In one of the most famous and beloved moments of The Lord of the Rings, the elven queen Galadriel cautions the Fellowship of the Ring: “Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” Beautiful and stirring at once. Author Joseph Loconte speculates that J. R. R. Tolkien may very well have been thinking about the dangerously precarious position of Western civilization at the very beginning of the Second World War.
Tolkien stressed that The Lord of the Rings was not about the Second World War or Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler or any other immediate thing. That it was simply about itself. Loconte, however, makes a very persuasive case that global events, especially in the critical years between 1933 and 1945, could not but affect Tolkien and his closest friends — C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, a group of scholars at Oxford — as they “struggled to make sense of the world around them.”
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