In June 1972 the University of Oxford conferred on Tolkien the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. Outside Oxford he was known best as the author of The Hobbit and the book that followed it in the 1950s, The Lord of the Rings. The books had made him a rich man, and were already spawning those telling indications of wide readership, imitations and parodies. But despite courteous references to The Hobbit and to the still unpublished Silmarillion in the Latin address by the Public Orator, it was clear that his peers were honouring Tolkien not for his fiction but for his philological work. This was no slight of him as a creative writer: rather, it recognized the value of his scholarly work, that some of his publications were landmarks in the study of the ancient languages and literatures of Northern Europe. The University judged wisely, for Tolkien's linguistic researches lie at the heart of what drove the writing of the books that make up what many now refer to as ‘Tolkien’ – the author's name standing for his writings as does ‘Milton’, or ‘Wordsworth’ or ‘Conrad’, in a way that indicates acceptance into some sort of canon.

Language, the web of words, is what holds societies together: to explain a word you need to understand the language, and to explain the language, you need to understand the society that used it. Language and words, the naming of things, is the most central human activity; it was, according to legend, Adam's first. Language allows us to live together, to make some sort of sense of our world: to make our world, indeed. There is no division between Tolkien's philology and his fiction. The history recorded in LR and its related texts is, in the end, secondary to the invented languages that Tolkien developed it to explain: ’A language requires a suitable habitation, and a history in which it can develop’ (Letter, 9 February 1967, Letters p. 375). So Tolkien's ideas about language, and about the nature of story, are helpful in understanding what he was doing in one of the most extraordinary bodies of modern fiction.