Tolkien’s work remains immortal because it speaks to something timeless—something that existed before him and beyond him. He was, in a sense, a messenger of a forgotten mythos.
In a detailed letter written around 1951 to the publisher Milton Waldman (commonly designated Letter 131), Tolkien explained the genesis of his legendarium. He described his long-standing regret over “the poverty of my own beloved country,” which, unlike Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, or Finland, lacked “stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil)” of the stature he admired. He recalled an early intention—qualified by the parenthetical remark “my crest has long since fallen”—to fashion “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story.” This corpus was to be dedicated “simply to: to England; to my country.” It would possess “the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East),” and would be “high,” “purged of the gross,” and suitable for “the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.”
Tom BombadilThe Astari - Wizard’s come on a sacred mission