Before Middle-earth: The Classical Roots of Tolkien
- Pierluigi Cuccitto
- 6 days ago
- 1 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
On December 2nd, 1953, in a letter to Father Robert Murray, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:
“I was brought up on the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”
This is an aspect of Tolkien that’s far too often overlooked—perhaps because it’s more convenient to confine the author to a single niche, in his case the “Norse” world. But this is a mistake. Without acknowledging Tolkien’s deep literary pleasure rooted in Homer, we fail to fully grasp his remarkable ability to create worlds where epic and tragedy, comedy and drama, coexist.
