Long ago, I lived on the edge of the East Anglian Fens, and caught cash in the summer months with guided punt tours for tourists. This sparked an interest in the shapes and stories of history, and the telling of them. I wrote a book on the study of the humanities and the social sciences in Victorian Cambridge, which awakened an interest in the discovery of prehistory. After 1859 the bottom fell out of history, and two generations of respectable scholars filled the void with lurid fantasies of primitive social evolution.
One day, now settled in Israel, I picked up Tolkien’s posthumously published lectures on Finn and Hengest (1982) and recognized in this literary reading of the northern heroic age a return to sobriety armed with pregnant insight. I was hooked. Tolkien brings acute insight into the interplay of reality and fantasy with which we make our mortal history. I returned to the two Hobbit stories that I had devoured in my youth. That was about 15 years ago. Here is some of the research since, stepping stones along the way.
Today I approach an end and present a conclusion. The two links below lead to two pages on this site, each dedicated to one of two sides of a single design, which Tolkien drew out of the Old English Beowulf and expressed in his own times with The Lord of the Rings. With two sets of steps, here is a corkscrew study drawing out two sides of Tolkien’s imagination from the mid-1930s as two sides of a single spiral stairway, connecting the One Ring of Sauron to the Beowulf criticism of J.R.R. Tolkien.
‘Seeing Stones’ is about a short story told by J.R.R. Tolkien one Wednesday in 1936,an allegory of the making and modern reception of the Old English poem Beowulf A Hobbit’s Guide to Stairs’ illuminates this allegory by reading The Lord of the Rings as its sequel. The connection is revealed within the allegorical tower, a spiral staircase drawn out of Tolkien’s Beowulf criticism in Seeing Stones and revealed as the hidden design of The Lord of the Rings in the Hobbit’s Guide.