Abstract
This dissertation examines the presence and quality of difficult Hope in J. R. R. Tolkien’s early mythology, chiefly across the years c. 1913 to c. 1938. Approaching his work through the combined lenses of biography, mythological vision, linguistic pursuit, and religious conviction, it treats the ‘tower’ of Tolkien’s legendarium not as a structure to be dismantled, but as a work of remarkable craft still able to grant a meaningful view. At its centre lies Hope as a vital, often hidden bond-stone in Tolkien’s so-called Great Tales: not optimism, but a hard and costly longing for things to come right, somehow, grounded in an ultimately eschatological horizon. Because Tolkien was not a theologian working in systematic terms, this study follows Hope as he himself explored it: through mythopoesis, story, and language. Without claiming that Hope is the single key to Tolkien’s literature, the dissertation argues that it is one of its central sustaining threads, woven deeply into his early mythology and into his long labour to imagine sorrow, endurance, joy, and the possibility of a final Good End.