An exhausted Oxford academic grading school certificate exams in the early 1930s turned over a blank page and scribbled a sentence about a creature living in a hole. This episode looks past the movies to the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien, from a childhood at Sarehole Mill in Worcestershire watching the countryside swallowed by Birmingham’s industrial sprawl, to the Western Front, where he survived the Battle of the Somme, lost nearly all his closest friends, and contracted trench fever.

We explain what philology actually is and how Old English, Old Norse, Finnish, and Welsh gave him the raw material for his languages, which he invented first and then built Middle-earth to house. We trace the twelve-year writing process that began as a Hobbit sequel in 1937, the chapters mailed to his son Christopher in the RAF, C.S. Lewis’s championing and Hugo Dyson’s groaning at Inklings readings, the roughly 9,250 pages of drafts, and the post-war paper shortage that split one story into three volumes with titles he disliked. We also cover the polarized reviews, the 1960s counterculture embrace, his distinction between allegory and applicability, his rejection of German publishers’ racial demands, and the 1969 sale of film and merchandising rights.

• Industrial Birmingham and the Somme as the roots of Sauron, Saruman, and the orcs
• Why the languages came before the stories and forced the creation of a mythology
• Serial chapters sent to a son serving in the Second World War
• The Inklings divided: swords of beauty for Lewis, tiresome elves for Dyson
• Trilogy by economic necessity, Frodo Lives on the walls, and a core theme of death and immortality