V. CONCLUSION
At the end, the easiest way to unravel the strange literary composition which is The Lord of the Rings is just considering Tolkien as who he was: a philologist. Tolkien was not originally a writer, but a scholar of Literature as one of the physical materializations of Language, much more specialized in the latter than in the former, of course. So Tolkien might have been expected to write a treaty about Grammar, a History of the English Language, even. The fact that he was firstly a philologist and then a writer doesn't mean that he was a bad/poor author, but as we have seen this has been exactly the front Tolkien has always been attacked at by critics who wanted to depreciate his work. Some times much too cryptic and "linguistic", others much too fantastic and "literary".
One couldn't exactly tell whether The Lord of the Rings was Tolkien ultimate proof that Philology was the right science to join Language and Literature or not, as he never said so. But was it consciously or unwilling, we can finally affirm that he managed to prove it. The proof was his idea that there was no language without a world and there was no world without a language. For Tolkien, “world” meant “the reality to talk about”. We may call it “context”, but with caution Why being cautious? Because Tolkien seemed to think that context could never ever be independent from language. And that’s just why he always rejected allegory: what would be the philological sense of a text if its context was completely independent from the language it is written in? Tolkien’s invented languages are only understandable and valid in their specific context, within the story they are a part of (italics are mine). So any critic trying to “de-contextualize” or “re-contextualize” The Lord of the Rings would automatically be unaccredited to go on.
Many critics never saw that behind Tolkien's "entertainment" (as he himself referred to writing many times) there was a "living" example of the working mechanisms of Philology, an elaborated philological investigation from the beginning to the end. Is The Lord of the Rings really worth that label? One must be aware that he not only "made philology”, but created the languages and background to apply it. So with The Lord of the Rings Tolkien gave an example of philological studies at their best.
All the sources accepted by Tolkien to have influenced him still prove to be undeniable nowadays, for they have been (and still are) continuously displayed and discussed as the main study materials. In this essay, the major scholarly sources concerning narrative have been provided by Tom Shippey's Tolkien Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-Earth, Matthew Dickerson's Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings, and Leslie E. Jones’ Myth & Middle-Earth
Shippey and Dickerson offer a very useful and rich scope regarding narrative, for they both develop many of the most specific aspects of the plot allowing the better general comprehension of the story. In both authors, one of the most important aspects, the nature of evil, is treated in such a way that its importance and presence in the plot is immediately recognized (in spite of being a highly moral/philosophical issue) The most significant difference between The Road to Middle-Earth and Tolkien Author of the Century is their scope: the former is aimed at the history of Tolkien's universe, the implications the book had with previous literature and its own nature, and the latter is aimed at the author, his attitude towards the story.
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