MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
England and Always: Tolkien's World of the Rings is a short study by Jared Lobdell, an American historian who had edited A Tolkien Compass, one of the very first books of Tolkien criticism. It was published in 1981 by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Lobdell reads The Lord of the Rings through three threads: the Edwardian adventure story of Rider Haggard, Buchan and Conan Doyle, where a small English party travels to strange lands and comes home again; Tolkien's philology; and Christian doctrine set in a pre-Christian world. He later revised and expanded the book as The World of the Rings, published by Open Court in 2004.
Jared Lobdell reads The Lord of the Rings as an Edwardian adventure story, a philologist's world and a Christian work.