A Debt That Could Never Be Repaid

When the first volume of The Lord of the Rings appeared in London bookshops on July 29, 1954, it bore only J. R. R. Tolkien's name on the cover. But Tolkien himself knew the story behind the story. For nearly seventeen years, he had labored over the manuscript in his Oxford study, often losing momentum, sometimes abandoning it for months at a time.…