolkien Encyclopedia and, for twenty-one years, of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. There are surely few indeed, if any, who have lived with Tolkien’s work so intently for so long. When Drout was five years old, his father read him Tolkien’s stories, and the dedicated scholar has since read The Lord of the Rings dozens of times. His expertise is undoubted and his love ardently professed. His new book is a devotee’s summation of his life’s work on Tolkien, every related text, and many an associated bit of lore, including Beowulf, Icelandic sagas, and Finnish epic. Neither the Tolkien neophyte nor the general reader (that urban legend) is likely to find comfort there. This is an expert writing for other experts, with a nod perhaps to the stray aficionado.

You might think a certain ease of expression would attend such comprehensive mastery, but Drout seems obliged to assert continually the seriousness of his subject, as though it must be proven anew every day to fellow credentialed experts in other literary specialties, by resorting to the barbarous cant of the tribe. This is what professorial expertise sounds like these days: “It is not Tolkien’s multivocality that makes his mature works so distinctive, but his heterotextuality.” “Newly developed ‘Lexomic’ techniques of computer-assisted stylometry show that the distribution of vocabulary in Tolkien’s great work is particularly heterogeneous.” “Although no one would mistake The Silmarillion for a novel per se, it does possess some of the pabnopemue (Footnote: I’m just guessing; it’s in Cyrillic script) [“varied speech-ness,” usually translated as “heteroglossia”] that Mikhail Bakhtin saw as being the novel’s most important quality.” A mere journalist like me would suggest asking some novelists about the novel’s most important qualities, rather than parroting the consummate modish obscurantist theoretician of the hour.

It saddens one to see the author abuse his gifts – and, more appallingly, Tolkien’s – in order to fulfill misconceived professional expectations, for native intelligence does peep intermittently through the murk. Drout’s heart is in the right place, even if, like most twenty-first-century academics, he doesn’t have his head on straight. He recognizes the beauty and rightness of Tolkien’s ineradicable melancholy at the transience of all things lovely: “As Théoden intuits, ‘much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth.’” Tolkien saw Death and Immortality as the main theme of his works, and Drout writes with surpassing good sense, drawing upon terrible experience of his own, about the limited consolation that literature can offer for life’s never-healing wounds: “What art can do is to give shape and form to grief and loss, which does not take away the pain but does, in some strange way, make it able to be borne.”

Drout concentrates his energy on promoting the unique “experiential” quality of Tolkien’s writing. More than any other writer ever, Drout argues, Tolkien makes the reader feel that he is not merely reading a book – he is living the experience that the novelist renders. The critic’s painstaking analysis of the rhetorical tactics Tolkien employs to achieve this end, however, tends to suck the juice out of the work rather than celebrate its life-giving genius. Ultimately, Drout must appeal to his own blissful experience of reading Tolkien as irrefutable proof of the justice of his case. But what of the reader who finds in The Lord of the Rings only the same degree of uplifting intoxication he enjoys in reading, say, the science fiction of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, which falls rather short of the enchantment he experiences in Homer or Tolstoy? Although minor classics can have an immortality all their own, the distance remains vast between their excellence and the highest greatness.

It is only the committed fanatic, however, who gets carried away to the extent Drout does and would cleave to so extravagant a claim. To the common reader unencumbered by ponderous thoughts of heteroglossia and the like, Tolkien offers immersion in a wondrous storybook world, which for all its self-conscious inventiveness bears down hard on the main nerve of twentieth-century moral understanding, rendered exquisitely sensitive by prolonged exposure to very real calamity, catastrophe, and cataclysm. The Lord of the Rings is a fairy tale that bites, and it leaves its mark on the reader who might have come to it expecting little more than standard-issue dungeons and dragons, swords and sorcerers.