While Jacob Lawrence was single-mindedly painting the migration panels as the decade of the 1940s began, across the Atlantic J. R. R. Tolkien was intermittently laboring over his promised sequel to his 1937 children's book The Hobbit. In a matter of months, Lawrence, working rapidly and with confidence, brought his 60 panels to completion for a solo exhibition in New York and a spread in Fortune magazine. In that year, Tolkien, as would happen so often in the coming years, found that his teaching duties as Oxford University's Professor of Anglo-Saxon Studies, swelled by the external work he did “for hire” to supplement his salary, kept getting in the way of the book he had begun to call The Lord of the Rings. Writing to one of his four children, Michael, a young anti-aircraft gunner in January 1941, he lamented that he had just taken out “my story again; but as soon as I get really started, term will be casting its shadow ahead, and I shall have to think of lectures and committees.” Having begun The Lord of the Rings in 1938, when he and his publisher both expected a quick follow-up to the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien would take over 15 years to bring its three volumes to publication in 1954 and 1955.

Only some of this long delay can be blamed on academic responsibilities. The anxieties of the war, in which two of his sons were serving, and lapses of confidence in his story along with what his friend C. S. Lewis, rather smugly, referred to as his “dilatory” habits, played their part in Tolkien's slow progress on The Lord of the Rings. Most crucially, though, his “sequel” began to get out of hand; no longer another children's book, it was growing into something altogether new and vast that required a longer gestation period. As a few people (Lewis and Tolkien's youngest son Christopher, above all) were aware, the new story had gotten entangled in a deeper and hidden imaginative creation that originated during Tolkien's years as a soldier in World War I. Not until The Silmarillion was published in 1977, four years after his death, did the scope of his epic enterprise, which occupied the entirety of his adult life, start to come into full view.