ABSTRACT
This chapter compares two utterances by J. R. R. Tolkien about history. One was in the foreword to the revised 1966 edition of The Lord of the Rings, where he says that he prefers history, “real or feigned,” to allegory. The other was in a letter to his son Christopher after the latter gave a lecture on the early medieval Goths at Oxford; as impressed as he was by Christopher’s mastery of historical detail, it was in the history of words, philology, that he was truly interested. This opening chapter builds upon these two utterances by contrasting how, within Tolkien’s fictional legendarium, history operates in two discernible ways: in the archives and on the road.
