It seems that Tolkien, even in the throes of combat, consciously sought to retrieve a martial tradition that would become a casualty alongside all the other casualties of the First World War. Already he was constructing a mythology about England meant to recall its long history of struggle for noble purposes. “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought,” he once explained.55 Thus he set out “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology
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