Tolkien's Essay on Beowulf

Tolkien is a genius and we need to take him seriously as a genius, but then more than that, he's a genius who's coming out of this tradition of British romanticism. He takes very, very seriously the role that art plays in the world and the relationship between God and art. And so you can't divorce Tolkien's Middle Earth writings from his linguistic project. You can't divorce it from his family life, because a lot of the stuff comes straight from the stories that he tells for his children. For Tolkien, in the location that he is in as a 20th century British Roman Catholic romantic, all of that gets wrapped up together.