The city and its surroundings were to have a big influence on the writings of JRR Tolkien. As he later wrote: "the country in which I lived my childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten." ...

One byproduct of war particularly struck Tolkien: the dissolution of class boundaries. "Officers were selected from men who had been to university, men like Tolkien. The infantry ... were ordinary ...

Why is this so? What is different about him? For answers, we would do well to look at the recent work of Holly Ordway, whose 2023 biography Tolkien’s Faith constitutes a significant breakthrough ...